The next year, Biljana arranged for me to conduct a papermaking workshop at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, then capital of the steadily disintegrating Yugoslav Republic. I received a travel grant from CEC ArtsLink, an international arts organization, which made the trip practical. This first journey set the stage for my next ten years as I shuttled back and forth, eighteen times so far, between the US and Yugoslavia, then the US and the Union of Serbia and Montenegro, finally the US and Serbia. I go one to three times a year, filming, writing, traveling, and leading papermaking workshops. In 2006, I received a Fulbright Scholar Award to build a papermaking studio at the University of Belgrade. I spent five months installing the studio, the first in all of Serbia, at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Adam Pantic, a lithography professor at the Faculty, prepared the studio space and gathered equipment and basic furniture prior to my arrival in January. Piece by piece we assembled the shop. I realized how much progress we had made one day in March, with winter's snow still heavy in the streets, when I arrived at the studio to find a huge pile of mulberry branches. Adam had cut and brought them back from his family farm in Central Serbia. We worked for hours pulping and processing them for hand papermaking. Once the studio was completed, we started teaching papermaking and found that the students were hungry for information. Later that year, Professor Vlada Veljasevic at the Faculty decided to write an instructional guide to papermaking in the form of a comic book, Pulp, A Love Story, for use with students. Vlada really understands paper, and can be quite hilarious. We worked out the how-to story line together, and I contributed a text and captions for the many illustrations. It was a hard slog translating my material from English to Serbian, then the Serbian portions into English. One difficulty was coming up with Serbian equivalents for papermaking's esoteric vocabulary, since papermaking had never been a craft tradition in Serbia. Papermaking, for example, became Rucno papir, literally, handmade paper; and Hollander beater became Holander beater, pronounced in a distinct Serbian accent. As a result of our work, the seed of hand papermaking has been firmly planted in Serbian soil. The papermaking studio is a going academic concern, as are papermaking studies at the University. One student, Ksenija Pantelic, even traveled to New York to intern at Dieu Donne. What started as a simple arts exchange has flowered into a personal passion for both Serbia and its nascent papermaking practice, and pride in my modest contribution to the culture of this three-year-old country with a thousand-year history. Editor's Note: Following are excerpts from Pulp, A Love Story: My Serbian Affair with Papermaking. The book is written by Melissa Potter and Vladimir Veljasevic, illustrated by Veljasevic, and designed with a tête-bêche binding (one side in English, the other in Serbian). It is available from www.lulu.com in a print-on-demand edition.
