Like other artists, when working I tune in to National Public Radio or listen to books on tape from the library. The quiet talk surrounds me with ideas from parts of the world that I have never seen and ideas from authors I respect and enjoy. This provides a sense of global community with folks outside my doors and beyond my reach. The sound of voices is both comforting and supplies the virtual presence of other people.  When working in paper, I strive to replicate that sense of community by using fiber that has been provided from across the United States. For the past fifteen years, friends and activists of various stripes have been shipping clothing to me for use in papermaking. This fiber is carefully organized into cartons that have traveled with me back and forth across the country as I worked and learned in many art centers, colleges, and universities in a dozen different states. Now that I am older and more sedentary (purely coincidental, I hope), I am looking forward to creating more projects that will use this vast quantity of material for paper acquired through the years. People have always been simultaneously amazed and pleased that their used clothing can be transformed and recycled into paper.  The clothing that is not in good enough condition for the second-hand store is even better for my purposes! My beginnings with papermaking stretch back to the mid-1970s although I did not seriously begin making paper until the late 1980s. I was in graduate school then, a period that coincided with the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Having been an activist for gay civil rights for years by then in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American freedom, my network of friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and former loves was eviscerated by the HIV crisis. Almost everyone I knew from a twelve-year period had died by 1990. It was as if my own history was being erased by this disease that President Reagan would not even mention. So, partly as a response to my personal devastation and partly in an effort to force others to touch, deal, and handle the AIDS epidemic, I began to make work that forced people to be confronted with HIV.  An early mail-art project was a series of postcards that I printed on commercial paper and distributed in San Francisco at the 1990 International Aids Conference. The postcards depicted various images related to HIV. Participants were encouraged to write and make collages on the postcards, then mail them back to me. This project was a response to the U.S. Postal Service, which had treated a close friend of mine badly while he was dying from AIDS-related diseases. Prior to becoming ill, my buddy had been a mail carrier for years in New Jersey. My mail art project was an attempt to force his fellow mail carriers to literally handle the disease in a way they did not emotionally while David was alive. This project, in turn, led me to search nationwide for authors and artists to contribute writings or artwork to a portfolio of broadsides that would speak about their experience with HIV. Inviting so many people into my life who were near death was a difficult emotional challenge. In many instances, work on the project was delayed while I rushed proofs to a writer in the last stages of his or her disease. Eventually, it seemed natural to create a handmade paper wrapper using clothing material collected from people living with AIDS. Like the mail art project, I hoped to enclose the collection and bring readers closer to the HIV community by making them touch paper that had once touched another’s skin. This was a holistic approach, a completing of the circle through papermaking. Not only was the content of the project about a specific topic, but the paper used for one part was provided by those closest to the issue. Another project was a book based on the Shirley Jackson short story “The Lottery.” This story deals with the random manner in which some are chosen as a target of oppression. The story has always been a personal favorite and I loved the opportunity to reprint it on handmade paper. I made the paper from clothing contributed by people of every sexual orientation, every color, and many nationalities.  As I have worked around the country, I have continued to collect fabric for papermaking. I always gather the material in advance, never knowing what project the fiber might be used for. When I was working in the Baltimore-Washington area, Helen Frederick, Buck Downs, and I collaborated on a book project, Parts of the Body, at Pyramid Atlantic. Helen pulled the dried stalks and seeds from her garden’s flax plants to use as inclusions for the book’s handmade paper cover and box. The same idea of growth and rebirth is part of the wedding invitations I printed for Bindu Paper company in New Mexico. They provided me with handmade paper that had flower and plant seeds as inclusions in the pulp. The idea was that the wedding guests could tear up the paper in their garden, thereby planting the seeds and watching the love of the married couple blossom under their careful care and support.  To honor my own relationship, I made paper from a sisal rug that my partner and I had in an apartment we had shared. The paper was used in a book to commemorate our fifth anniversary. Although that anniversary was years ago, Jeff continues to show off the book that was made from pieces of our life together.  Most recently, I used paper made from fiber given to me by a variety of papermakers for a broadside to honor this publication’s retiring editor. Although no one would be aware of the paper content (until now), it seemed appropriate to use fiber sources that honored the far-flung influence Hand Papermaking continues to have.  Just as I invite the world into my studio while I work, I include that world in the paper I send back out into the world.