We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Liza Q Wirtz a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Liza Q, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?
Happiness is not one of my natural skills :-), and I expect I’ll be working on figuring out how to get there from now until I move on to the next great adventure. That said, I’m happier as an artist/creative, teacher, and self-employed small-business owner than I’ve been in every other professional milieu I’ve ever occupied except one, the one that comes the closest to what I do now: the ten years I spent as a different kind of artist, a professional singer. On my best days, both fiber arts and music lift me up and keep me going, whether I’m performing them, teaching them, consuming them, or some combination thereof. Even on my worst days, the possibility of putting creative energy into the world can bring me much-needed hope and often sparks the energy I need to get through whatever’s weighing me down. When I sang, I did so chiefly as a member of various ensembles, and I miss that group energy, that more-than-the-sum-of-its-partsness that isn’t as available to me as a solo fiber artist. As a balance, though, I get to do two important things in my current textile-arts creative incarnation that didn’t apply to my musical one: I teach (weaving, spinning, carding, and above all giving oneself grace to trust the creative heart and make something joyful); and I’m coming ever closer to making an actual living as a fiber artist, something I couldn’t quite pull off in my singing days. And really, that’s awfully damn close to happiness, I must admit!
Do I wonder what it might be like to work a regular “day job”? No, because I’ve done that, too. Before I started singing professionally I spent more than a decade as a secretary and then worked for a big wonderful bookseller on the retail side and then on the corporate one. And prior to starting my fiber-arts business, I had the honor and privilege of serving for almost eight years as a legal-aid lawyer for low-income folks. Every one of those jobs qualified as “regular”, though each had its irregularities as well, and I don’t regret any of them. I learned a great deal from each, both from the content of what I did and from the structures within which I did it and those with whom I worked. As with the professional music-making, what I miss most about those jobs is the ensemble sense each brought to my life; I also miss the conviction legal-aid work brought me that I was doing concrete good in the world. But there are things I do NOT miss about each, and there are so many wonderful things about what I do now. I wouldn’t skip any of those jobs – but I wouldn’t trade what I do now for anything. And really, how lucky am I to be able to say both of those things?
Liza Q, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m Q! I got there after James Bond but before Star Trek and have been doing my best to live up to the country’s rarest middle initial ever since. When I left the fulltime practice of law in 2014 – a little crispy around the edges and needing a break – I moved to the state where my extraordinary and loving life partners resided and took the opportunity to try to figure out once again What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up. Somewhat to my surprise, while I was mulling my next moves, a little voice woke up in my brain and began to insist that the professional creative world had a place for me – specifically one taking advantage of both my fibercrafting interests and my inherited desire to teach (thanks, beloved late Mom and Dad). I lucked into lessons in freestyle weaving from friends who became chosen family, bought three used looms from one of them in 2017, and with the financial and emotional support of said lifepartners I was off and … well, if not running, then at least stumbling along entertainingly in a useful and enjoyable direction. (In my increasingly nonexistent spare time, I very occasionally still practice some estate-planning law in two of the states where I’m licensed, choosing that area because I believe it gives both my clients and their loved ones peace of mind and one can never have too much of that. )
My love of all things feline and a slightly tipsy story from my past combined to give me my business name, the Foldout Cat, and today nearly everything I make and sell at the fiber events where I vend and teach takes off from that point (Shear Purrfection, Mew Hues, Cattails, and so on). As the Foldout Cat, I weave and teach freestyle weaving on wonderful simple two-harness floor looms; I hand-dye and sell yarn and fiber in a whole clowder of colorways; I teach a method of fiber preparation called carding and create carded clouds of fluff (batts and rolags) for fibery folks to spin, felt, weave with, or just look at and enjoy; and I spin, sell handspun yarn, and teach spinning on herds of wheels both electric and acoustic. Everything I do in my business – teaching, creating, both/and/other – is informed by the same philosophy: the belief that everyone has an artist inside them and that my task on this island Earth is to encourage them to find and nurture that artist however I can, through tools, supplies, education, and encouragement. I am emphatically not the Fiber Police, nor do I believe in the One True Way to do much of anything. Instead, I maintain that working creatively in ways that give the maker joy, honoring one’s own dreams rather than other people’s rules and restrictions, puts beauty into the world at a time when we need that more than ever.
Because here’s the thing. There are a whole host of experts out there on every conceivable topic, many of them in direct and often unfriendly conflict with one another. The world is full of the absolutely certain, the immovably opinionated, the sad folks who need power over someone else to feel okay about themselves. I don’t play those games. I like fiber and freedom; I admire and enable creative courage; I want to help my fellow humans to walk a joyful path, whatever that looks like for them. If you’re on the hunt for a guru, I’m not your girl. If you’re ISO someone who’ll tell you just what to do and just how to do it, I’m not the droid you’re looking for. But if you want someone to give you permission to play, to experiment, and to explore, using fiber arts as a way to start that journey, I will enable the living daylights out of you and love every minute of it. Come fiber with me!
Have you ever had to pivot?
In 1993, I started singing professionally. A conductor friend from my first grad school got a position as organist and choir director in a small Detroit-area Episcopal church and asked me to come be her alto section leader and soloist. I had no idea I wanted to do anything of the kind until I started showing up and realized how much I loved the work – the repertoire, the leading from within, the occasional solo, and above all the feeling of creating with others something bigger than ourselves and releasing that beauty into the world. I’d always been a very good musician and had become a reasonably good singer, but doing it professionally gave me confidence in myself I’d never before had (especially after the soul-sappingly miserable graduate-school experience that had brought me to Michigan in the first place). I started singing other sorts of music – operetta, early (Medieval/Renaissance) Western European small-ensemble repertoire – and began to come into my own as a performer. In 1998, I moved from the Detroit area to Boston to take a position as soprano section leader and soloist at a big Episcopal church there. I joined a new vocal-jazz group; I sang more and more early music; my voice teacher got me into a mixed vocal/instrumental ensemble specializing in colonial and 19th-century US music; I got gig with a group that performed amazingly varied rep as live soundtracks to art films. I was singing more and more, loving it more and more, gaining more and more confidence, and I was just about ready to step up my audition schedule and hopefully ditch the part-time non-musical work I still relied on to help pay my bills.
And then my voice broke down. Progressively, painfully, unstoppably, and comprehensively.
All of a sudden, music-making was off the table; in fact, it was so far off the table it had pretty much moved to another country. And I had to figure out what in the hell to do next. Not just to pay the aforementioned bills, but also – and arguably more importantly – to fill the void in my life left by the failure of my instrument, the way I expressed myself most clearly and joyfully, the thing with which I had come to identify myself almost entirely.
So I spent a few months looking at the world around me, and the models I had in my family of how people I respected and loved went about trying to make that world a better place, and the options that were open to me that might allow me to chart a path away from the ones that had closed.
And in 2003 – ten years after I started singing professionally – I went to law school. I went specifically to be a legal-aid lawyer, the only person in my 200-person class with any such goal (I was also 12 years older, considerably farther left, and much less straight than my average classmate – no challenges there, then!). I got out in 2006, took and passed the bar exam, and promptly went to work for a firm in a totally different state (second bar exam FTW), and I did that until I moved again in 2014 to be with my partners.
That pivot was incredibly, insanely painful. I didn’t want it; I railed against it; I tried everything I could afford to avoid it. But twenty years later, I’m forced to admit that I would not be the artist and teacher and person I am today if I hadn’t been smacked down that hard and had to figure out how to get back up and keep going.
(Postscript: my voice started coming back while I was in law school, and by my 2014 move it had pretty much returned completely. The ways of the universe are mysterious indeed.)
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
I feel like much, if not most (or all), of what could usefully be said about this has been said, and thus that I’m not going to be contributing much to the conversation here. Still, it’s something about which I feel strongly, so I’ll forge ahead nonetheless. In my view, the best possible move on society’s part to support artists, creatives, and the ecosystem in which they live and flourish is to teach both the arts and value for the arts at every possible educational level, from kindergarten to (yes) graduate school to (also yes) continuing education for adults, now and forever, right alongside math and language and science and history and how to budget and why you really do need a living will. It’s pretty simple, really. If we teach our children, our parents, our peers, and ourselves that art is a good and valuable thing – not a side note, not unnecessary frosting on the cake, not an afterthought, but an intrinsic and important part of life – then we honor and uphold the aspect of each of us that wants to create and experiment and explore and play. That benefits our work; it benefits our communications and connections; it benefits our spirits. Long story short, as my beloved sister is wont to say when she’s already told the long story: honoring the creative in everyone benefits us as individuals, as communities, and as parts of ecosystems. Correspondingly, devaluing the arts devalues the artist contained in every human being; it holds down and squashes creativity and creation; and it scars and damages everyone, especially those drawn most strongly to the arts who are thus told most emphatically that what they instinctively love is unimportant and insignificant. No one deserves that. Indeed, I’d argue that we all deserve entirely the reverse.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://foldoutcat.com/
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/foldoutcat/
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/foldoutcat/
- Youtube: http://youtube.com/foldoutcat/
- Other: I’m the Foldout Cat pretty much everywhere (though I no longer Twit, thank you kindly). I have a Threads account linked to my Instagram/Facebook accounts; I haven’t begun using it yet, but I’m working towards that. Ditto TikTok. The best way to keep up with where I’m going and what I’m doing is to sign up for my email newsletter, a form to do which is on the bottom of every page of my website. The best way to communicate directly with me is to message me on Facebook; email’s a good second choice.
Image Credits
Photo of Liza Q Wirtz: Justin Richards, (c) 2019 All other photos: Liza Q Wirtz-the Foldout Cat, (c) 2019-2024