EMPRESS, Alta. – Aaron Steinley stopped farming seven years ago and started making willow furniture, but he says he never really left the food production business.
“Rather than food for the body, I’m now producing food for the soul,” he said in his shop on Empress’s main street, shortly after taking a break from scraping bark from a large piece of diamond willow.
“These chairs, a big part of my payment is when we go to the shows with this furniture and you see the response you get from people when they see it and touch it and sit on it. When a sale is made – I don’t even like to call it a sale – because it’s more a coming together of an individual and furniture. For some, there’s an immediate bond.”
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He tells about meeting a woman at a show in Calgary who fell in love with a chair she couldn’t afford. Steinley noticed the connection she had made with the chair and eventually came up with a price she could afford.
“When she realized she was going to take this chair home, she actually had to stop and go for a walk,” he said. “She was hyperventilating. She had to go and collect herself because emotionally it was very strong and very powerful.”
Steinley’s journey from chickpeas to willow trees began in the late 1990s when his marriage ended. He was farming six sections of land in partnership with his brother but decided to end the partnership so that his divorce didn’t affect his brother.
“Without any real consideration to try to stay in farming myself, I just thought, ‘this is when I exit farming.’ “
Steinley said he and his brother had been at the forefront of alternative farming practices in the early and mid-1980s, adopting zero tillage and direct seeding, growing novel crops such as lentils, beans and chickpeas and experimenting with companion crops to achieve two crops from one seeding.
However, he said his decision to stop farming went deeper than the divorce.
“It was getting harder to stay in it anyway because with the situation in agriculture, you’d look around the farm and you’d see different things you could do or things that the land needed or it was calling for this or that but it wasn’t financially feasible to do it, so you were always taking shortcuts or farming according to the dollar or the bank balance rather than farming to what the land was needing.”
He left home for Tuscon, Arizona, for a year, where he met Lori Kelly, whom he eventually married. She wanted to move to Canada so they decided to land in Empress and wait for her paperwork before finding a home.
“Just as time passes, things are kind of falling into place here and we’ve realized we are at home here.”
Willow furniture was to play a big part of Steinley’s new life. It was a skill he had learned in the mid-1980s and he now set about figuring out how to make a living at it.
Much of the furniture he makes is sold from his Knarls ‘* Knots shop at the back of Empress’s old liquor store, but it’s also sold at a store in Calgary and another in Black Diamond, Alta. He attends trade and craft shows for the exposure, but said that’s not really the answer for him.
“We end up in the aisle with siding and plumbing and we’re not really a Christmas show item either because we’re not a $25 Christmas gift.”
Part of the problem is that it takes four or five days to make a small chair and 100 hours for some of the bigger pieces, requiring large price tags to compensate him for his time.
As a way around this, he’s considering organizing a hand-crafted furniture festival in Alberta.
“It would have to be a show that’s very focused on hand crafted so we can promote it as a high-end show with pricey pieces so people can come prepared for that.”
He’s also keen to be accepted into the Western Design Conference held in Cody, Wyoming, every year, where gallery owners and other wealthy customers fly in on private jets.
“That’s where I want to be,” he said.
He applied for last year’s show and the rejection letter said his photographs weren’t good enough.
“We’ll be hiring a professional photographer this year.”
For now, he continues to build his furniture, conscious of the fact that they will last a long time.
“Whoever buys these chairs are buying them for their great-grandchildren.”
He combs the South Saskatchewan and Red Deer rivers for willow: the sandbar variety that is 2.5 centimetres in diameter and 4.5 metres tall and used for bending and the larger diamond variety that grows in clumps and reaches 40 cm in diameter.
He has used both green and dead wood but at the moment is making furniture out of dead diamond willow, which he strips of bark, polishes and stains.
His weekly trips to the river valleys are one of the more pleasant parts of his job.
“I hear people talk on the radio about work environment and I look around and I think, ‘yeah, this is a pretty good work environment,’ as the chickadees are playing their tune. It’s a pretty good life.”
