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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. A lot of people took up new hobbies at the height of the pandemic. Some got into yoga. There were those who became obsessed with homemade sourdough bread. Journalist Peggy Orenstein learned to shear sheep. Her goal was to make a garment from scratch. During her quest on scene, thought hard about life, the unstoppable passage of time aging, her daughter going off to college, her father's dementia worsening, and wildfires in California where she lives.

Orenstein who spent her career covering gender issues, turned her reporting skills inward, chronicling her own learning process, both the sheep shearing thing and about herself and the role of women in our culture.

In her latest book titled, Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater. A San Francisco Chronicle Review says, "Starting down this sweater-making thread, Orenstein unravels a whole ball of yarns. She considers the enduring and cross-cultural myths of women weavers, variously goddesses, or witches. She celebrates the unsung and history-altering inventions of thread and the spinning wheel. She documents the early ways American spinners, mostly teenage girls were labor pioneers." Peggy Orenstein is the author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Girls & Sex, and Boys & Sex, and she joins us today to talk about Unraveling which is out today. Happy publication day, Peggy.

Peggy Orenstein: Thank you, Alison. It's so great to be here.

Alison Stewart: When did you know this book was going to be about more than your decision to learn to shear sheep?

Peggy Orenstein: Gosh, almost immediately I just started reading and I couldn't believe how much you could really tell, basically the history of the whole world through looking at how fiber was produced and just going down all these research things about color and about sheep and about women's work and about history and about mythology. It was amazing.

Alison Stewart: How does one discover where to learn to shear sheep? Let's just start with--

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Alison Stewart: Do you just go to Google and type in where can I learn to shear sheep? [laughs]

Peggy Orenstein: It's funny because I've been thinking about [unintelligible 00:02:05] People are so interested in the sheep shearing part of the journey, and it makes me think about how urbanized we've become because I think not long ago we all would've known how to shear sheep or how to find somebody to shear sheep or knew somebody who shear sheep. I just kept asking-- I live in northern California, right. There's a lot of crunch around here and there's farms and things.

I just asked a lot of people, but the challenge for me was that I really wanted to learn from a woman. I really wanted this book to be women's stories and 95% of sheep shearing-- Sheep shearers is a hard thing to say. [chuckles] 95% of sheep shearers are men. Part of that is because it's got this cowboy aspect to it. Part of it was just misogyny basically and they used to say things like, if a woman approached the sheep shearing shed, they'd yell, "Ducks on the pond." I don't know why. That they could, I don't know, pull up their pants so that they're-- I don't know what they were doing. It's still very much a man's world and I did find a young woman who could teach me but it took a while.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Her name is Lora Kincaid. She's 29 years old, the professional small flock shearer who also manages an organic produce farm. How did she become a small flock shearer? It's a lot of difficult things to say today.

Peggy Orenstein: I know [laughs] and you're on the radio. She was into the organic farm thing and she just-- like me, one day just looked up and went, "Huh. Interesting." She went to a demonstration and-- They say that it's the hardest job in the world. Sheep shearers say that all the time. They burn twice as many calories as marathon runners. They told me that. I just politely thought, "Sure, I'm in my 50s, I can do that. No problem." "Sheep have hooves and they kick and they don't want to be there. You're holding a blade that's hot jittering, worrying, and doesn't have a safety on it." [laughs] Like, "Yes, sure. Sign me up. I can do that. No worries."

Alison Stewart: I'd love for you to read a little bit from the book about some of the gear you had to get to be prepared to be a sheep shearer. Especially the shoes. Would you read on page 11, "You can't just wear any shoes."

Peggy Orenstein: Yes. You can't just wear any shoes in a sheep shearing pen. The wood floors get slick with lanolin. If you wear hiking boots, sneakers, or anything else with a conventional tread, your feet will slide out from under you, landing you smack on your butt or worse. Sheep shearing shoes say that three times fast are swayed like moccasins. Over time, the soles build up a patina of lanolin, which helps them stick to whatever's on the floor.

When mine arrive in the mail, I pop them on delighted. They're black, with bright red laces threaded around the top edge that I [unitelligible00:04:54] to create a custom fit. If I wasn't about to get them completely covered in sheep yuck, I'd consider keeping them as indoor slippers. As it is I strut around the house for the rest of the afternoon, periodically holding up a foot to admire it.

Daisy, my daughter emerges from her bedroom layer where she's been largely hold up since COVID closed the high school, glances down at my feet, and freezes. "What are those?" She asks with the edge of disdain that only a teenage girl can master. "My new shoes," I say. "Do you like them? I'm going to wear them everywhere." She shakes her head, her expression, a mixture of alarm and disgust. "Mom, you can't wear those." I laugh and tell her what they're really for. "You're only going to use them once?" She says. I nod. She looks first relieved and suspicious. "What did they cost?" I attempt unsuccessfully to take advantage of the teachable moment to explain to her about tax write-offs.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Peggy Orenstein, the name of the book is Unraveling: What I Learned About Life while Shearing Sheep Dyeing Wool and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater. One of the things I learned from the book, and I think it's important to point out at this moment, is that a lot of people think shearing sheep is cruel, but actually, a shorn sheep is a sign of a well-cared-for sheep.

Peggy Orenstein: Yes. That is really important to know. You can see videos online of some pretty awful stuff because anytime humans interact with animals, there's abuse, but it's good for them. You can also see a video online that something like 20 million people watched during the pandemic because what else do we have to do, of a sheep that they found that had the record for it got lost somehow and it had 90 pounds of wool on it. They sheared it and underneath it was starving because it couldn't-- We've evolved them to grow wool indefinitely and they must be shorn.

Alison Stewart: You go on to learn to spin yarn and to dye it and you write, if nothing else, the enforced [unitelligible00:06:49] of the pandemic gave those of us who were neither ill nor essential the opportunity to experiment, to find comfort, competence, and escape in developing fresh skills. For you, what was it like to realize that you could develop a fresh skill?

Peggy Orenstein: It was really the great gift of this experience because I'm a writer, so I do something creative for a living. When you do something creative for a living, commerce comes into it, deadlines come, all these things that can erode the sense of joy in creativity. To do something, I think for any of us that we've never done before, and regain that sense of almost childlike wonder and joy, that beginner's mind, that amateur sense of self.

It was incredible and it really restored my sense of creativity. I say it's the world's ugliest. It's fine. It looks fine. It's not that ugly. You can see it on the back of the book. The thing that I learned and that I resisted for much of the book was that I wanted to be good and finally, I thought, it's not about that. The learning of the new skills during the pandemic, I think gave everybody that joy of process that it didn't matter if it was good, it mattered that you did it, it mattered that you tried, it mattered that you learned. If I hadn't tried, I never would've learned all the lore in history and wonder and things that I learned that I wrote about.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about the way you learn?

Peggy Orenstein: [chuckles] I learned that I have a really, really critical voice in my head which I already knew and I really needed to stop that enough to allow myself to play. I talk a little bit about this idea called creative mortification in the book, which is what happens to us when we're small children and we're doing something that we love doing. Somebody goes, "That sucks." That's it. Whether it's your baseball bat, your violin, your drawing pencil, you put it down, you never pick it up again. Instead of asking, "Is that good? Does that suck?" You have to learn to ask, "What was that like?" "What could I do better?" "What worked?" These questions that feed your sense of process rather than your sense of product.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Peggy Orenstein. The name of the book is Unraveling: What I Learned About Life while Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweaters. You have a section in the book which really explains how synthetic fabrics are problematic and that saying you're wearing one of those fleece, even if it's made out of plastic bottles. What'd you say? It's like you said, serving Hammond Mayo at a Bar mitzvah. [laughs]

Peggy Orenstein: Yes. I said it's like I was wearing my trusty fleece made out of recycled water bottles and it's like brandishing a Hammond cheese sandwich on white bread at a Bar mitzvah. I didn't realize what synthetic fiber-- How they had taken over. This is hard because you're already, I'm already, we don't think about our clothing the way we think about our food, right? We've learned to think in this way about organic and local and ethical and all of that, and we're not thinking about our clothing that way, and it's having profound implications. The fashion industry is one of the worst offenders environmentally and socially in the world. I'm sitting here thinking I'm already going to the farmers market and composting and recycling and driving my Prius because I live in Northern California and not flushing when it's only pee because of the drought and all this and now I have to think, "Oh, my God, where did this pair of pants come from?" Part of me just wants to go, "No." You have to know and we have to understand and the great news is that right now, and I actually have a piece coming out. Should be coming out this Sunday in the New York Times, that the EU is starting to roll out unprecedented regulation of the fashion industry starting this year.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Peggy Orenstein: Particularly we who care and understand, we who knit or sew or create with fiber and understand the care and value of those materials, and our time should be right on top of pressuring our government in this country to be doing that as well.

Alison Stewart: Yes. How are consumers, how are the textile industry attempting to make the industry in the making of clothes more sustainable?

Peggy Orenstein: Well, there's been massive greenwashing is one big answer to that. It's been a self-regulated industry, and they have honestly been doing a terrible job. We as consumers can put pressure on and it's hard because as we know, all these individual things we do are important, and they don't make enough of a difference but they're a start. Not the fast fashion thing has been terrible. A garbage truck of textiles is now burned every second, burned or incinerated, disposed of. Thinking about the way that we think about our food, the way that we've learned. If I talk to 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, about farmers market and a free range chickens, you just think I was a nut but now, we all understand the importance of that. I think that we're just starting on the road with fashion and that's very exciting.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Peggy Orenstein. The name of the book is Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater. You went through this process during the pandemic, obviously, you touch on the spring of 2020. The reaction to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and hate crimes against Asian-Americans. You follow a knitter on Instagram who's a woman of color, and she had a thing or two to say to her followers around that time. What did she say that resonated with you?

Peggy Orenstein: That's Gaye Glasspie, who goes by ggmadeit on Instagram. She talks about standing in the gap and putting down your knitting, and what you have to do about activism. For me, I'm the mom-- My husband is Asian-America and then our daughter her Asian heritage is very apparent in the way that she looks. That time of rising anti-Asian violence was hard. As the white mom of a child of color, you always think as a mother, that you're going to be able to correct for the things that your mother did, and you're going to be this perfect mother, and you're going to bring all these things.

This was the place where I had to really stop and think about how do I do this as somebody who has such difference from her? How do I do this as somebody who has such privilege when I moved through the world? How do I help her with her pain and her anger and her fear? How do I stand in that gap? That was one of the big challenges for me during the pandemic. In the book, I talk a lot about what we learned from our mothers because so many of us learn to knit from our mothers. I end up with an acronym for that that I jokingly throw throughout. For me, what I learned from my mother, what I taught my daughter, and the things that I didn't teach my daughter that I learned from my mother too.

I joke that I didn't teach my daughter to knit because I knit in a really weird way. There's so many things that we learn from our moms and there's so many things that we don't want to pass on and there's so many things we do so all of that was knit in as well.

Alison Stewart: How do you look at your life differently after this experience, the hands-on experience of shearing and dyeing and knitting and making the sweater and then also the experience of examining it through a bigger picture, through the cultural lens?

Peggy Orenstein: I certainly I look at how I buy clothing differently, really differently. I buy so much less clothing. I'm so much more conscious of it. I look at the world around me differently because I use all these natural dyes so I now think about every leaf, every tree, every flower what would it look like. Creativity is different for me now. I'm much better at process. Obviously, the pandemic change things for all of us but it also in the end, one of the arcs in the book is about home and as somebody who really left my home at a young age in the Midwest and moved around the country and landed in California by chance and never really felt like I lived here, I learned what mattered to me, what home meant to me and in the end, made a much more active conscious choice removed during the pandemic, to stay and to live here and to be this person living in California.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater, today is its publication day. I've been speaking with its author Peggy Orenstein. Peggy, thank you so much for being with us.

Peggy Orenstein: Thank you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for today. On tomorrow's show, the Oscar nominations have been announced and there were some surprises and some snubs. We'll dive into them with New York Times projectionist writer Kyle Buchanan. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I'll meet you back here next time.

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