Howdy! Welcome to Yondering.

Allow me to introduce myself.

I’m Kathie Sever, and I’m the owner of Ft Lonesome, a custom chainstitch embroidery and custom western wear studio in Austin Tx. I only make a tiny fraction of the stuff that comes out of the Fort, but i’ll likely be doing most of the yapping around here.

I fell in love with the spacious romantic notion embodied in what some might call Cowboy Culture back in the very early 1990’s. It was during my tenure as an oil-painting art major in Northern California’s Humboldt county that I began to notice a creeping claustrophobia- one I attributed to my reckoning with Capitol-A-Art as a semi-religious, overly-precious, insular and alienating hierarchical system. Perhaps I was painting with broad strokes, pun intended, but I was 20. That’s the native tongue of the youths.

I graduated with my arbitrary degree and was uncertain what was next when my horse wrangling, cruise ship dancing, mountain wandering big sister came blowing through town on her way to McLeod, Montana, where she’d landed a summer gig cooking meals at the X-A Dude Ranch. She’d yet to lay her actual eyes on the ranch, but if ever there was a baton-twirling small town California girl more suited to life on a working Montana cattle ranch, I’ve yet to meet her.

As she was packing her car to leave, I asked if when she got there, she’d ask if maybe they could use any more help on the ranch that summer? Turns out, they could.

That’s me. In 1995. In Montana. Really feeling the vibe, if you know what I mean.

The next several years I spent wandering in and out of the X-A’s educational ecosystem- realistically i was there to make beds and wash dishes, although at a small working cattle-cum-dude ranch in very remote Montana, one dons many (stetson) hats. Thereby, I picked up on fragments of the following skill sets: horse wrangling, field irrigation, fence mending, saddle storage, cooking eggs for thirty or more and….. goat whispering. The goat whispering was primarily aspirational, as our resident goat remained generally pernicious no matter my attempts to connect.

Although I’m quite certain I’ve never felt more wild and powerful than while galloping bareback down the Boulder Valley, chasing a heard of trail weary horses back to the ranch- in hindsight the most precious teaching I took away from my time at the X-A was the abiding value in stepping outside one’s echo chamber and falling in love with things and people who embody a different story than yours. There are few educational opportunities more fruitful than the ones that arise from embracing humility in unfamiliar terrain.

Here’s how I like to remember myself during my Montana era:

Here’s how I actually was during my Montana era:

And yes, i made both of those dresses, neither with much attention to detail but both in the spirit of trying to capture my newfound lonesomeness in thread.

What is Yondering, you ask?

You didn’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway.

Yondering is the title of a Louis L’Amour novel my husband Matt found while playing a folk gig at a used book store in Eugene, OR a couple of minutes after he’d gotten off a call where I was agonizing over reeeeeeally wanting to launch my Very Interesting Substack Idea! I had the concept, the first post was penned. I’d outlined and edited and was ready to go- except I absolutely could not land on a good title for this frightening endeavor.

I’d sent him lists, we’d brainstormed, nothing was clicking. Hyperbolic threats of throwing it all away were made. We got off the phone, he walked into his gig. There, among a display of old western novels situated near the front door, he picked up a book. He sent me this photo, and it was settled.

Yondering feels not unlike the word Lonesome, a word I felt and still feel intimately describes my days in Montana- full of longing for wholeness, yet somehow simultaneously rich with faith in its presence.

Yondering, to me, invokes the journey, the narrative arc; a ‘what’s over yonder hill’ curiosity- the holy spark that ignites all creative propulsion.

What might you expect to find while Yondering?

The genesis story of this newsletter begins with the art show my team at Ft Lonesome and I are in the process of building. The show will be at Prizer gallery in Austin in late November. The concept we’re noodling on centers around the idea that the Cowboy archetype falls under the Jungian umbrella of the Explorer, whose shadow rears up as the Wanderer- one attribute moves with meaning; the other, more opportunistic in nature. We’ve begun positing the question internally of how we feel about interacting with the images pervasively used in the western wear visual lexicon- references that allude to a sometimes lopsided narrative of expansionism and entitlement- the wandering shadow of the unintegrated explorer, you could say. You could say we’ve been wondering about wandering. Ha. Ha. Ha.

All of this wondering began to feel like a creative project in and of itself- an opportunity to engage our community and invite you into the conversation. After all, an archetype only exists as an expression of the collective. Although powerful to contemplate in isolation, the archetype draws us out of our maladaptive addiction to sovereignty and reminds us of our mycelial interconnectedness.

So! The nascent structure I’m hoping to build here will revolve largely around the above theme. However, because I don’t wish to misidentify myself as someone with any authority with which to speak on any given subject, my plan is also to throw in plenty of less heady content; I plan to distract myself, and in the process you as well, with shiny objects, lest my head attempt to out-think my heart. Below is a short list of ideas I’m germinating for future missives:

• Chainstitch and western wear related tutorials!

• Poetry, but i’ll try to keep it brief.

• Interviews with folks who know more than me about stuff (i.e. everyone).

• Behind the scenes at the Fort as we prep for the show at Prizer later this year.

• Book recommendations!

• Musings on running a small art-centric business in a capitalist ecosystem that craves scalability and relentless newness.

• Jokes! (Those will probably come from my husband who is funnier than me.)

• and So! Much! More! (probably not much more, i mean that’s kind of a lot.)

Why I’d love for you to subscribe to Yondering.

I’m truly glad you’re here. I hope you’ll stick around, paid subscriber or no.

That being said, I’ll go ahead and take this opportunity to say- the impetus to gather all this thinking and plop it into a substack initially sprung up as a means with which to try to fund the work for our upcoming show.

Without belaboring the obvious, the hours we spend devoted to new work with ambiguous monetization potential is risky when you’re simultaneously operating a business with overhead, payroll yadda yadda yadda. We are no exception to a very expensive rule, and we are not alone in this conundrum! We are coming to you to ask for help. If you could throw us a few bones not only for what you find within this newsletter situation, but also out faith that the show we assemble might provide something of value to the world, I’d be quite grateful- or much obliged, to intone the dialect of our Explorer.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read- here’s to yondering together.