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Through
my work, I've pondered the way we define ourselves
through design, architecture and other visual
representations. This page has links to my
published work and unpublished ideas, and
to influences like typography, philosophy,
political cartoons, and my prolonged journey
in Japan. |
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Bio |
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Maggie
Kinser Hohle, who wrote for nine years as Maggie
Kinser Saiki, was born in Illinois in 1963. She
grew up in a household permeated with the language
and ideas of design. She graduated in 1985 from
St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland with
a double major in philosophy and math. In 1986
Maggie moved to Japan, where she became fluent
in Japanese and wrote about Japanese design, business,
vernacular architecture and traditional rural
culture and industry. Maggie returned to the Eastern
US in July of 2000 and now lives in Northern California
with her husband and kids. More...
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Influences |
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Maggie's
Dad |
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Bill
Kinser, designer and teacher (1931-2002)
To
my dad design was not an art, but a trade,
with simple, verifiable rules. Dad was fascinated
by the transformation of logic into visual
symbols and the use of those symbols to
persuade. He taught me to look at the world
as a puzzle that could be decoded, and delight
in the dreams that lead people to attempt
grand acts. The interviewer in me came from
my dad, who took me everywhere with him
and talked with everyone he met about what
they knew and not what he knew. With Dad
I visited gas stations, design labs, sale
barns and photographers' houses. Dad collected
ancient books for their typography and printing,
and was forever fascinated with the kinship
between social history and visual history.
My
first view of history was formed as a child,
as my dad and Neil Kleinman worked at our
house on their book, A Search for Aesthetic
Reality in Germany, 1890-1945; The dream
that was no more a dream, (1969 Harper
& Row). Immaculately illustrated with images
from the late 1800s through the mid 20th
century, their book analyzes Germany's enduring
symbols and concludes that, "the way in
which a society explains itself -- the style
and purpose of its history--is...as important
as the specific content of its history."
It wasn't until I finished my book, 12
Japanese Masters in 2001 that I realized
that I had approached the same questions
in a different nation: how does our visual
environment change the way we think and
act? How powerful is the manipulation of
symbols, conscious or not? More...
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Maggie's
Mom |
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been my favorite never-ending job to describe
my mother's world. With her whole life she's
taught me how to edit the details to describe
character, though her characters have most
often been three-dimensional. After a powerful
career in animation, shortened by marriage,
she worked her design education at Chouinard
Art Institute into her life as a mother. She
spent my early childhood in Illinois and Pennsylvania
working freelance as the crafts editor for
American Home Crafts, doing weird, memorable
one-off commercial projects like a line of
a half dozen 3 foot-high Orphan Annie dolls
for a Chicago store window, and a huge 3-d
soft sculpture hot dog (with mustard) for
7-Up. And she wrote books. I remember most
clearly her working on Outdoor Art For Kids,
(Follett, Chicago 1975 [TK]). My late brother
Tom and I were the guinea pigs and models
for the crafts, and the stories inspired me
to write. In the late 1970s, when I was becoming
conscious of the world, Mom established Charleen
Kinser Designs, which for 26 years was
a small group of artisans creating characters
Mom designed to be played with: toys made
by hand for an international market. She gave
teenage me my first writing job: to describe
these creatures in story and doggerel. The
production crew finally disbanded in 2002,
but for Mom's one- or two-of-a-kinds, I still
write the stories.
People call my mom 'whimsical', but like all
good characters, hers are real, and I think
of my writing about them as non-fiction. More... |
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Great
Books |
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| Irreverent?
Maybe so, but at St. John's College ("The Great
Books School"), there was nothing more fun than
making the work of the great thinkers our own, on
every level. This is one of the postcards I made
to raise money for Reality, the final party.
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Life
in Japan |
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My freelance
work in Japan taught me by example that man is
inherently flexible, intellectually and physically.
We can understand any point of view, any value
system. We can take on any way of life. From the
beginning, almost all of my friends were Japanese,
and--in their language--I asked them to elucidate
their values, their habits, their emotions. Japanese
is a good language for this kind of talk. In 1990,
I married a Japanese, an artist from a family
that for generations had held a Shinto shrine
on the southern island of Shikoku. We moved into
a thatched farmhouse in the mountains north of
Kyoto. We began a family. Sheer immersion in the
same rural life my neighbors lived, with their
centuries-old festivals and their easy belief
in animism, made their concerns mine, and their
values mine.
A tutor
at St. John's once told a class pursuing Pascal,
"translation is impossible." After so many years
in a foreign culture that became my own, I still
long to prove him wrong, if only slightly. More...
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Gallery |
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Published
Works |
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Unpublished
Works |
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Every
writer has stories he wishes he'd pitched or wishes
he'd sold. Below are two from the early 1990s that
I remember with regret, each for a different reason.
In 1999, when I met a young Japanese thatcher who'd
visited the UK, studied thatching there, and dreamed
of thatching a Japanese house with the much more
efficient British methods, I went to my dad with
my great idea of writing about this young thatcher.
His response depressed me at first: "if the dream
isn't realized, there IS no story; there's just
another young man with a dream." That one comment
burned me up so much I determined to make the dream
come true, with or without the young thatcher. In
1999 I brought over a British thatcher to work with
yet another Japanese thatcher, and together they
performed the first cross-cultural rethatching of
a 100 year-old Japanese farmhouse. The first thatcher,
the one with the dream, ended up dropping out of
the thatching business altogether, depressed by
the weight of his dream. But other thatchers did
join our project, and through TV and newspaper exposure,
magazine articles and lectures, it went on to influence
many more. When I'm discouraged I remember the truth
I learned that year: A dream is just a dream. |
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