What are the most significant ways in which your shop has evolved in the time that you’ve been there?

For years it was just me, alone, knocking out commissions between acting jobs. When Parks and Rec rolled around, I had a feeling it would be well received enough to seriously curtail my shop time, and thankfully, I was right. I first found Rebecca Lee to run the shop in my sporadic absence, and then we organically added the other redoubtable personalities to our roster. In doing so, we have become a multi-talented group of craftspersons, creating everything from kazoos to canoes to gazebos. It has come to resemble the other fruitful communities in my life of which I have been fortunate enough to be part—my farming family in Minooka, Illinois, and my theater companies: Defiant Theatre in Chicago and Evidence Room in Los Angeles.

I very much enjoyed the artwork and knick knacks hanging throughout the shop. Do you have a favorite piece?

The work of my best friend, artist Pat Roberts has been a constant inspiration to me for about 20 years now. I have many of his pieces there, and I am hard-pressed to choose a favorite between the action painting Jesus’ Cape and my 27th birthday present, Ziggy Is a Fuckin’ Hobbit. He makes me laugh and dance, even while making me toot and think.

Do you have any workshop rules? Have there been incidents in the past that predicated them?

First and foremost in any shop: SAFETY FIRST. The shop holds many, many dangers to life and limb and finger and eyeball, and so the first rule is to respect the tools and machinery, keep the workplace neat and clean, don goggles, dust and ear protection, and pay attention to your own work and that of your neighbor.

Second rule is: “Please” and “Thank you.” We use good manners in the shop and we don’t allow our tempers to flare. One great artist lost his cool a few years ago, rather habitually, and so he was excused from our company. The point of a venerated craft like woodworking is to eschew the “rat race” mentality that is the cause of so much frustration in modern consumerist society. L.A. road rage is a perfect example of what happens to a population when it feels that happiness lies in the notion of “time is money.” At Offerman Woodshop, we understand the value of taking one’s time to do a job right, with meticulous care. We find the resultant recompense to be a more fortifying meal than mere dollars.

On writing Gumption, how did you arrive at the idea of paying respect and very funny tribute to great Americans?

My splendid editor at Dutton, Jill Schwartzman, and I determined that the list of “great Americans” would be an excellent lens through which I could examine some of the values that bind all of us together here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. In our contemporary climate of extreme partisanship and tenacious discrimination, particularly in the areas of racism, sexism, and sexual orientation, I wanted to point up the ways in which “we’re all in this together,” in the hope that we can continue to become more decent to one another. All with my usual clumsy sense of humor, or course.

When writing this book, what was your process like?

“I would rise each morning in my remote cabin in Minnesota’s north woods and greet the day with a hearty breakfast of bluegill, bacon and eggs, and then settle into a pot of strong coffee and some lugubrious paragraphing on my preferred writing medium: lengths of supple birchbark, whilst Megan split firewood melodically in the woods off the porch” is how I would like to answer this question. In truth, between my own acting jobs, touring as a humorist, the Sundance film festival, and visiting Megan at her acting work, this book was written largely on flights, or in hotels in New York City; London; Park City, Utah; Istanbul; Cape Town, South Africa; and Calgary, Alberta. Each of my subjects required a good deal of research and/or interviews as well, so I had a fulsome packet from which to glean my musings in each chapter. Airplanes were key to the completion of the work, particularly the long trans-Atlantic flights.