Hello. I am Error.

On a cold Friday night in December of 2007, my friends and I sat around my living room, each with two needles and a ball of yarn. At a time when many young men might have been surfing the Internet or outside playing with fire, we were sitting in a circle learning the ancient art of knitting. For some of us, knitting became the next thing on a long list of rather fleeting endeavors—I suppose it had an appeal, in our more mature years, similar to that of karate lessons during every boy’s childhood. Others of us had enough patience to endure the long hours of tedious, eye-squinting, finger-tip-pricking work, and we continue practicing our needlework to this day. Regardless of its lasting importance, knitting brought us together on this particular winter night, and the shared experience provided us with a valuable insight, which, in time, landed us a Pulitzer prize and a long-lasting seat on the New York Times Bestseller list.

The central idea of Stitching a Connection Between Life and Knitting came to us during just a single stitch but developed throughout the hundreds of fabrics that followed. You see, during the knitting process, one must never excuse his attention from the work at hand, lest he lose track of his pattern. And worse, if for just one stitch, a man ceases to knit his heart into his creation, the work will have a blatant gap. Throughout this process of intense concentration and overtly repetitive motions, the mind has abundant time to wander. As our needles carried the yarn in and out of our scarves that night, our minds were weaving an elaborate metaphor between this age-old technique and our life experiences as young men in a world full of adversity. Lessons of community and loneliness, love and hatred, accomplishments and failures, patience, commitment, endurance, and creativity—all of these and more are interwoven into the world of knitting.

Further into the book, you will discover the full range and polarity of these life lessons. Before we begin our journey into Stitching a Connection, however, I would like to share just one story about the importance of creativity in our world. Of course, creativity in knitting is just as important as the needles and yarn. I am convinced, however, that few people place enough importance on creativity in the world outside of knitting—more broadly referred to as “life.” With creativity, we can break the rules without actually breaking any rules; it stirs the heart, when everything else simply moves the mind; creativity stops people dead in their tracks, forcing them to consider this third option that has a strange magnetism and irresistible charm to it. You see, we live in a world where our narrow gazes have trapped us, like a nasty, tangled lump of yarn: we believe we can either fight fire with water or fight fire with fire, but beyond that, we see few other options. I once read a story about an old man who lived in a rough part of town. On the occasion, the neighborhood kids would break out in a fight; but the old man didn’t try to go stand in the middle or threaten to call the cops. Instead, he hopped onto his unicycle, grabbed his bowling pins, and wheeled himself out into the street, creating a spectacle irresistible to the attention of the hotheaded teenagers. So when fire breaks loose, stop going to the same old tactics, beating that dead horse of yours. Choose the third option. Fight fire with unicycles, and fight fire with juggling, and fight it ever so joyfully with a childlike imagination—that one of which we lost sight far too long ago—and if you think it suits you, fight fire with knitting.

-Jesse Strauss