Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle is best known as one of the finest craft education centers on the East Coast. Whether a student, teacher, administrator or visitor, Haystack imparts a powerful creative energy at the end of the winding lane that leads to one of the most beautiful small campuses in America. In a new book that celebrates Haystack’s 50th anniversary, fans, followers, faculty and friends write of the synergy, sanctuary, alchemy, refuge, magic and mecca they found there.

In a collection of more than 50 contributing writers, “Discovery: Fifty Years of Craft Experience at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts,” published earlier this year by the University of Maine Press, renders a uniquely democratic testimony to the founding and flourishing of an arts institution in Maine and in America. The letters were solicited through Haystack, and every person who responded, according to editor Carl Little, made the cut.

In 1950, Haystack started with a group of professional craftspeople in Montville, near the actual Haystack Mountain, and a desire to teach, develop and research crafts. The first directors were Francis and Priscilla Merritt, and the inaugural season included ceramics, block printing, weaving and woodworking. Nine years later, the school moved to Deer Isle, where architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed buildings that seemed to grow from the rocks themselves.

Fifty years later, Haystack has grown from five faculty members to a rotating summer faculty of more than 40 distinguished artists from around the world. It also holds conferences in the fall and community-based programs throughout the year.

As an institution, however, Haystack has maintained a high level of intimacy with its participants, and, more than anything, that’s what the “Discovery” publication records. A joint project

between Stuart Kestenbaum, Haystack’s director for the last 13 years, and Michael Alpert at the UM Press in Orono, the book attempts to capture the transformation and inspiration that instructors, artists and students experience at Haystack.

The cover is in color but the rest of the book is printed in duotone, with a warm-gray second color, using a 300-line screen, according to Alpert, a book craftsman in his own right. He originally had planned to print the book with color plates, but the varying quality of photographs made it impossible to do. Alpert also wanted readers to focus on the writing, rather than the images – an unusual approach for a book written by people who work in visual media. It’s a loss not to have color, but without a unified photographic vision, Alpert made the next best choice.

Most of the contributors are not professional writers, as editor Little says in his preface. In other words, it is not difficult to find a lot of rhapsodizing within these pages.

But if you have visited, worked or studied at Haystack, the enthusiasm of its beneficiaries translates into joyous gratitude -and it’s hard to argue with that once you’ve seen the place and watched its spell be cast. While I occasionally found myself wanting a deeper, more historical and cultural perspective -Where does Haystack fit into the larger world of art in America? Who can authoritatively and critically tell us the significance of its accomplishments and the reach of its mission? – I also encountered unexpected insights into the nature of creative arts.

The accounts are not universally compelling, but in all fairness, the contributors are, by and large, artists trying to put into words the unexplainable work of the muse, in this case, a site-specific combination of landscape, seascape, stars, trees and light. The best of writers would struggle with this assignment.

Many of the pieces I liked were written by what you might call “old timers,” those with a true historical appreciation.

Ted Hallman, a fiber artist with a 40-year relationship with Haystack, was refreshingly abrupt. “Clarity is present at Haystack,” he states in a block of cogent aphorisms about the place.

“You can’t miss it, the poetry of interconnections concentrated at Haystack,” writes Paulus Berensohn, the well-known clay artist. “An alchemy awakens something deep within us called awe, called care, called craft art: The ‘power’ we have to make connections, to reveal a natural beauty. The Latin root of material is mother.”

“Haystack, the site, nurtures a naivete critical to discovery,” explains Wayne Higby, a ceramic artist and educator. “It strips away sophistication and touches the raw tissue of feeling.”

These introspective moments reminded me of all the artists and students who have crossed the Deer Isle bridge in the last half century, how they arrived with hope and left with faith, and how the spirit of the place emblazoned on them a reverence for artistic mystery.

In the end, I still craved a piece of writing as beautiful as the pots and jewelry, weavings and paintings created at Haystack. But I understood something more important about the collaborative process at the heart of the school.

Stuart Kestenbaum – a poet and visionary of no small stature – points out in the introduction that reading these works is “like walking into the dining room, to find it full of energetic people from around the country and abroad, engaged in conversations about their work and their lives.” “Discovery” is more of an oral history put to page, and its voices, with all their internal colors and variations, are, as Kestenbaum rightly notes, very much like a Haystack session.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 or aanstead@bangordailynews.net.