Mark Peiser talks about learning glass through trial and error at Penland. Oral History Interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:59.

Mark Peiser: No—there wasn’t anybody—there were no instructors at Penland. I mean, they’re basically, I showed up in the fall; I went back to Chicago after the summer thing. Went back to Chicago, closed down my business—such as it was—and got back. Got there in the fall, there’re like five people: the director, Bill Brown, his wife, and a guy who was sort of the maintenance, garbage man, and Bonnie Ford, who was sort of the—did the office, basically. You know, that’s all the people who were living on the whole mountain. And no one knew anything about glass—I didn’t know anyone who did—and I figured it was up to me to figure it out, you know. And I—start reading books and stuff, and trying all sorts of things. I was a huge admirer of Tiffany glass, and other glass at the time. You know, Egyptian glass I also was much taken with. Those were the two main things, I kind of looked at whatever I could find. Mostly, you know, I think early on in life I kind of learned to do things by trial and error, and that’s pretty much what I did. I did—I tried analyzing from a physicist’s point of view, glassblowing, which I [laughs] tried to impart to some students up at Haystack [Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine] one year, which didn’t fly very well. But, but anyway, I was just trying to understand the process.