Toots Zynsky discusses her time at RISD and early Pilchuck. Oral history interview with Toots Zynsky, March 23, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:44.

Toots Zynsky: So I was very lucky because I had, at the end of my freshman year, decided not to take a leave of absence, probably a withdrawal from RISD, and happened quite accidentally on the glass shop, which they had just finished really building and was listed as a ceramic storage room. And I saw it and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ and people were just moving around, totally—it looked like this amazing spontaneous choreography to me with something music playing and glass swirling through the air and I [inaudible] withdrawn from school and actually continued for the next nine months to look at medical schools. And but the glass kept teasing [laughs] the back of my brain and having worked so hard to get into RISD, I determined that I was going to RISD when I was 11 years old, and I thought, ‘Okay I should give myself one semester. I’m giving myself one semester to go back and really work at it, get as good as I can so I can see if there’s really something there or it’s just gonna be an infatuation,’ because it was clear that everyone seeing glass blown for the first time is totally infatuated by it. And I wanted to know if there was really something there so I did work really hard and then Dale asked me to go out and help build Pilchuck [Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington], so Jamie [James] Carpenter and I, two of the people drove out together to Pilchuck. That in itself was a weird adventure, I’d never been West, and that was it. It grabbed me.