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"What if I forgave myself?

What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done?"

[ ♪♪♪ ] I did that thing that artists have done throughout all time and said, "Here's the thing I know.

Here's my pain.

Here's my heart.

I'm going to share it with you in hopes that you will see yourself in it."

MAN: I found my thing.

It's like seeing again to me to be able to take that image in my mind and make it a real object.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ Strayed reading on-screen text ] [ birds chirping ] The Pacific Crest Trail always feels like home to me, no matter how long I've been away, just like home is, right?

When you go back, you feel that sense of belonging, that sense of recognition and familiarity.

The Pacific Crest Trail was Cheryl Strayed's home for three months when she was 26.

Her wildly successful book, Wild, recounts her solo 1,100-mile hike.

Wild is printed in like 39 or 40 languages, and that completely blows me away.

I read this and was so excited about it, I said, "I have to bring back the book club."

The whole Oprah chapter... [ chuckles ] ...of my life is as thrilling as you can imagine.

It felt exciting and fun.

I can't keep it to myself.

STRAYED: And unbelievable.

I need to tell everybody I know about this book.

And to know that it actually happened, it's not a novel.

That's right.

That's right.

STRAYED: The troubles I faced down on the PCT were really the troubles that came to the fore of my life when my mom died about three years before I began hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

My mother was 45 when she died very suddenly of lung cancer.

My biological father had been abusive and threatening and not even in my life after about the age of 6.

So my mother was the taproot of my life.

I couldn't essentially bear how much pain I was in, how confused and lost I felt.

And so I did what a lot of people do with pain of that magnitude, is I really turned that inward and I began using heroin.

That's where I was at that very bottom moment when I had decided that I had to hike this trail.

This is a monster.

It was big and it was painful, and I thought, "Well, maybe this is just what backpacking is like."

You know, in retrospect, I needed to carry that heavy weight.

I needed to carry the weight that I couldn't bear.

"What if I forgave myself?

What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done?

What if I had actually wanted to sleep with every one of those men?

What if heroin taught me something?"

[ Strayed continues reading on-screen text ] I did that thing that artists have done throughout all time and said, "Here's the thing I know.

Here's a truth I want to share.

Here's my pain.

Here's my heart.

I'm going to share it with you in hopes that you will see yourself in it."

[ people chattering indistinctly ] For me, it's the role of a lifetime, and it's a gift I'll never be able to repay Cheryl for, that to play a woman like this, a dynamic character who, you know, ends the film with no man, no money, no parents, no job, and it's a happy ending is truly a singular thing in the movie business.

It's something I've never seen before.

Don't even start with that.

Reese Witherspoon earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in the film adaptation of Wild.

So did Laura Dern, who played Cheryl's mom, Bobbi.

STRAYED: There were so many great parts about making the movie.

Like they wanted me to show them the backpack and the clothes I wore, and they really wanted to make it realistic.

The director asked me, "Show Reese, like what did you do?"

I felt embarrassed.

You know, I felt like, in some ways, the way I felt on day one, where I was like, "Okay, I have to get this pack up, I can't get this pack up."

DIRECTOR: Okay, action.

STRAYED: Words escape.

How to describe this feeling of some of the most amazing moments of your life being reenacted.

[ gasping ] Watching that scene where Reese is on the side of the mountain and she takes off her boot and the boot goes over the edge, and then just like me, she throws the other one over the edge, too.

And she gives us that primal scream... [ screams ] I loved that moment.

It's about the way that we are savages in the end, in the most important things.

When we give birth, when we make love, when we lose somebody who we think we can't live without.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I grew up in Minnesota.

I grew up in the wilderness.

I grew up in a house that didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing or running water.

And I always dreamed of being a writer.

I was a voracious reader, loved books.

I applied for college and went to two colleges in the Twin Cities.

What I decided is that the best way to pursue that path was simply to write and to read as much as I could and to apprentice myself to the craft of writing.

And so that's what I did.

I got jobs as a waitress in various places, I worked as a political organizer.

I essentially made money any way I could, all in support of my writing career.

I'm very much a binge writer.

My very mundane and ordinary and very often hectic life is I write when I can.

I write when I must.

I write when I have a deadline.

And I write in the moments that nobody's in the house.

When I was writing Wild and my kids were really little, it was impossible to have solitude.

And so Brian would stay home with the kids alone and I would check into whatever hotel in Portland I could find some deal on.

I would just go and write.

Usually I would do two nights, 48 hours, and I would do nothing but write.

Wild was released in 2012, about 17 years after Cheryl's hike.

I was traveling on my book tour, and my husband texted me and said, "Our rent check bounced."

The book was selling really well, but you don't get paid for many months when you publish a book.

I do know that we were like $85,000 in credit card debt.

Credit card debt, okay?

Also both my husband and I had student loans that we were still paying off.

I started writing the "Dear Sugar" column when I had just finished the first draft of Wild.

I was asked to write this advice column for a website called The Rumpus.

And it paid nothing, it was anonymous, so I wouldn't even get credit for it, and at the time, I thought, "This is insane."

And yet something inside of me sparked.

When nobody's paying you, you're not working for anyone.

And that's a very liberating experience.

I decided to take the "Dear Sugar" column really seriously and to give it the full force of my humanity and to really make them literary pieces.

In one powerful letter, Sugar consoles a man who's distraught that his 22-year-old son was killed by a drunk driver.

"It is impossible for you to go on as you were before.

So you must go on as you never have.

The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young.

Tiny Beautiful Things came out like four months after Wild.

The book compiles highlights of Cheryl's "Dear Sugar" letters.

Her advice is filled with love, wit, and fierce honesty.

I got an email from a man named Thomas Kail, and he said, "I'm a theater director, I love your book.

I think this could be a really interesting play."

Dear Sugar, where are you?

Dear Sugar, why aren't you answering me?

Dear Sugar... STRAYED: Thomas Kail is best known as the director of Hamilton.

It's been in so many theaters across the United States but also in other countries.

It's been a thrill.

[ water running ] Okay, guys, everyone needs a pumpkin and everyone needs a knife or some implement.

I feel really lucky that I had that grounded sense of who I was as an artist.

We went from qualifying for food stamps, which we didn't apply for, because having grown up using food stamps, I just felt too much shame.

But pretty much overnight, this thing happened.

And then suddenly we had a kind of stability that we never dreamed we'd have.

I mean, this house we bought outright from the book sales of Wild.

If you pay in cash, they don't own you.

They can't take it away from you.

[ laughs ] Let's see.

Oh, I love it!

That's great!

Brave Enough is Cheryl's third national bestseller.

It's a collection of her inspirational quotes that her fans share on the Internet.

People were sending me photographs of tattoos, you know, my lines tattooed on their arm or whatnot.

WINFREY: What is that like?

STRAYED: It's amazing.

It's really an honor.

I'm working on my next book, which is a memoir.

I think of myself as a very intuitive writer.

I never know where anything's going to go until I write it, and I don't talk about a book until it's done.

As a writer, when you're turning life into art, you have to dig deeper.

It is about excavating, digging for the truth.

I visited their grave.

All of my relatives lived very difficult lives.

The women were chambermaids and the men were coal miners and laborers.

I've uncovered so many secrets.

When I do think about ancestry, I immediately think about story.

[ ♪♪♪ ] One of my favorite days on the set is when we shot what's the final scene in the film, and that's at the Bridge of the Gods.

MAN: The light couldn't be better.

STRAYED: I was there with my family, my son Carver, my daughter Bobbi, my husband Brian.

My daughter, of course, was in the film.

She played the young me.

But what a lot of people don't know is that my husband and my son were also in the film.

On the day that we shot at the Bridge of the Gods, a car drives from the toll booth, and the driver and the boy wave at Reese, and that's Brian and Carver.

I was absolutely moved to tears watching that, because that's when I realized this trail brought me to my family.

[ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: Let's go get some cherries, sweetie pie.

WOMAN: Alrighty.

You want to grab your hat?

My good old Indiana Jones hat.

[ chuckles ] Yes.

I love this thing.

Alrighty.

All right.

[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: Alrighty.

What a pretty day.

It is.

It's like perfect.

MAN: We met each other at the Piano School of Technology for the Blind.

She was an artist painting a piano at a fundraiser, and I was going there doing extra classes because the school mainly taught tuning and basic repair, and I happened to be working in the same classroom as she was painting the piano.

And I walk in and put my hand on the wet paint, of course, and we both say, "Oh, no, sorry!"

Because I thought I'd destroyed her painting.

Yeah, and I was really awkward because, I don't know, I'd never really been around blind people very much.

JOHN: She asked me out first.

I had this huge patch of peas at the Marshall Center Community Garden, and so I called her back and asked if she wanted to help me pick peas in the garden.

[ both chuckle ] But I loved it.

Yeah.

It was -- it was the best first date that I've ever been on.

JOHN: I love to be in my wood shop, because I get lost in my projects.

It's definitely my happy place, because when I've got a bowl on the lathe and I'm carving away, there's just -- there's nothing else but me and that bowl.

I see it in my mind and I feel the wood change as I'm carving, and you're not really supposed to have your hand on it while you're carving, but it changes so fast, if I didn't, I would look like a blind guy made it, so... [ laughs ] One of my main inspirations is just creating things.

The Woodwright's Shop on PBS, I always loved watching that guy, especially the lathe.

It just transforms like magic, and I remember wishing I could do those kind of things.

My name is John Furniss.

I'm 37 years old, and I live in Washougal, Washington.

But I grew up in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah basically.

At 16 years old, I attempted suicide by shooting myself, and luckily only lost my sight and sense of smell.

My mind was left completely intact.

I finished out high school, and then when I turned 18, I moved out back to the town I grew up in, and that was a bad idea.

I got into meth and I got into trouble with the law and ended up on probation and just downward spiral, really.

I moved back in with my folks after that happened, and they helped me get off the meth and get off probation.

A little ways after that, I started attending fine woodworking classes at a school for the blind in Salt Lake City.

I found my thing.

It's like seeing again to me to be able to take that image in my mind and make it a real object.

Anni put the things I was making on Facebook, and people wanted to order them.

I jokingly say she's my press secretary, but it's totally true, because I don't know anything about Facebook or Instagram, and I'd probably be taking pictures of my nose anyway.

You know, and -- It helps that I'm your biggest fan.

Yeah, that, too.

Because, really, without her putting me out there on Facebook and Instagram, no one would know who I am.

[ ♪♪♪ ] What do we got there, sweetie pie?

That one looks like padauk.

JOHN: Anni helps me separate the colors.

ANNI: And this one is yellowheart.

JOHN: Okay.

I just picture them in my mind.

I've got a full CAD program in my mind.

This one here, is that dark or light?

This one, um, it's like a light medium.

Mm, okay.

So...

So it almost looks -- And I try to come up with as unique of a design as I possibly can.

Every bowl starts pretty much as a slab of wood like this, depending on, you know, size or whatever.

You sand it -- or cut it to size, and then sand it and flatten it out as much as possible where your glue joints are going to be.

And I am particularly picky about my glue joints.

I will do a dry fitting like this one here without any glue, and then I take that knife, and if the tip of that blade fits into a gap along that seam, I take it apart and I sand more.

As you can see, this one is -- this one's ready to rock 'n' roll.

[ ♪♪♪ ] ANNI: Art has been an important tool for me in my life.

I have struggled with depression since I was about 16 or so.

My mother gifted me my great-grandfather's oil paints.

It was just a really great way for me to work through some pretty dark times that I was dealing with.

I struggled with eating disorders for many, many years, and art was a really great way for me to hone my focus on something else instead of, you know, maybe the pain that I was feeling at the time or, you know, feeling maybe like I was lonely or didn't belong.

Reusing a painting is a pretty common thing for me.

When I repurpose them, I love using the collective energy that is underneath the canvas.

I'm working on a piece that is dedicated to my friend Kelly.

Kelly was a very prolific artist in Vancouver, and she just passed away from cancer.

And she was a very dear friend of mine.

So this piece is dedicated to her.

When we were in the hospital with her, it was close to her last... last day, and John had told her, "And the wind whispered, 'Kelly.'"

This is what this one's going to be called.

I had started a painting of my grandmother, and I just couldn't quite get it to where I wanted it, and so it kind of has just sat there, and when I came across it, I'm like, "Well, that's perfect."

You know, "I'll create the painting of Kelly on the canvas of the painting of my grandmother."

She has the same eyes as my grandmother, and she just reminded me so much of her, and I think that's actually one of the reasons we connected so deeply.

What better way to honor both of them than to use the same canvas?

I was raised in a very, very loving home.

And I draw a lot of my inspiration from my family and my friends.

My little sister's adopted from Korea.

My brother-in-law is Vietnamese.

We always had a very diverse group of people in our home because my sister was part of the International Club.

The religious traditions or cultural, I have really absorbed those into my own life.

For the last several years, I've been drawing my inspiration from my husband, from John, and his amazing story and the love that he shares with me.

A lot of my pieces, you'll see that the subjects, the eyes are closed.

John has his eyes closed because his eyelids have nerve damage.

And I always joke with him that he looks like he's reaching nirvana or something, because he just looks so peaceful.

[ lathe whirring ] [ lathe shuts off ] JOHN: I do have some times that I get discouraged when I'm working.

I've cut the whole side off of a bowl before because I wasn't paying attention.

Those times, it can get discouraging, but I step away from it for a while and come back to being calm and just go back to it.

[ playing music over phone ] ANNI: This is an iPhone amphitheater or smartphone amphitheater.

It just about doubles it.

This is a honey pot, and you open it and you put honey in it, and there's the dipper.

Sometimes John makes bowls that we call...

"Oops!"

I mean, "Ta-da!"

That have just little flaws or blemishes like this.

I had some ash, and I made this out of it.

ANNI: And then this ring John made for me.

It was our second anniversary, right?

JOHN: Yeah.

ANNI: I love that ring.

He's my calm in the storm.

We jokingly call him the Anni whisperer, because I have pretty bad anxiety, and he helps chill me out.

JOHN: It's like we were just meant to be.

[ indistinct chattering ] ANNI: We actually just celebrated seven years together.

I'd say things are going pretty well.

JOHN: I'd have to agree.

[ both chuckling ] [ ♪♪♪ ] To see more stories about Oregon artists, visit our website... And for a look at what we're working on now, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

[ ♪♪♪ ] What do we got there?

That one looks like padauk.

Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.