KATHRYN GRAVEN

When the global pandemic shuts down the world, a Boston artist takes to her sewing machine. Drawing on her close ties to Japan and a life-long love of sewing, she becomes a mask maker. In a time of unparalleled anxiety, her charming masks offer friends and strangers, near and far, connection and hope.

           

Memoirs of a Mask Maker is the story of how a five-year-old girl learns to navigate loss after a tragic car accident leaves her motherless. It honors three amazing women - a grandmother, a neighbor and a pharmacist in Japan - who helped her stitch together a beautiful life. In time, the young woman travels the world, lands her dream job as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo and there, finds lasting love.

    

But her resilience is tested when, just as she is poised to become a mother, she faces new unexpected losses. Fighting despair, she turns to sewing. She stitches a baptismal quilt for her newborn baby. She clears a path forward, not by avoiding grief, but by tending it. She weeds unhelpful family patterns and sorts tangled threads of unfinished business. She seeks new joys in raising a family, creating art, playing music, growing a garden.

        

Repurposing old fabrics into new masks and signing each with a positive message, the mask maker reaffirms the threads that hold together our fragile global family.