The Chatham Arts Council is investing in artists through our Meet This Artist series, introducing you to Chatham County artists each year in a big way. So, take a look. Meet your very inspiring neighbor.
Guest writer Corbie Hill penned this Meet This Artist feature. Corbie is a writer, musician, runner, and Star Trek superfan who lives in Pittsboro. Listen to Corbie’s music here, and find him on Instagram here.
Grief is like trees across the highway.
Arlo Estill explains an analogy he heard from his mom, Tami Schwerin, as the two sit upstairs of Hempsmith Clothing Co. Slowly, your brain figures out ways around the figurative blocked highway, Estill continues. As you take back roads to find your way around, your mind and spirit grow.
“Once you get there, you are fuller,” Estill says of healing after trauma. “When the heart breaks, it can fill in with gold.”
Schwerin and Estill have turned incredible loss—the 2016 death of Schwerin’s son and Arlo’s brother Zafer Estill—into a community gathering centered on healthy, honest relationships with the one thing none of us can avoid: death. On November 7, the 11th annual Death Faire returns to The Plant in Pittsboro. Death Faire is also the subject of a new documentary film, screening October 26 at the Lumina in Chapel Hill.
If Death Faire began a family affair, so did The Plant, which was co-founded by Schwerin and Lyle Estill, whose son Arlo is now a partner. Tucked away down Lorax Lane on the east side of Pittsboro, The Plant maintains a time-tested Chatham vibe of being simultaneously off the beaten path and in the middle of the action. Schwerin and Lyle Estill’s contributions to the community go back decades, while Arlo is enthusiastically coming into his own as a member of Purple Snakes—The Plant’s house band—and a slow fashion purveyor through Hempsmith. Yet even Hempsmith, which was originally Zafer’s idea, points to the many complicated tendrils death leaves in the lives of those who survive.
We sat down with Tami Schwerin and Arlo Estill, primarily to talk about Death Faire and how they engage with the concept of death positivity. “I remember after Z died. You’re just in this shock,” Schwerin says. “There was this weird thing for a while. Colors to me were so vivid. It was beautiful and joyful. You’re in this deep despair, but it’s like you can reach a higher joy the lower your despair is.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Corbie Hill: In this society, death is seen as a thing that is mourned quickly and moved on from. Death Faire seems divergent from the common cultural approach. What has that done for y’all, as community members and as a family that has lost someone?
Tami Schwerin:
It was a huge tragedy. My son Arlo’s brother died suddenly in Boulder, Colorado, from smoking heroin. There’s a long story about how we got to the first Death Faire, but over the past 10 years, it’s become this beautiful thing. In some ways, it comforts me that my son’s death is not a complete loss. That it has really done amazing stuff for people. We’ve seen it. We’ve heard it. People come here from all over the nation.
Death positivity is something that started years and years ago. This community is very death positive. I feel like we can survive these terrible losses that happen from time to time.
Arlo Estill:
I feel like Zafer lives on in the work that you did with Death Faire. The shift in culture around death has been amazing around here. I’m really grateful for Death Faire. It feels like our own kind of celebration, like almost Day of the Dead. It gives permission to people to grieve and embrace death and not just push it down or sweep it under the carpet.
CH:
What does death positivity mean to each of you?
TS:
There’s a kind of a famous author, Caitlin Doughty, and she’s taken death positivity to the next level. For me, I think it’s a much healthier way of dealing with grief. The opposite of it is ignoring death.
It’s a taboo subject. It freaks people out.
AE:
There was one line I heard over the years: wear your death on your shoulder. Think about your death every day. It doesn’t have to be a scary thing, but just acknowledging death and embracing it. You don’t take things for granted when you know that you could die tomorrow, or all your loved ones could just be gone tomorrow. If we really held that close, every time I saw a friend, I would be like, “Wow, I love you so much.” We forget that all this is impermanent. If you really are conscious of death, you hold people a lot closer and are more conscious with how you’re creating your life.
CH:
Death is central to a lot of art. How is death engaged by artists at Death Faire?
TS:
We’ve met all these beautiful artists who have also gone through trauma. The way they are healing is just throwing themselves into creative, amazing, powerful pieces of art. One woman had lost her son. The art she had was just phenomenal, and it was not for sale.
We started an art show, I believe with the first one. It seemed natural. It’s our best show that we have here at the Plant. They’re really beautiful pieces. Some of them are terrifying and awful to look at. But art is meant to be provocative.
AE:
We’ve always done a song that we work on together for Death Faire. We’ve done “Timshel” by Mumford and Sons, “No Hard Feelings” by the Avett Brothers and “Annabel” by the Duhks. That’s such a beautiful, heartbreaking song.
Artists are coming to Death Faire. They share so openly. I know losing Zafer had a big impact on me. I want to sing my music and not be self-conscious of it, partially because I could be gone tomorrow.
TS:
Arlo just wrote a song, “Death is an Ally.” It’s beautiful. That’s incorporated into the documentary.
CH:
Death Faire is one of two subjects of the documentary, as I understand it.
TS:
Carey McKelvey is a filmmaker. He did this really beautiful thing called the Grief Chronicles. He had people just talk about their grief. He had that footage and then he had footage of Death Faire.
We wanted a short video of Death Faire. It got bigger and bigger, and then he had run into someone in Tarboro, a woman who is actively dying, and he coupled these stories together. Brooksie Edwards is my partner with Death Faire. She’s the glue that goes back and forth between these two communities. It’s the story of how these two communities are handling death differently. The title is Changing the Story of Death.
CH:
How do you feel about the song that you have in that?
AE:
I’m excited to go see it premiere at the Lumina. That feels like such a really big step. “Death is an Ally” came from one of my teachers. I don’t know how it came about. I might have come in very anxious and fearful and maybe describing death, and he’s like, “Well, you know, death is an ally.” That was a great line.
It felt like a culmination of sharing all these bits of wisdom, like “wear it on your shoulder” and “it’s right around the corner.” It was kind of just a poem. Then I ended up putting some finger picking to it and my buddy Hunter mixed it for me. I feel grateful for the music scene. Also, this album that Rob (Hamlet) and I just dropped is very grief-centric, or very informed by the loss of Zafer. Rob also has his own story.
CH:
Is that the Purple Snakes record, Burn So Bright?
AE:
Yeah.
CH:
Let’s talk about it.
AE:
One of these songs, the first one on the album, is called “Unexpected Ways.” I wrote it probably a year or two after Zafer passed, and it is one of my favorite, most meaningful songs. There’s even a version on SoundCloud where I can tell my voice is so new and awkward. It’s almost probably eight years late. I’ve played a lot of music since.
This album means so much to me. `The other track, “Burn So Bright,” is about taking people for granted. I didn’t know Zafer was gonna leave, so one of the lines was like “I wish I knew how much it was worth to be right by your side.” I think it’s our best album yet. This is the debut of Hempsmith Records. It’s kind of the start of the studio out here. It’s all fun and games. It’s playful.
CH:
More generally, what’s exciting in the art scene right now? What’s on the horizon?
TS:
I’m personally on a mission to dot the town with art. I get to work with the Town of Pittsboro. We’re in our second year of a sculpture celebration. We’ve got mostly North Carolina artists here, a lot of Chatham, and they bought three pieces last year. We all try to work on how we can get more art downtown. We’ve always been art focused. We’ve got a permanent collection here at The Plant. We just had a lovely dinner to celebrate the artists and the art patrons. We had jazz music. With all the development happening, we’ve got to focus on the aesthetics and the heart and soul of Pittsboro. That means we need lots more art.
AE:
We have the Get Down coming up at The Plant at the end of October. That’s a homemade music festival. That feels like such a cool place for young artists to experience the stage for the first time. We have the open mic, and then the Get Down where you can be on stage, and then we have The Wheelhouse, the new listening room for more intimate shows, and then the studio is gonna plug in. It does feel like we’re attracting all this really cool talent.
TS:
I want to give a big shout out to my partner Lyle Estill, Arlo’s dad. He’s a metal artist, but really, his art is in scene. He loves to look at a scene and how he can sculpt it. He’s been sculpting The Plant for 20 years, and he’s starting to work with the town of Pittsboro on this 72-acre park next door by reducing the invasives and making sure the trees are gonna shine. What would he be called? I mean, he’s like a community sculptor. It’s pretty incredible.
AE:
We have quite the food scene, sustainable ag scene, coming along as well. It is critical to the community and the culture that we’re building here.
TS:
Food is art. And then we are developing kind of an arts district in the back. We just brought in a loom for textile art, and our goal is to turn Building Two into a maker space. We’re putting artist spaces next. I think the art is just going to go up and up and up over the rest of our history here.
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