AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Every week, a guest draws a card from NPR's Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Nick Offerman is best known for his acting, including the role of Ron Swanson in "Parks And Recreation." But he's also a woodworker and an author, and his latest book is "Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop's Guide To Tools And Tomfoolery." He talked to host Rachel Martin on Wild Card about his childhood in Minooka, Illinois.
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RACHEL MARTIN: What's a place that shaped you just as much as any person did?
NICK OFFERMAN: The workshop end of the shed at Uncle Dan's farm. My mom's whole family are still farming corn and soybeans. And Uncle Dan sort of became the de facto big farmer. That was his CB handle - big farmer.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
OFFERMAN: And at his house was the enormous shed that housed a lot of the tractors and combines and farm equipment.
MARTIN: Yeah.
OFFERMAN: And at one end of it was the - just called the shop. And the shop is where all of the tools lived, and it's where they were able to fix anything. There was a very Han Solo and Chewbacca feeling to the shed because you never paid anybody to fix anything, and you never bought a new part if you could help it.
MARTIN: No, that's right.
OFFERMAN: Uncle Dan and his younger brother, Uncle Don, would fashion new parts out of coffee cans, and, like, they were just incredible MacGyvers. And so I just saw the way that we could affect the world around us with tools and ingenuity, and how that was much cheaper than going to the mall but also sometimes more frustrating.
MARTIN: My family are farmers - wheat and barley from Idaho. And my grandpa made all his tools as well - not all. But to this day, we still have - my sister has them in her house. He made these, like, medieval spears, just for the hell of it. Like, he could make things. He used things to make things. He was a potato farmer. He made, like, the potato sorter. But the fact that he could - he would make these tools as art, too, was, like, this...
OFFERMAN: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Different way that he elevated his craft.
OFFERMAN: I love that about human ingenuity. You know, I was making a canoe paddle one time, and I really enjoy taking a rectilinear piece of wood and shaping it down to a canoe paddle. And you can start to feel the use in the paddle as it takes...
MARTIN: You're right (ph).
OFFERMAN: You're like, oh, wow, I can feel how this is going to work...
MARTIN: Yeah.
OFFERMAN: ...So efficaciously. And so I started making a series of wooden - the first one I made is a felling axe out of a plank of mahogany. So the head and the shaft are all just one piece of mahogany.
MARTIN: One piece? Wow.
OFFERMAN: And I love this thing. I love to just hold it and feel this - it's a sculpture, basically. And I love that about human creativity, yeah, that we say - I mean, when I was building decks and cabins in people's yards in Los Angeles, I - similarly, I said, oh, wait a second. I could make a dining room table. If I can put this gazebo up, if I just change a few things around, I could rest my beer on it and my barbecue.
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CHANG: And you can watch a longer conversation with Nick Offerman by searching for Wild Card with Rachel Martin on YouTube. Offerman's latest book, "Little Woodchucks," is out now.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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