Meet Trapper Haskins | Musician, Writer, Woodworker

We had the good fortune of connecting with Trapper Haskins and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Trapper, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
I don’t know that I ever had any real designs on business ownership at the start. I just knew every job I’d had as an employee was utterly unfulfilling. My intentions were only to find a way to be free of someone else dictating my schedule. Now, as a woodworker, a musician, and a writer, my schedule can be overwhelmingly full. But I get to determine it.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
More than twenty years after leaving the boatshop and returning to the South I’m still doing woodwork, though these days I’m focused on finish carpentry and furniture. My work in the woodshop also bleeds over into my music career; many of the instruments I play on stage are ones I’ve made, electric and acoustic guitars. The writing I do is also influenced by my time in the boatshop. I am currently writing a book about a journey my wife and I took down the Mississippi River in a wooden rowboat I built back in my Maine days. So, all three of my pursuits–writing, music, and woodwork–are kind of bound up together. They inform each other.

The difficulty is trying to balance the three, both financially and around my family’s schedule. But, as I’ve said, at least I’m the one making the schedule.


Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I cut my teeth on woodworking more than twenty years ago at a place called The Apprenticeshop up in Maine. It’s a boatbuilding school, but it’s not a school in the popular sense. The A’Shop gives its students an opportunity to learn the craft of traditional wooden boatbuilding. The thing is, faced with a set of plans and a stack of rough sawn lumber, you quickly learn as much about yourself as you do the geometry of boats. The Apprenticeshop taught me a trade. But it also provided me with a feeling of empowerment, a grasp of my own capabilities, the transformative power of work.

Website: TrapperHaskins.com

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Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9k2YZPfh9VafFfplK-M9Ag