Person

“I never had a business dream,” admitted Dave Kapell, founder of Minneapolis-based Magnetic Poetry Inc. “I aspired to be a starving artist.”

In 1993, he was a thirty-year-old musician struggling to write song lyrics in his living room. He picked up a newspaper. He picked up a pair of scissors. He picked up adhesive, magnetic tape, and a pie tin. In the space of an afternoon, he had created Magnetic Poetry, which would, within three years, earn something like six million dollars. “The thing that happens when people see words bump up against each other; it takes their brains to a completely weird place they never would have gone.”

Kapell’s brain has no problem going to completely weird places. His office in Northeast Minneapolis looks like a cross between an artist’s studio and a toy store, and it suits him perfectly. Hardwood floors sparkle beneath warehouse walls alternately painted bright yellow and sea-foam green. Directly across from the front door, huge black-and-white magnets spell out things like “ask / his / behind / for / sizzle / time,” “long days / are not blue,” and “my music plays / a sad & sweet / symphony of life.”

Perched on the edge of his desk-chair, Kapell gestured toward his shiny red violin. “I took my first violin lesson on 9/11. What a bizarre day that was. My teacher was this elderly woman who was sort of rigid in her ways, you know. And I walked in and had to convince her to turn on the TV.”

He pulled a ukulele out from behind a potted plant. “Music started for me with my mom. She used to do tours to Hawaii back in the fifties—it had just become a state—and she’d wear this grass skirt and teach people ukulele songs. She taught them to me when I was really young; the ukulele’s great for small hands.”

These days, Kapell’s hands are busy building featherweight canoes. “I wanted to build a fiddle,” he explained. But after outfitting his “creative lab” with woodworking tools, Kapell decided to begin with something simpler. “It’s a similar process … you build molds, and stretch the wood over the mold.”

After one canoe, Kapell was hooked. He built one for his wife. He built one for his son. And then he built another so his son could bring a friend. Kapell’s single-person canoes look like topless mahogany kayaks. On one, a small wooden block attached to the bottom houses a unique Kapell accessory: a cello string. “You’re in the middle of a lake, and you pull it taut and pluck it, or use a bow … it vibrates the whole boat.”—Julie Bates