During my trip west, I gave a lot of star-gazing and wide-sky thought to what I want the shape of the rest of my life to look like. I’ve now passed the halfway point and I feel as if I’ve been trying too hard for too long to be The Author and not simply just ME. So I’m going to include some of my other interests on my website, because, you know, that’s who I AM, yo? I mean, I don’t have anything to prove and my last two novels have yet to get picked up, and I just can’t make my world all about the writing anymore. Not if I want to live a happy life. Don’t get me wrong, I will still write. I love to write. But I’m going to make it about the joy of the work and not try so hard to self-promote as someone I think the world wants to see. Instead, as I said, I’ll just be me. And a big part of me, ever since I had my first good earthy whiff of clay in my twenties, enjoys pottery. Specifically functional pottery. There’s something about the communion between the hand of the potter and the hand of the user that really speaks to me. It’s similar to the communion I feel between writer and reader. I write to commune with the world of readers and I create usable clay art to commune with the world—one coffee drinker and soup eater at a time. And now that I’m an empty-nester, I’m getting back into this first love of mine and thoroughly enjoying it. This week, I’ve been thinking about bowls and their many “attitudes.” I tend to anthropomorphize pots and bowls are no exception. A bowl can be wide open at the top, and all about showing you its inside. Or a bowl can curve inward, be more secretive and/or protective of its contents. A bowl can have my favorite kind of attitude: a little bit of both, with a lovely open rim, but also a curved belly that holds its secrets until you take the time look inside. I’m working with earthenware now, and I’ve recently been wanting to experiment with more pre-glazing decorative options. I like slips, but only seriously painted with them in college when I worked as a potter at Historic Jamestown Island making reproduction white stoneware with a heavy Italian-style painting done wet, on freshly-thrown pots for the public’s enjoyment and for piece-work pay. I’ve always been intrigued by slip trailing, though. For those who don’t know, slip trailing is a little bit like cake decorating or...
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