Category Archives: Essays

Falling in love with Pottery: Wedging, Rolling and No Ghosting

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“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” –Julia Cameron

People, I have fallen hard for pottery. I suppose this shouldn’t be a huge surprise given the collection of bowls, plates, and sauce dishes gracing my cupboards. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron says that when searching for a creative home, one should pay attention to the sideline where she’s sitting. My sidelines involved gallery windows, peeking in at the works of electric, raku, and soda kilns. After years of turning the idea in my mind, I signed up for a pottery class in January and have since felt like I’m fifteen all over again. I’m thinking about it as I fall asleep at night. I’m stalking it on the internet. I want to know every little thing about it. Finding a new art is like falling in love again. I can’t get enough.

When I took my first class earlier in the year, I thought wheel throwing was where the magic happened. After all, if we’ve learned anything from Ghost it’s that wheel throwing is the sexy poster child for pottery. Being able to make casserole dishes and garlic keepers may not be what most people file under the “hot” column. However, when Demi and Patrick got together on the wheel, clay was foreplay.

I should let you know, now that I’ve mentioned it, the first rule of pottery (a la Fight Club). The first rule of pottery is never mention Ghost. No cracks about Whoopie Goldberg should be uttered. No melodies – chained or otherwise – should be hummed. Apparently some potters even have little signs posted in their studios warning that any mentions of the 1990 classic are verboten. This is, of course, quite difficult. It’s like singing Mandy the first time you meet a girl named Mandy, asking a tall person how the weather is up there, or making a Mr. Clean joke to a bald guy. Yes, they’ve heard that joke a thousand times before. Stale, sure, but somehow the jokes can be downright irresistible.

I don’t always have the best luck fighting these urges, and so fortuitously while wheel throwing has been challenging and interesting, that’s not where I’ve found the spark. It’s come as a surprise to me that hand building is where my creativity comes to life. There’s nothing quite like getting into a zone and seeing what happens next. After rolling slabs of clay, I can fold, meld, slip and score. I see what the clay wants to do, how it wants to be molded and moved. Working with it is part art and part architecture. Building walls and a base, smoothing the sides and giving definition has an order to it while still being a fluid kind of meditation.

After the clay has dried, pottery becomes parenting. You do what you can and then you have to let go. Despite your best laid plans, there may be cracks in the kiln. The glaze may be totally different than you’d envisioned. Sometimes everything comes together in a cosmically wonderful way and sometimes it’s hideous. To a certain degree, you don’t know what you’re going to get.  It’s a surprise every time.

You’ll be seeing me more regularly again for the next few weeks since I’ll be back in the kitchen dirtying dishes instead of making them while I wait for my next pottery session to begin. I’ll be thinking about you, Pottery… Oh, and just one more teensy little thing…

 

A Month Without Coffee

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Do you know those scenes from a movie, in which a person who has only recently given up cigarettes asks a smoker to blow smoke in her face?  That’s the way that I felt today going to a coffee shop with my husband.  He was getting an afternoon jolt, and I was trying to get a contact high, breathing in the smells of brewing coffee in the air – the deep roasted aroma, the rich and satisfying smells…  After a month without coffee, I needed a secondhand sniff.

Giving up coffee was something I never thought I’d do.  I loved everything about it – the sound of the beans grinding, the smells emanating from the kitchen while it brewed, the warm feeling of the mug in my hands, and the taste of those first heavenly sips.  Better than all of that was the feeling that it gave me – as if I were being catapulted into the day.  I went from groggy and heavy to levitating off the kitchen floor, dancing and singing in a matter of 20 minutes.  (I’m glad that coffee drinking Cadry wasn’t with me on those first few days without caffeine, I don’t think I could have tolerated her enthusiasm.  Of course, if I’ve learned anything from Dr. Who, I know that having both of us there would have caused some kind of time rift in the continuum, but that’s neither here nor there.)

With a lift from coffee in the morning, I was a professional skier sliding up and over a ramp – nothing but wind in my face and a feeling I could get it all done in no time at all.  Despite this devotion, I’d kept my intake on the lower end.  I’d have a mug and a half in the morning.  In the afternoons, I’d often have a cup of caffeinated tea.  Maybe once a week I’d pick up coffee at a coffee shop.  I stopped drinking caffeine by three or four.  I never drank soda.

It wasn’t always that way.  In my life I hardly remember a time when I wasn’t taking in caffeine.  As a kid I was a fan of bubbly cola.  As a teenager I drank 5 or 6 cans a day.  By the time I got to college, I’d wake up with soda and fall asleep with soda.  Once I was out in the working world, I’d noticed a creep in my pant size and moved to diet soda instead.  I drank that for a year or so, and then decided to drop it because of the aspartame.  At that point, I said goodbye to soda and hello to coffee.  So why give it up now?

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Nooch – A Supplement By Any Other Name…

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You know how everyone feels bad for celebrity kids getting names like Pilot, Apple, Blanket, Diva Thin Muffin, and Pebbles?  (What?  That was only on the Flintstones?  Well, forget about that last one then.)  Well, there is one naming situation that is possibly worse.  That unfortunate award goes to Nutritional Yeast Flakes.  (For those not in the know, nutritional yeast is a supplement that’s high in B-vitamins and made from deactivated yeast.  It has a delicious cheesy flavor that’s great on popcorn and adds a savory depth to gravies and sauces.  Many vegans and cats are addicted to the stuff.)  Admittedly, there are only three things wrong with the name – Nutritional, Yeast, and Flakes.  Let’s look at them each one at a time.

First off, no one wants to eat something whose first and most notable title is “Nutritional.”  This is a descriptor that is never used as a compliment.  “Mmm, those oat groats look awfully nutritional.  Give me another helping!”  Instead people conjure up the smells of their parents downing Geritol or that unhappy sight when a spoonful of cough syrup was heading mouthward.

Next up, Yeast.  I don’t want to be indelicate here, but when people hear yeast, they think bread… and infections.  Nutritional yeast flakes aren’t generally going into loaves of bread, and so that leaves only infections.  Ask someone if you’d like to top their spaghetti or popcorn in yeast and expect strange looks at best, sudden dinner cancellations at worst.

Finally, Flakes.  Okay, there are snowflakes, which to some people could be a positive thing, but with yeast flakes being yellow, I don’t know that it’s a huge selling point.  No, the major thing we think of with the term flakes is dandruff.  It puts one to the mind of cheesy (okay, kind of appropriate) commercials from the 1980’s that were sandwiched between ads about ring around the collar and Calgon, take me away.  These commercials involved colorful sweaters and concerns over how to shampoo your scalp back to health.

So where does that leave us?  Geritol Infection Dandruff.  These are not selling points.  What’s a nutritional yeast-loving person to do?  Well, lots of people re-name it “nooch”, and I’ve gone that route a time or two.  It’s cute.  It sounds pleasant enough.  But you know what the problem is?  Eventually you’re going to mention nooch to someone who isn’t vegan or vegan-curious, and they’re going to say, “What’s nooch?”  And then you’re left saying, “Nutritional Yeast Flakes,” which means zero to them, and which takes you back to the first problem and that is that nutritional yeast flakes is a terrible name for something so incredibly delicious.

If you’re anything like me, maybe you’ve tried to skirt the issue by describing its origins instead.  Friends, if there’s one thing worse than calling it Nutritional Yeast Flakes, it’s describing its origins.  “It’s this non-active yeast that grows on molasses.”  Can I tell you how wholly unappealing that sounds?  Non-active yeast growing on molasses?  It’s still past what most people can imagine in terms of their own ideas of, say, farming, and it doesn’t do anything to help the case for our friend, nooch.

I’d say we have two choices.  Here’s the first; find an agreeable nickname that is liked by all parties.  I’d like to throw the following options into the hat:

Could I offer you some Cheesy Sprinkles for your popcorn?

1.  Cheesy Sprinkles – What’s the first thing people tell you when you say you’re vegan?  Right, that they don’t eat much meat.  And second?  That they could never give up cheese.  (Occasionally, the order is reversed.)  So we know that people like cheese and cheesy (especially if Mr. T is involved).  And sprinkles remind people of cakes and cookies and birthdays, and those are very pleasurable things, indeed.

2.  Droplets of Sunshine – We have sunshine, which let’s all agree, is awesome.  Then we have droplets, which are reminiscent of a spring rain and daffodils and skipping in puddles– again good things.

3.  Popcorn Topping – It’s not the most flowery name ever, but it’s quick and to the point, and I don’t think people will question it too much.  (If you’ve read the ingredients in conventional popcorn topping, you’ll likely agree.)  “Hey, do you want some popcorn topping?”  This sounds innocuous enough.

Outside of heavy renaming, I’d say our other option is to just give it to those who don’t question the name.  To them, it doesn’t need a name at all.  All they need to know is that it’s the addictive stuff in the stoneware jar that’s delivered by spoon to their kitty treat plate.  Who needs words when an insistent meow will bring you this?

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