This Month at Green River Pottery: New Year's 2009-10
| Writing about clay is easy. Writing fiction is harder—for me—but here’s an excerpt from a story I did this year about a man taking his dog for a walk at the end of a winter day. The story is about work, and winter, and (of course!) it’s about clay. |
…nothing but darkening sky in all directions, once I get to the ridge: the mountains like a grainy photograph in the last of the light, their snowy tops gray against the fading sky, shadows rising from the contours of the badlands that stretch for miles below them, fins of sandy earth shaped by water, spires capped by rocks that were set there by a receding ocean in some other geologic age.
I keep walking with the ragged cliffs below me, their water-worn rocks packed in with the loose clay and sand, sometimes after a heavy snow or rain I stop, just stand still up here for a while, listening, and if I’m lucky I hear a piece of something loosen and fall. A clump of dirt, a boulder. I always wonder how long it was up there, stuck in its crumbling cliff, before breaking loose—a million years? A thousand? Or maybe just fifty. Hard to know.
I dig my hands in my pockets. The first stars appear, the real night cold coming on. Back at the house the rice will be puffed up and pungent and that is a good smell. There’s nothing like the smell of rice at the end of the day. The dogs will be tired out and quiet. For the moment they have disappeared, chasing something, and left alone I think about work. I flex my fingers, dig a thumb into the other palm, my hands tired from the clay, skin dry from it, clay still under my fingernails, my shoulder tight from the wheel. Is anything from today any good? I wonder. And when will the kiln be filled? Not by Friday. I thought for sure Friday at the latest. For a second, as I walk, it crosses my mind that it’s all a waste—that I might simply be pouring my efforts into the great earth itself instead of the other way around, the earth reaching to help me—that I might be so wide of the mark in my effort to make something beautiful, something good, that it’s hopeless. Could I possibly succeed? Someday?
The dogs race back along the path toward me, exhilarated despite not catching whatever it was they were after. Probably a rabbit. Ah, there’s nothing worse than thinking about work once I’ve left the studio. Plus, I remind myself, tonight before bed I’ll sneak back out there as I always do and when I lift the plastic off the pieces I threw one or two of them will be different than I remember, one or two will be good, maybe one will be really good and seem to be a thing in itself, to have a spirit of its own—something more than what I gave it—I’ll feel a thrill, then, a tingle of redemption, and will consider just staying there and working through the night as I used to do so often when I was first starting out.
