Confidence

When I was just starting out in clay I was fortunate to have a counselor, a guide. Like any good guide, she herself had no idea where I was heading or how I would get there. She had instinct. And confidence. Somebody needed to play the role for me, she was willing. Her kitchen was stacked with whiteware from Target, she didn't know stoneware from earthenware. Still. I trusted her. Like any good adventurer, I had to follow someone. I needed a plan. A lot of times – artists don't like to admit this – you follow anyone you can find.

Here's an example. Once I had succeeded in building a kiln and had acquired a few other pieces of studio equipment people would call. Can you fire these pieces for me, do you have a wheel I can borrow? My response usually was suspicious. Hmm, I'd say. Maybe.

My counselor rolled her eyes. Don’t say maybe, she said. Say yes. Help people. Not everybody is lucky like you, to have their own kiln that fires, what is it again, stoneware? You need to be glad. You have to believe in your own fortune, she said. You have to be generous.

Years went by. I tried to say yes – I tried to help. Another kind of call I'd get would be from someone with the opposite question. Hello? I'm looking for someone who can take these things, they'd say. My partner used to have a clay studio? She was really quite successful. Now…we need to just find someone who can use her old wedging table, and, that magazine, Ceramics Monthly? She had a complete set, from nineteen seventy-eight up until just last year. Here is her book collection. You would be welcome to this too.

As someone with a little experience in this, I knew. You can’t just discard these well-loved things — they need to go somewhere, and find a new life. Sure, I would say. Our studio will be very grateful, and it was true — we would be. We are. Any creative space, a clay studio, a garden shed, a piano bench, is a collection of necessary tools and supplies, some of which you put there intentionally and some of which just ended up there, were given to you. Often it's the latter category that are most significant. It's the things you didn't know you'd need on your adventure that prove most useful when you reach some impasse. A glaze that flakes off the pots before they get to the kiln – what is the solution for that problem? I ransack through The Potter’s Dictionary of Materials and Techniques, a book I never would have bought for myself, looking for an answer. Calcined kaolin! Of course. That makes sense. Wait...don't I have a bag of that somewhere?

Recently I've been getting another kind of call.

Or email. I'm giving away my late husband's pottery wheel to a passionate potter,student or teacher, it starts out. Hmm, I think. Oh! After all those times I've accepted used books and bags of feldspar and studio equipment just to be generous, now maybe I'm getting my reward. What's not to like, here? Thank you so much for your email and for finding our studio, I start off eagerly, in response.

The sender then sends pictures of a potter's wheel sitting on a vinyl wood floor in the doorway of what looks like a little apartment. The wheel is very clean, and the closeups show the word Brent without letting you see the control panel or the serial number. She'd be happy to drop the wheel by sometime, the email sender says after a couple more exchanges. I give my address, on Lena Street.

Is that Lena Illinois? She says.

Santa Fe, actually, I say in my next email.

I think we have a distance problem – I'm in El Paso. Though I'm leaving for ND in two days, I'm booked for surgery.

I am disappointed instead of suspicious. I'm sure you'll be able to find someone in your area who can accept your donation. Have a good Thanksgiving, I say, and pack my suitcase for California, a little holiday.

This was last year. To my surprise, a few days later, another email. Good news, it said – my daughter in Law who works with the freight said they can deliver to you. What is your receiving address? Without thinking this through, I respond dutifully, and then receive an estimate. $301 for two-day shipping, or $700 for 'express'. Which option do you wish to go with the two business days option is cheaper I think you go for that but let me know your thoughts.

It took me getting all the way here before I got suspicious. Actually, it wasn't even me getting suspicious. This was two days after Thanksgiving now, last year, 2024, I was in a motel room with my partner, dutifully doing emails before we set out for a beach walk in Mendocino. That sounds like a scam, she said airily, from across the room, pulling on a windbreaker. It was clear, and breezy – cool though, November, on that rocky coast. We were both eager to get out to those crashing waves, see that blue water, look to the horizon. Uhh, I said, crestfallen, not just about not getting the free Brent potter’s wheel, also about not even being able to see I was being scammed. Gee that's right. You're totally right.

I haven't heard from you for a few days, the same emailer said, a week later. I was back in Santa Fe by then, back to work, and before long someone else at the studio, a hard-working intern eager to set up her own workspace, also got lead into the scam. The Brent Wheel Scam. The same windfall offer of a free potter's wheel, I’ll drop it by for you, then the same disappointment that it’s just a confidence game.

Over the last twelve months I've gotten the email several more times, and so have others at the studio. Greetings I’m giving away my late husband’s Brent CXC pottery wheel to a passionate potter,student teacher or family if know whom may have a great need for this equipment do please forward my email to them. Of course now, as I read this, I see immediately it's a scam. The sentence is kind of a word scramble. The email always seems to have that missing space between potter,student. The photos they send usually include that same one, the cleaned-up wheel in the doorway on the fake wood flooring. And what potter says pottery wheel? Usually you say potter's wheel. As always, I guess, the game depends on the person being conned kind of wanting to believe, as I did, and as my intern did. A free wheel? Of course!

I was running one morning with my neighbor this fall, Thanksgiving approaching again, the air cooling though we both were still wearing shorts, running the ridge behind our houses that leads into the sandy badlands, the jumble of arroyos & juniper under the great clear sky. I was telling him about the Brent Wheel Scam, and expressing my irritation, my resentment, of the whole thing. Why potters? I asked him. Why try to con a humble potter out of three hundred and one dollars?

Good question, he said. We kept running. It was Sunday, a day when I usually try to slow down. Running barely faster than walking.

Most potters don't have a lot of extra money, I continued. Why don't they target someone rich? Most potters are kind of idealistic outsiders, trying to figure things out on their own, just trying to make it all work.

Well there's your answer right there, said my neighbor, as we shuffled along the crumbly trail, the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos in the distance. They'd just received their first dusting of snow. They're idealistic. They're the perfect target.

Ugh, I said. It totally makes me mad.

Back home I took off my running shoes & returned to the studio. I thought of my guide again, my consultant from when I was starting out. I remembered meeting with her once, a time when I had a long list of complaints. You decide to be a potter, and of course it’s pretty hard at first. Starting a studio, trying to make it all work, loosing pieces to a bad firing in a kiln you built yourself, paying a lot of money to go to a show & not selling anything, lining up child care and then having the person not show up, trying to fix the roof. Of the house. Back at the beginning I lived in a house with a very leaky roof. I was beleaguered, I vented, I certainly was not feeling glad. Or generous. In fact I was short on money.

Money, my guide repeated, and gave me an incisive look. You know if you were working harder in your studio none of these things would be bothering you so much.

Years later I still always think of that, her slightly cold tough advice. There are always distractions, scams, things you can get mad about, ways that things are unfair. Confidence, she was saying. Believe in what you're doing, concentrate on the actual pots you're making. You need a cold streak, it turns out, a kind of cultivated artistic obliviousness, to rise above the cons and Brent Wheel Scams that appear in your inbox all the time.

Nothing like a walk on the windy beach, or a run through the sandy badlands, or just the discovery of some book someone donated & you didn’t know you even had, to help remember to be generous and glad.

Thanksgiving, of course — it’s here again. Now is the right time for this reminder.

— Theo Helmstadter
November 2025