This Writer Was Not Meant To Become A Ceramicist
One of the ways my parents were able to send me to a Catholic high school was through a work-study scholarship. This meant that the school assigned me odd jobs in between my classes. My first job involved pumping liquid nacho cheese into portion cups for fellow students waiting in the lunch line. The job I loved most was cleaning the art rooms after school.
I felt, even in that repressed, repressive school with anti-abortion posters in the stairwells and a crucifix above every classroom’s door, that the art wing was a place of immense possibility. Often, there was another work-study student assigned to share duties or my best friend Julia would come along to hang out, but sometimes, I got to be by myself in the art rooms. Putting a CD on, wiping dust off of the tables, sweeping the floor, and checking out other students’ works-in-progress, I felt like a cool girl in a real artist’s studio. I fantasized it was my artist’s studio.
I was eventually able to participate in a ceramics class as an elective, but I could tell that the teacher, Mrs. Reiderer, didn’t think I had talent. She wasn’t mean to me or anything like that, but I didn’t feel particularly encouraged. And, perhaps I was innately aware of the low quality of my work. I made a decorative bowl composed of slabs of clay cut into crude hearts. I made pinch-pots that were neither attractive nor functional. I slobbed on glaze in clashing colors. I didn’t take care with materials in the way a visual artist needs to. I tried to mass-produce. I didn’t think through my designs.
Though I wasn’t able to articulate it yet in high school, there was already a part of me that knew I wanted to spend my life as an artist. I hadn’t found my medium. I hadn’t fallen in love. But I was able to say, to myself and others, that I liked being around art and I liked being around artists, or at least the people whom I thought were artists. On the weekends, I’d ask my mom to drop me off or I’d take the bus to a yellow Victorian house converted into a coffee shop called Rochambo. I would buy a cup of black coffee (No sugar! No cream!), stare out the second-story window, and observe all the freaks I loved on Brady Street (this was when all the freaks were still there, before the bro bars moved in). Art equalled counterculture, a place where I could be myself. I just wasn’t sure where in the mosaic I fit. What was my contribution?
I spent a decade working on becoming a poet. As I enter the next ten years of my writing career, I’m recalibrating. I no longer feel like I’m only a poet. I’m writing micro-memoir and essays like this one. I’ve jumped into the pool of fiction.
As a poet, I wasn’t drawn to the craft and melody of the words first; I was drawn to the politics. I chose this path because the proximity of politics to words was evident from the beginning. With clay, or drawing, or even music, my novice inability in terms of craft got in the way of saying something. The assignments my ceramics teacher gave me, creating a large door key or a pair of dice out of clay, seemed too insignificant to bother with. Making a statement is what I desperately wanted to do. And, for me, a political statement was easiest to do with words.
In the first creative writing class I took in college, we were writing about Oscar Grant’s recent murder and surviving sexual abuse and gentrification and Greek mythology and global warming and growing up as a boy in the South and pagan spirituality. We had things to say, and I felt our collective urgency with fervor. Craft came later, the delivery mode.
In ceramics, there are a few basic methods of hand-building. Pinch pot, slab work, coils. I’m not saying that anyone who begins a ceramics or writing class and doesn’t feel like they have talent should just pack up and go home (quite the opposite, actually). I’m also not saying that my entry into writing was easier, or that it’s easy now. Intuitively, it just felt more like home. In the creative writing classroom, I felt the same way I felt at Rochambo or walking around a library, like I was in a clubhouse of artists where I belonged.
I’ve never felt, since then, that creative writing was something I was not supposed to do, but what is true is that the longer I write, the more I feel like I am a beginner. Right now, I’m working on an extended piece of writing in a new-to-me mode, a new genre. It feels like I’m trying to create something out of clay for the first time in fifteen years, like I don’t have the skills to pursue or even formulate a precise creative goal. I’m just rolling out slabs on the edge of the table, creating uneven coils, pushing clay around, so to speak. My technical skill does not match my vision, or maybe I am not even quite sure what my vision for this writing project is.
But, the difference this time is that I have enough experience to have a bit of faith in the process. I still want to achieve political aims and say something, but I realize that message doesn’t necessarily need to come before craft. I feel able to play the long-game because of the great gift of working in multiple genres at once, on multiple writing projects. So, I can say what I need to say in one writing genre while I’m learning basic skills of another.
It feels good not just to be the one wiping the art tables, but to also be the one at work in the studio. My mom has kept those pinch-pots in her attic, and I will probably never throw them away, either. I still drink black coffee every morning.
