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| Like Beans and Rice by Alan Steinberg |
I am not someone who writes.” That
was a
lie I told myself for more than twenty-five
years, the visible scar of a wound inflicted
by a fierce college poetry professor intent on
defending the gates of academic professional
excellence. My long history of weekly bicycle
trips to and from the local library with baskets
of books came to a crashing halt. In the
ensuing decades I neither read nor wrote
for pleasure, especially poetry. The pen was
mighty enough merely to pay the bills. |
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Turtles, Stumps, and Lumps of Clay by Fred
Taylor |
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In the garden behind my house is a slight
rise in the ground, a reddishbrown mound where a mass of
terracotta clay has slowly
melted back into the earth. Once it was a sculpture of an “ancestor
stump” that I brought home from the first Clay and
Writing workshop that Alan Steinberg and I led together. |
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The workshop began with a brief round of introductions after which the participants donned blindoflds and lined up single-file. With right hands on the shoulder of the person in front of them, off they trudged on a silent, imaginary, yet viscerally felt, hourney though the darkening forest. Upon returning, they sat down still blindfolded, and listened to the Greek tale of Theseus, who desended into the Cretan La byrinth to meet the minotaur...
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Comment Who Are You? by Alan Steinberg
Who are you?” the director asked. The way he’d said it, I knew he meant, “Who the hell are you? We only hire famous people.”
Why did I think his organization should sponsor my clay workshop, and what made me think anyone would sign up?
It was clear what would convince him I was worthy of his time. He didn’t want to hear the story of the time just before a nine-day craft fair when I opened the kiln and found that 75% of the pots had melted into a barely recognizable mass, leaving me with inadequate stock for the show. The supplier had mistakenly thrown a bag of talc into my custom-mixed clay. The lesson learned was always to test a sample from each new batch of clay before committing myself to two months worth of production.
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© 2007 Brattleboro Clayworks
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