Lately, I’ve been trying to revise a book. And make some new pots.
I’ve been making pots for over twenty-five years, since I was a child. It’s something I did long before I wrote prose, or thought of myself as a writer. Ceramics is a great place to go to blot out your thoughts. It’s just you and the wheel, chasing perfect cups. I’m terrible at handbuilding: I am just learning, now, after many years, in part because I was simply promoted into the throwing classes in high school and college, and also because I had some not-so-great teachers in the past. But throwing always made intuitive sense. I want to make perfect cups, lighter in the hand than you assume they’ll be. Cups so thin they’re translucent, feel crisp and cold in your hand. Cups whose curve inside matches the curve outside the cup, with perfectly balanced handles. This part—the curve—is important: It tells you that the cup is the same thickness all the way through. It affects how the liquid pours, how much it insulates your coffee or tea. You can see the curve when you break the work in pieces, study the edges. The cup could be right, if only I had trimmed it differently.
In ceramics, for the most part, revision is more iterative compared with writing. I make a thing, and then I make a new thing that somewhat resembles the old thing. It’s not possible to alter the original, in most cases: The clay body I use, a thixotropic porcelain—like ketchup if you look at it the wrong way, or overwork it, or add too much water—is far too fragile to accept edits. Instead, I end up repeating the process, over and over again, with slightly differing results. Lately, I’ve been making lots of translucent cups. The translucency doesn’t show up in unfired clay; you have to operate by feel instead, the weight of the cup in your hand, raw clay, the hope that it will become translucent with time and heat. The kiln offers so much in the way of variability; potters talk about praying to the kiln gods, and I get this: An air bubble, or a pot heated too quickly, or a thin pot that’s too thin, or uneven thickness throughout—a heavy foot on the bottom of the pot, a little circle of clay that elevates the work—could ruin everything. I have a little test kiln in my basement, run on a dishwasher circuit. It’s about the size of a microwave, inside, except that it will get to 2300 degrees Fahrenheit if you program it for that. It will fit six cups, or a handful of test tiles, and can reach temperature in four to seven hours, depending on the program I’ve selected. It is programmable, unlike my old kiln, which relied on ceramic cones to let me know when it’d gotten to temperature. I try to fire things slow, to make the work less likely to explode, but even that’s not a guarantee.
Sometimes I take classes at the community college, to have access to bigger or different types of kilns, like the gas updraft, or raku, or the large electric kilns, but mostly I just fire at home these days, especially because I fire my pots just once, applying glaze to bare clay, and I want to have control over the entire process. Almost everyone else I know fires twice, or more: once at one temperature, the bisque fire, then a second time with glaze, typically at a higher temperature, unless you’re making earthenware, a low-fire clay body. When making pots at the community college, with work I don’t quite love, I have a tendency to throw things back into the kiln, over and over again. It’s not an uncommon practice, another way of revising. I have a teacher who has fired a cup dozens of times, hoping to chase a certain kind of chemical reaction in the glaze pattern that has—so far—eluded him. Because I work in porcelain, the second firing—the glaze firing—is much hotter than the first. But if you just fire once, it’s one climb to that hotter temperature. You get instant results. It’s great. It uses less energy. But there is so much more room for error.