The sticky middle

Glazing thoughts & technical questions

Okay, this is a ceramics post. Mostly. It’s also probably a writing post. I’m a bit feral. Bear with me.

Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion on the clayart listserv about EPK, or Edgar Plastic Kaolin. It’s a type of kaolin (often called China clay) mined at Edgar Minerals in Florida. Kaolin is hydrated alumina silicate, a component of many clays and glazes (and things like toothpaste—though EPK in particular is typically used for ceramics). The initial concern was that the mine might close altogether. The latest news is that there have been delays surrounding the delivery of EPK as a result of storms and supply chain issues in Florida. So there might be a shortage, but we’ve been promised it’s temporary. That hasn’t stopped the clayart listserv from talking about the alternatives at length and scouting out where to order in the meantime, to ride out the shortage. We’re used to this—chemicals keep rotating in and out of circulation depending on what’s available. Mines open and close all the time. I have some EPK in the basement, but not a ton, so I’m going to have to be thoughtful about how I use it, unless I can find more for a reasonable price.

among my oldest mugs, thrown and altered, gas fired to cone 10, reduction. This yellow salt glaze requires EPK, but other substitutions are easily made. Image by MK Rogers, who you should follow on Instagram.

The clayart listserv is full of potters who are in their sixties or beyond, old school ceramists who learned how to make things from other things. People used to working with raw materials, who can make and fix their own kilns. There is a huge wealth of information available for free on this listserv. You can ask a question and have it answered by Ron Roy, for example, the guy who popularized midfire glazes. A lot of the glazes available today at midfire studios are directly related to Mr. Roy’s work. For many years the expectation was that you needed to get a gas kiln and fire at a high, reduction atmosphere temperature in order to get complex colors. Now many of those colors are accessible to home potters with electric kilns at cone 6 (2200F).

I may be the only person under 40 on this listserv. I don’t know how old everyone else is, but the most frequent commentators are all the old guard, folks who have been sending each other emails about nepheline syenite or grolleg chemical content since the mid-nineties. We’re rock nerds, okay?

There is no gatekeeping on this site, or really among potters in general. If you see a piece and ask how it was made, whoever made it will happily walk you through, step by step, with videos and photos, if necessary. If I message a potter on Instagram and say, “hey, tell me about that carbide tool you use, did you make that, or is it commercially available?” they will send you a link where they bought it, so you can get it too. If the tool is homemade, they’ll tell you where to buy the bandsaw blade and how to torch it so you can make the tiny handheld slip rake of your dreams. All of this knowledge sharing is done for free. Occasionally you’ll see someone not disclose a glaze or glazing chemistry. But that’s pretty rare overall, and if you know a little about the chemistry, you can make some educated guesses. And if you work in the same studio as someone else, they will share their glaze recipes, even if you don’t make work together. Everyone does it. Sharing information about how you work is a huge part of working in a group studio or co-op. For those of us who primarily work at home, there’s clayart and Instagram, and YouTube, too.

I wish writers did this more, or felt freer about it. We could learn something from potters. Instead, there’s all this gatekeeping around publication and payment, around money and how to get things going. How much everyone is making is shrouded in secrecy (“good deal” “great deal” “in a pre-empt”). We have no idea what other supports folks have, financially or otherwise. Over a dozen people messaged me after my last post, about money. Then there’s NYC vs MFA, but also MFA vs no MFA, and also Iowa MFA vs Everybody Else. There’s a lot of success on Instagram and twitter and always understated—I’m guilty of this too (“some personal news…” and then the announcement of the book sale is very common) but rarely failures. But pottery fail videos are some of the most well liked videos on social media. The general idea is: if you’re chipping stuff out of the bottom of your kiln, or you break something, grab your phone and film it. The process is messy and ugly, and humbling. Ceramics is great in some respects because you can get instant gratification that you can’t get with other media. And it’s great because the worst can happen to anyone. Documenting the process—success and failure—is part of the experience of being a potter.

(Once, I took a ceramics workshop with a woman who got her MFA at a school in Ohio. Her professor, nationally renowned for his ceramics work, asked if he could put work in her firing. She fired the kiln, very nervous to add his work. At the end, all of her work came out perfectly and all of his work was ruined. She was horrified, but apparently he’d made choices in his firing and glazing process that resulted in everything melting and breaking—it was his fault. Afterwards, she said, the entire studio could hear him throwing all his broken work in the dumpster, shouting, “I quit ceramics!” over and over again. He did not quit. He has tenure and is the department chair.)

Mostly I’m telling you this because I think it’s important to share the not-so-successful stuff too, and more about the process. Lately: the book is really horrible. I worry about making my deadline. There. I said it. I think I can. I am working towards it. I printed the pages and have been reading them. I underline or mark sections I want to carry to the next draft. I am making an outline for the first time in my life, where I list all the sections I am writing, and all the ones I have already written. My friend suggested I try to put together some chapter summaries as another way to organize, so I’m trying that too. There are no substitutes, of course, for book EPK; I just have to make book. I am bad at organizing. I have been allocating all my brain space to the book (ok, and reading clayart; the resident porcelain expert just suggested I look into mixing two clay bodies to get the translucency I want in a midrange porcelain and eliminate thixotropy problems; now the question is how to find those clay bodies commercially in our neck of the woods. I can also, of course, make some clays, though I don’t currently have access to a mixer or pug mill, so it’d all have to happen by hand, first in a five gallon bucket and then laid out on some plaster bats).

It is not all horrible. A huge thing: my inlaws bought me a beautiful desk and it comes this week. I have been writing on the same IKEA desk for over ten years. The frame is a little racked so it wobbles and clatters. Recently it was available for $29 on clearance if you also decide you need this desk which, again, I do not recommend. I bought it in grad school. I am so excited to get a real fancy desk.

Another great thing: my agent is going to talk me off a cliff this week, which: I know. I should not be asking for a pep talk now, or bothering people, but I kind of feel like I really need one. I have also been to therapy about it, and my therapist has been very reassuring, but I have some questions, still, and I’m hoping he can answer them. I’m fine, I swear. I just think about the book. A lot. It wakes me up in the middle of the night these days. My partner knows to sleep facing away from me, under the covers, because sometimes I have to crack open my laptop at 3 am when I worry I’m missing something. Then I find that I’ve already written about that somewhere else. Sometimes the pages are only in my head. That’s the best and the worst—then I have to write it all down, before it’s lost again, even though I probably have notes from everything I want to say. I have talked to friends, too, about my book problems, and they know, and have been thoughtful and helpful and supportive in so many different ways. I know this—making work and feeling horrible about it—is part of my process. I just wish I had a different process.

In terms of what’s salvageable from the current draft, there is both more than I had expected and also less than I hoped to have. In some ways I know the work is better than before, maybe even more commercial in some respects (which is a complicated statement, and perhaps best reserved for a different substack post), but it’s still horrible. It is hard and dumb to write books, generally. I tell people that if you can find anything else to do with your time (and feel even remotely satisfied with it) then you should do that instead. Literally anything. I want to be honest with you. Somehow I keep doing this, though sometimes I want to think about porcelain (or EPK) instead.