The permanence of stoneware is one of its satisfactions, and another satisfaction, more significant, is its ultimate imperfection – there's always a little background noise.

Not everyone's work can get noticed, not everyone stays working through to the end, not every pot lovingly made in a home studio that's been lovingly built gets very far, and these pots never made it more than thirty feet from their kiln.

Instinctively, as you start on a path you're unsure of, you look for help and it comes obliquely, in ways you don't always recognize at first.

A surprising change had taken place. It is so not true that stoneware is an indelible permanent material. The plates were not that good anymore.

I stood up from my computer as the door opened with the first box – just set that right here, thanks, I said, pointing to the same spot where the same driver has set boxes down for the last twelve years. I peered at the label – for a moment I had forgotten what this box was and who had sent it.

Each strip of paper has to be the same size and shape so that they are equally weighted, so to speak — each potential project needs the same consideration, just as each day, from a journal-writing perspective, needs its thoughts and ideas translated. You can't pick and choose.

I've been thinking over these early experiences of learning glazing, and pondering these clichés about teaching, over the last week or so as I wrap up another round of the glaze class down at the studio in Santa Fe. What would my teacher say now if he knew I was standing before others, repeating his words, then pausing as students write them down?

Sometimes I think a big reason I'm in the studio is that I just like that, the comforting spin of the wheel, the churn of the mixer, the tumbling ball mill. You get to be a bit like these machines on a good long day working.

Judith Duff's white shino glaze is thick on the outside of the form, rutted like a midsummer county road, and that's wood ash, melting at the shoulder & dripping down into glass.

Clunky, I thought. Kind of horrible, but — I need this for my collection. How did it get here from Alabama, I wondered? I like the random sense of fate, of synchronicity, at the thrift store. What is this piece of discarded stoneware telling me?

That got me thinking about my influences. Not famous people, most of them. I kept weighing out ingredients for the opaque white so I could get these bowls glazed. Most people who have kept me on track and lead me forward would be surprised to know they were an influence at all.

You get a feeling for the power of the river – you're just little, and you have a little short paddle, and the waves sometimes are huge. The sound is deafening when you're in the middle of a rapid – you can't see, or hear, anything else except water. As an artist you're hoping to join your own minor powers to something greater…

Just about every afternoon, back then, after an early start (no emails) I’d be outside for a couple moments, resting, reading. I worked at an easy, careless, pace.

Is it 'wrong' for one art to delve into the sphere of another? For a photograph to try & tell a story, for a poem to sound like jazz? Crazy, but back then…yes, I thought. Good art sticks to what it knows and does only what it is good at.

They're young good artists. They have ideas, I said, kicking the gravel as we walked back to the Summer Studio, a big unheated space, a great old warehouse, habitable into October apparently. Me – I said — I'm just working.

Over this last weekend I learned to say dunt. Dunting. True, sometimes a crack can be the most important and beautiful part of a piece — it can enliven, energize, separate, open — always though it is a last resort, a way to resolve tension when there is no other way. You open a blank space, put emptiness where before there was substance.

Intuitive people may not be good with thinking, but they're good at turning thinking off. Once they know, they know. Sometimes, that attribute is extremely useful. I took a deep breath and relaxed. An hour or two later I was back to the pavement, and I pulled over to check the load – I knew it was okay though. I could feel it.

I always say that If you unload the kiln and encounter one very good piece, you've had a very good firing. There may be a hundred pieces in the kiln that come off the warm shelves and onto ware boards and back inside – still. You never count the others, you look for the one.

Next day we put on sunscreen. And neoprene. We turned off our phones. Hi, I said bravely, and tried to join the group. Clay, of course, is always an ending and a beginning — it is decomposed rock, it has weathered and ceased being what it is and lost its form. Also it is impressionable, ready, malleable as the first day of a river trip. Nothing is decided - anything could happen.

I took for granted that my time wasn’t worth much. If a piece I’d spent half a day on didn’t work out back it went into the bucket — no big deal. I took it for granted that doing art involved wasting enormous amounts of time. Not everything you try works. I found this liberating. Wasting time is a talent, more important than centering or matte glazes or the other talents a potter might be proud of.