I also called to inquire about the clay body I love/hate, the translucent thixotropic one, with the local clay distributor. They’re a dealer, so they can get it for me, but only a pallet at a time (2,000 pounds), so I am opting to get a few boxes shipped to me from the place where I used to buy clay instead, at significant expense, but that way I don’t have to figure out where to put 40 boxes. The local clay place here has already plied me with all their samples of literally all the porcelain clay bodies they make in-house (some of which would be a lot cheaper than this one), but I don’t really care for any of them. They all seem so gray to me and some claim translucency but don’t have the same feel (like ketchup, genuinely, when you slake it down into slip) that the other clay has. So, I am possibly ordering more of the very same clay I just sold before moving. I didn’t know at the time that I’d be handbuilding. This clay is great for handbuilding. Also, moving clay is a huge PITA. And I sold what remained for the same as what I paid for it, which was great and worked out for everybody.

But this means I may be returning to the translucent clay body. I think I need to? It feels important. I like how the glazes show up on the cups, more of a watercolor effect. Everything I’m making right now is the other cone 6 porcelain, which has a very different feel. But I’m almost out of it. Hence: new old clay body.

I am also making some new forms, and playing with old things but in a new way. I think I will have to just post some of these on the website and sell them, but I also have to make more, and other things. Hoping I still have some time to work after the semester starts.

Also, in addition to posting online, like I do, some news: my mugs will be available in person at the Oklahoma Contemporary gift shop. More about that soon.

So, when I am not sorting through files and trying to figure out if I’ve already written a section of this project years ago (spoiler alert: I have), I split my time three ways: one, to finish the assignments and semester of work that will allow me to teach my classes this fall in the most cohesive, organized way I can. The readings will be good. The assignments will be fun. I have spent perhaps too much time this summer on this, and still yet not enough. Two: making weird experiments in the studio (see below) and trying to avoid the noise (it’s camp season. I don’t mind the kids, honestly, it’s the adult students who keep leaving handfuls of paper towels in the sink and that drives me bonkers). Three: trying to figure out what we’re doing next year. I am doing what amounts to (probably) a reasonably good job here. I have great colleagues. My students are largely lovely, bright and talented folks. But this is not a long-term plan. I have at most a third year here, and I don’t want to apply to things when I’m feeling desperate. So, I am applying for fellowships and jobs and related opportunities. Maybe also more grad school, probably in an art-related discipline, or else in health policy. Yeah, it’s like that right now. I am a bit all over the place.

Part of the problem for me is that ChatGPT is taking over everything, and I don’t want to participate in or even brush up against it in the course of my work. I see the effects of generative AI in some of the pieces my students submit. I see it in the loss of critical thinking skills. I see it on the internet, when some publisher retracts a book because it’s AI—why did nobody see this earlier? I hate it. I think generative AI is good for one thing only, and that is when you program an LLM to code poems, à la Travesty Generator. So if you’re fucking with it to make a weird art, yes, that’s great. If you’re using it to generate text, or as a makeshift therapist, or to “write” or “ideate” or whatever nonsense you attribute to this horrible thing, I think less of you. I really do. Even if you were to forget how generative AI is rapidly accelerating the heat-death of this planet. Or how people who live near data centers are directly harmed by them. Or the cognitive impact you suffer in using it. Forget how wrong the answers are for a minute. There are reasons why the children of tech scions are not using this technology and limiting screens generally, people. That’s probably my biggest conspiracy theory. Except it’s true.

Did I mention I’m bringing blue books back to my classroom this fall? No reason. Just thought it would be fun to start interpreting student handwriting again.

I also may need to migrate away from Substack to another platform, or just start sending stuff via the USPS again.

So I’m making weird art, mostly. My handbuilding experiment is going surprisingly well. It’s strange to me, since I have spent so much time throwing over the past several decades, and hardly any time making slabs or coils or pinch pots. Lately, I am making slab mugs. I made some colored porcelain and have been using it for handles in primary colors. I call these my Play-Doh mugs, because they are not pulled handles, like what I typically do, but rough and made to look like Play-Doh, or a similar substance. I welcome an actual, non-copyrighted name for these mugs. After these are fired again, they will look even brighter than they do now. More red. Usually red fades in the kiln at high temperatures, but I have been using encapsulated stains to prevent this from happening. The encapsulation means that the color will not burn away, so I can get bright yellows and reds that otherwise would not last at the higher temperatures. The blues are not a problem at cone six and above. They tend to stay intact—cobalt oxide is especially heat-resistant. That’s why so many old ceramics are blue, too, particularly ancient Chinese ceramics—so many of these have survived, and so that’s the association most people make, though this sort of blue and white decoration is even older, from what is now Iran, the 8th century or before, that were then traded on spice routes to China. Blue has a very long history. So I’m playing with that too, in drawing cups on cups, a way to upend or subvert or make funny. I don’t know. It’s worth it, the play. It’s time I’m off the internet and away from my desk, just making weird things. I just have to remember to bring headphones. And ignore the paper towels that make their way into the sink.

I cannot watch the news. It’s not that I don’t know about what’s happening. I know too much about what’s happening. But I have to limit my exposure. Because otherwise I will not write or make art at all.

Ori has a lot of ideas about this problem, the slowness. I make my feelings—joy, anxiety, obsessiveness—in cup form. But the fact that joy is made of shards, requires a certain kind of inane attention to detail, and takes hours to finish a single cup is probably a metaphor somewhere. “Joy should be easier,” Ori says. I need to be better about standardizing the work: both in writing and in everything else. I am working on a novel, lately. It’s good. It is a place where I can go, a thing I can do. I cannot talk about it with you, but I am accumulating pages, about to swap with a friend. It’s like that, somehow, this work. Accumulating.

But the other work: writing essays, of which I am reminded at least one is due to a literary magazine (sorry Paul/VQR), is slow. And making the memoir is slow too. And making cups is also slow. I want to be smarter about things, move more quickly, spend less time polishing an individual object. I should have more books, more cups, more work done by now. There are a few problems.

One is that I try to obsess over each word before I fix the next word. I’ve talked about this before: per Anne Fadiman, you are either a swamp driver or a diamond polisher. Swamp drivers drive back and forth across the swamp, accumulating pages that they then cut down. Or if you’re a diamond polisher, like me, every word has to be perfect before you get to the next word. I try to not do this in the substack, but then that sometimes means I’m sending out ideas that are half-baked, not fully realized. The novel feels more unhinged, freer somehow. So I can find momentum that way. Especially since I haven’t sent pages to anyone yet.

I think also, of course, there is the time spent on instagram, or facebook, endless scrolling. I like that when I am at the studio, making things, I cannot be online. I have to be reminded to take photos, because usually my hands are full of clay. I am rereading How to Break Up With Your Phone (revised edition) because my brain is popcorn these days. I know I need to get off the internet. But I also know that I have to simply use it better, whatever that means. I have to plan my usage. Stay focused. Make the substack posts, or post on IG or facebook, and then get offline. I need fewer tabs, my phone in grayscale. All the tricks.

But the pots, even offline, are still slow.

Here’s the pottery problem: I need to be slipcasting my work. To slipcast means you make a mold, usually plaster, and pour liquid clay into it (slip) and then let it dry a little before popping it out of the mold. It’s a way of making many of the same shape. That means I can spend more time decorating, or be less obsessive in my trimming, or just finish pots more quickly. I used to be better about this: I would just dip work in whatever glazes I’d made, then throw them in the kiln and hope for the best. I used to have 25 recipes for copper red. Now I’m more into surface decoration, and so I need to spend less time throwing. It’s a potter’s calculus. It’s why some people end up making dinnerware and other people make one-off pieces. There’s no in between, no matter what I want. I can’t make one-offs and spend a ton of time decorating and also standardize the pieces I make all at once.

Also, there’s the problem of my hand. I had surgery in December, followed by months of hand therapy. I asked my surgeon to make sure my hands matched: I am hypermobile in my hands, and I need both of my thumbs to work the same way. He refused, and so now I have one hand with limited mobility and the other one with my regular range. I am making some progress, for sure. But throwing is painful, particularly opening clay with my thumbs, after centering, and I can’t do what I could do before. So I might have to change how I interact with the work entirely. Enter slipcasting. Maybe. I’ll report back.

I’ve been busy. I sent my draft to my editor. It’s still a mess, I think, but it is 74,000 words, and has most? some? of the components there. I couldn’t look at it anymore, and that’s how I decided to ship it. Is it really done? No. Is it good? Also no. But do I feel good about it? Absolutely not. It is a thing. It is so complicated, my feelings, the book, what it’s really about. How to make it look like I want in my head. The book that comes after this one is a different sort of animal, and that’s my current focus, while book two is with editor. I included a letter to my editor so she can see what I am thinking, even if the current iteration of the book doesn’t match up with that.

The new book is a novel. I seem to be accumulating pages, so that’s exciting?

I’m also applying for grants, fellowships, some jobs. I’m officially going on the job market this fall; my artist-in-residence gig at UCO is just a short-term thing. I would like to be tenure-track or get something longer-term, generally, more permanent. We are open to location, honestly. More just trying to find the right community, and ideally the opportunity to get a house. We have loved it here, in many respects, but there is no permanent opportunity or path forward. Long story short, the department tried to recruit a nonfiction writer, but required a PhD (I do not have one, just my trusty MFA), and then the line was eliminated altogether, along with several other lines. I suppose this is common now: we are starting the tail end of reductions in staffing as the enrollment cliff approaches, though enrollments are up in English here. That said, I’m really grateful to the small but mighty group of colleagues and students who went to bat for me in an effort to get me hired long-term here. You know who you are, and I am so grateful for you.

Something else I’ve been doing, for the past week or so, is starting to make pots again, this time at the Oklahoma Contemporary Studio School. It’s been over a year since I’ve thrown, since I dropped a kiln on my hand while moving and had to get surgery in December to repair my ulnar collateral ligament. It’s like I have a brand-new thumb, I keep telling people, though most days it feels stiff and weird, and I’m still trying to break down the scar tissue inside my hand. I brought some aged English Grolleg over there and have been throwing most days, now starting to trim and finish, plus a box or two of older midrange porcelain that I’ve been dragging around. The photo is the midrange stuff. It’s not quite thixotropic, so it won’t be super translucent like the other stuff is, but it is easier to work with, and with my thumb, perhaps this is useful. Sometimes I wedge this clay with the thixotropic porcelain, to improve workability and preserve the translucency. Hopefully will have a sale soonish. Will post here. Have been faster. Pots will be more affordable as I’m using some new techniques to decorate, so stay tuned? Also, they have both gas and soda kilns in addition to electric, plus the occasional raku firing and a rocket kiln (wood), so I’m excited to get to play in atmospheric firings again. I’m hoping to enter a few cup shows if I can.

Ori has also been accompanying me to the studio most days, to wedge clay and hang out, to clean tools and assist. It’s been hugely helpful. I feel like I only have a limited ability to work before I run out of hand and being able to have him help is great. He also has some ideas he wants to put into clay, and so I am working with him on those too. More about our weird upcoming collaboration soon?

More stuff:

I interviewed Joseph Osmundson about their new book, Spawning Season. It’s really good. It’s a food memoir and a queer fertility memoir and also about the environment and also about a fish named Fry. You should read it.

The Rumpus has returned! Making things! Doing things! I am so excited.

Monster of A Land, Lauren Hough’s new book, is out now, and it’s amazing.

Currently reading and digging What I Made For Dinner, by Krys Malcolm Belc.

Tayari Jones’s Kin unfolds in the gorgeous, hypnotic way you can expect from her novels.

Last week, I started rehab for my thumb. I had surgery on it before the end of the year, to repair my ulnar collateral ligament, and now I have to remember how to use it again, to work against its stiffness, and do the exercises prescribed by my occupational therapist. I hate all of it. My hand feels deformed, not mine. It’s almost impossible to write with it, so I type everything if I can, or use talk-to-text. I am not supposed to be making pots, not yet. I am supposed to try writing more by hand, but it seems impossible, or at least slow. I can technically make pots by hand, but it’s not the same: I am not particularly good at it. But there are ways to participate in ceramics community without throwing, I think.

I’m going to tell you about Carol. No, not the protagonist on Pluribus. I haven’t even seen through the end of the first season. I get that people like this show, but I am having trouble (even as someone who considers Breaking Bad a comfort watch, and who once wrote to Fox Television as a child to get Scully a desk on the X-Files, a show I was absolutely not supposed to be watching, but like many queer millennials, it cemented my obsession with Gillian Anderson). Maybe because I never got into Better Call Saul beyond a handful of episodes? But that’s another story. Let’s talk about art instead.

The clayart listserv is full of all sorts of interesting characters. Carol is one of them. She is making the work. I love this about her. Every week or two, without fail, she emails the listserv with a link to her new work. Her name is Carol Marians (formerly Carol Knighten), and she is making wild glaze experiments in her kiln, a cone 10 electric, in the Pacific Northwest. The website is entirely bare-bones, just HTML and some photos. She shares her process, the molecular formulas, the firing schedule. She makes work that looks like it should belong in a wood or gas kiln. Making these atmospheric effects are typically impossible using an electric firing process. She is doing nothing short of alchemy. I don’t know if she has any other way of sharing this work, except through the clayart listserv. She does not use instagram, or facebook. It’s just her typing into the listserv, sharing with us these incredible glazing experiments, a handful at a time. Inevitably, one of the old guard, someone who runs the listserv, will reply: Carol, these are beautiful. Or: “I really liked what you were doing with this copper carb.” That’s short for copper carbonate, which offers all sorts of glazing effects. When I talk about copper reds in the gas kiln, it’s copper carbonate that flashes red. But here, in the electric kiln, it’ll cut a blue-green line through Carol’s work. A lot of Carol’s work is looking like the surface of the moon, or some other distant planet.

Why are these works important? These tests? Who cares, you might say. She is testing small batches, developing tiny shifts in her work, so testing glazes can become extremely repetitive and frustrating, a kind of endless monotony. But this is important because a lot of this work is no longer being done. The knowledge base is rapidly evaporating as potters retire or pass away. Both of my mentors from school are long dead. Pottery has been democratized, become popular, which is great in some respects: you can take a class at a commercial studio, glaze your pots at cone 6, take them to a craft fair and sell them without ever knowing anything about the glazes or the clay body: all these decisions have been made for you, by the studio owner. Instagram is now full of potters who slip cast and mass-produce work using commercial glazes. Commercial glazes are stable, make it easier to sell work, make the work more consumable, colorful, marketable. You do not have to worry if the pot is fully vitrified (vitrification being the process by which clay bodies become glass, nonporous), if the glaze fits the pot. Glaze fit is a problem I’ve brought up before in some previous substacks: it’s the way the glaze interacts with the surface of the clay. Some don’t like to play well together, and that is another problem that needs to be sorted by professionals. But if you are using clays and glazes commercially manufactured for each other, then you don’t have to worry.

So, what’s the problem? A lot of the work in commercial studios looks the same. It’s big, heavy, glazed with the same glazes. Maybe the potters learned from the same person and that person has passed their problems along to their students. Thick work, work without a foot, trimmed too heavy to be useful. You don’t want a mug that’s a workout to pick up. You want something light and delicate in your hand, beautiful and useful. Form follows function, right? But maybe you want a glaze that offers the surface of some distant planet. You can’t do that with a commercial glaze.

But Carol? She’s just making the work, every month. Glaze test after glaze test. And they’re beautiful.

I guess we just have to keep doing the work.

Mostly, I’m reading my manuscript lately, to get ready to send pages to my editor (not to bury the lede here, but…. yes), so I don’t have many suggestions to make. But please check out Laura Mauldin’s In Sickness and In Health, a gorgeous and vitally important book about healthcare inequality and the impossible work of caregivers, out on Tuesday.

I do not know what to do about the country, its current state, the ICE raids and murders, the lack of compassion for people, the way American imperialism coincidentally always seems to start wars in places with oil, the fact that it is no longer OK to teach Plato at Texas A&M, the continued crisis in Gaza, the many ways in which our planet is dying, the ever-continuing march of fascism, the rise of generative AI and how chatGPT now wants you to give your private health information to them (please do not do this), how nearly everyone I know is stressed and sad or angry. I think also, weirdly, the age of prestige television is coming to an end, and there is a precipitous drop in quality reality TV, for those who partake, and so we have fewer distractions. I do not know what to do about any of this, except to donate money, time, to watch what is happening, to record everything you can. To make the art, whenever possible. And I recommend going outside.

At Mt. Scott, where our friend graciously took us to see the top of the world, at least in this part of Oklahoma (Black Mesa is even taller, and perhaps that is a future trip soon), there are windmills one direction, a lake flooded by the Army Corps of Engineers; from a small plane she said you can see the roads and buildings that are still there, underwater now; another direction is Fort Sill, home to Geronimo’s gravesite and unexploded ordnance; and another direction still is just big grass and more mountains and cows and buffalo. The trees are windswept here in a way that feels like magic, juniper resembling giant bonsai, their limbs stark against the wispy clouds and blue sky. It’s a bit of a religious experience up here, a wild transformation.

Interestingly, a lot of the plants resemble what we know from back in Evanston. There are lots of purple coneflower here, currently dormant and full of seed pods, waiting to be swept by wind and rain. Big bluestem and little bluestem are familiar grasses; here there is also switchgrass and the addition of bushy bluestem, which appears in wooly clumps, also dormant and waiting for spring. The lichen is perhaps the most gorgeous surprise, big electric lime green dots (pleopsidium flavum, apparently, or gold cobblestone lichen) alongside blue and brown and gray, all growing on the granite boulders we climb over to see the rest of the landscape. At one point, we came face-to-face with a longhorn bull.

This, being outside, feels doable. I am not really able to do a lot of things yet; my mobility seems limited, because after a certain point, I run out of leg, or I accidentally use my arm and shouldn’t. I broke my leg some fifteen weeks ago after a horse I was riding reared repeatedly and the saddle slipped; then I had surgery, but still learning to move my body again. And I had surgery on my hand a week ago, from when I tore my ulnar collateral ligament in my thumb moving my kiln this summer. Two surgeries in a matter of months felt like a lot, I suppose because it is. At my hand surgery, one of the nurses said, hey, haven’t we seen you recently? because I was at the same hospital where I got my ankle ORIF. Yes, I said, do you want to see the scar? (She did). The good news is I should be free to make pots in a week or two, and there is a soda kiln here, alongside gas reduction and electric kilns. Soda firing porcelain will be a special kind of alchemy. Maybe I can make some lichen of my own.

2025 was hard in lots of ways, but good for us too: we sold our house and moved to Oklahoma. Now we’re here, writing, thinking, teaching, meeting new people, figuring out what comes next. And finishing the book, too. I am back on the horse, figuratively and literally (though not the one who threw me; I told them he needed a medical workup if anyone wants to get on him again, because he seems not quite right). Despite everything, we can still make art and perhaps sometimes go outside in wide open spaces, so let’s please do that.

An incomplete list of books that fucked/re-fucked me up in 2025:

Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li
Minor Black Figures, Brandon Taylor
The Mourner’s Bestiary, Eiren Caffall
Girls Play Dead, Jen Percy
Happy People Don’t Live Here, Amber Sparks
Beings, Ilana Masad
The Answer is in the Wound, Kelly Sundberg
Audition, Katie Kitamura
One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This, Omar El Akkad

But having all this time to convalesce means that I obsessively read the news, try to figure out what I want to be when I grow up (the academic job market looks bleak), and plan my teaching.

A number of weeks ago, I started meeting with my students 1:1, to ask them about their goals for the class. Many are surprised by this question, especially since I tell them that the grade is largely irrelevant (I am among those folks who feels it’s not particularly necessary to grade creative writing). If the grade doesn’t matter, and they can make anything they want, stuff can get big and scary right away. “What are your goals for the class?” could very easily become “Why write at all?” I am teaching introduction to creative writing and a nonfiction class, both undergraduate courses. A lot of my students are creative writing majors, though not all. Some of my creative writing majors have big goals: they are working on short stories or novels, or they want to write longform essays, or they hope to get a writing job after they graduate, or they want to publish their book, or some combination of these things.

But a lot of others, including some majors, don’t know. I tell them it’s okay to not know. That not knowing is part of the experience of being a writer, and a scholar. That maybe they can just have goals like reading more, or writing more, and that’s okay too, even if it initially feels unsatisfying. A lot of newer (or even more experienced) writers don’t know what they don’t know.

Our lives are clogged with short form video, catastrophic news cycles, distracted and complicated attention patterns, rising costs, absolute horrors on the streets of our cities and increasingly everywhere else, and a failure, as the kids say, for many people to “touch grass.” My students are overwhelmingly queer, first gen college students who feel vulnerable all the time, especially in a red state like Oklahoma. They have big goals as writers and thinkers. They want to get jobs after they graduate that mean they will not have to work for $11 an hour as a shift lead at a sandwich chain, or third shift at an Amazon warehouse, where the pay differential is helpful but at the cost of sleep and brain and everything else, though with the rise of AI, who can say what jobs will exist in the future. They come to my classes exhausted, slumped over, trying to stay awake and remember why they are here.

I try to get them to write about work, mostly, in small increments, maybe in response to a writing exercise or in the style of something we’ve read, so things don’t get too big or unwieldy. Work is the thing they do most, in addition to being at school or asleep. I want them to know that writing about their work, their experience, is valuable. That being a part of a larger community is valuable. Some days, we just sit and write together.

I wish I could be out at protests, or standing on a street corner with a whistle. I can’t do that right now. I spend long periods of time with my leg elevated, working on healing and the next thing and trying to make book progress. And teaching, maybe a few hundred words at a time.

Ori and I went down there last week to find an apartment and drive around, to get a sense of where things were and what to expect. The sky was fabulously big and full of wild weather (had a couple of tornado watches while there, maybe a little hail). We did some grocery store tourism at Crest Foods, ate a meal at Braum’s, drank way too much espresso at Elemental Coffee (highly recommend all of these things), and also looked at a couple of barns where I might get to ride and possibly keep a horse, both of which were mere minutes from campus.

I’ve started looking, a little, for a horse, but it’s still premature. I am hoping to find a horse project: someone who might be a little misunderstood, in need of care and training and regular rules and boundaries. Not a rescue: I have worked with plenty of those sorts, but maybe a horse who’s young and green and doesn’t know how to do anything. Or a horse that has already been started and caused problems for someone else. About once a year, on average, someone tries to give a horse. There is a reason for this: these horses are usually irreparably broken in some important and vital way. They do not understand how to be a horse, or maybe they are physically broken too. They rear or they bolt or spook at things that aren’t there or kick or they bite people or some combination of these issues. I am not necessarily looking for a free horse, because they usually end up costing a lot to fix, but we’ll see what happens. Writing and riding seem to be related for me, and I am ready for both again.

We also found an apartment. I am really excited; it’s in a newer building and close to campus. I am an asthmatic, overly sensitive to mold and smoke and dust, so we like that it’s newer. We also saw my office, which is gloriously wood paneled and has a window and bookshelves and feels absolutely cozy. I cannot wait to write in there and meet with students and fill it with plants. We are bringing some plants from our current place, but I also hope to pick up a few more.

And everyone is so welcoming there. Everyone is so lovely, so kind and open and generous and enthusiastic and brilliant. People are making art and they are passionate about teaching. I loved our visit and everyone we met. We felt cared for in a way that has not been the case for us for a long time.

A part of me has wanted to move for a while, ideally to teach, to write, have narrative distance, perhaps to leave the Midwest altogether, but this was the first year I actually went on the academic job market. I updated my letters of recommendation, wrote teaching statements and cover letters, and applied for four jobs. One of the visiting positions was one for which I was no longer qualified (they wanted someone earlier-career, without a book). One I never heard from at all, but it was clear there was an internal candidate based on how the job description was drafted. I was a finalist for one other tenure track job, and then I got this job in Oklahoma. Success!

When I tell my friends up north, here, that I am going to Oklahoma for the year (and who knows, maybe longer?), many are shocked. Why would I ever leave where we are now? There is much to like, objectively, on paper, here. We are steps to public transit, in a very walkable, “cool,” neighborhood, with fancy coffees and many restaurants and two bookstores. Some kind of liberal paradise, my friends say, though I am a leftist. We are six or seven blocks from Lake Michigan and around the corner from Trader Joe’s and many other grocery stores and close to other small shops and things to do, and if we get on the CTA or the Metra we can go to the Art Institute or the Museum of Contemporary Art or the theatre, for which Chicago is somewhat famous.

Of these things, the lake is probably what I will miss most. When friends come from out of town to visit, people from landlocked states or else California, a part of them does not understand that you cannot see across the lake. It is simply too big. One friend once asked if you could see across when the weather was better, less foggy, because I took her on a cloudy day. The scale is hard to explain. Sometimes, on a very clear day, you can see Chicago from the north side, or maybe Gary, Indiana, but that is not across. Michigan looks at us the same way, just big blue expanse, endless waves, this ancient inland sea.

I will miss our neighbors, and our friends: soup nights, waving hello, breakfasts and dinners and hanging out and shared vegetables and exchanges on the street.

But, to be truthful, I will not miss much else. Suddenly, we live in a trendy neighborhood, and everything is more expensive with many new neighbors and increased density and although I am a huge proponent of eliminating single family zoning altogether, I think I need to live in a place where there is big sky nearby, instead of big lake. Everything feels far away here, inaccessible financially or geographically, with hours spent in traffic if we drive. We cannot afford to go out, not really. When we lived in Pittsburgh, we went to so many shows—great theatre, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the symphony, and so many readings. Things were cheap and you could just go without making a big deal of it. And I had ceramics community, where I knew lots of artists because it was a cheap city where you could make art. I was a member of a ceramics cooperative. There were no worries about finding and paying for parking, or delays on the CTA impeding your ability to get somewhere. Danes avoid sharing negative feelings among groups of friends, to avoid disrupting the hygge, which I saw sometimes when I worked for a Danish company. I think there is some of that pressure here too. To not talk about how high the cost of living has gotten here, or the taxes, which feel oppressive, or how nearly everyone in our neighborhood is ten or twenty or thirty years older than us, because those are the people who can afford to live here. The winters are long and gray, and that is hard on us both. The school system is supposedly great—we live in a desirable elementary district—but we of course don’t use this. Lots of people are busy with their children. I get it: their children are the center of their lives. But this makes it a bit of a lonely place for people like us: we do not have kids, and we are not part of a greater literary or creative community, or an academic community here, and so we operate on a periphery that has felt, at times, impenetrable.

So, we’re leaving here for a new place. We’ll see how it goes. I’m so excited. I can’t wait.

Anne Fadiman once came to Pitt to visit, and she talked about how you are either a swamp driver or a diamond polisher, when it came to your writing process. Diamond polishers, understandably, need the word to be perfect before they get to the word that follows. Swamp drivers have to generate a lot of pages very quickly, driving back and forth across the swamp, before they know what they’re writing. Then, they take those pages and cut them down, rewrite, make more pages that they then revise. Diamond polishers tend to edit a lot less. Everyone who is a diamond polisher wants to be a swamp driver, and vice-versa.

Unfortunately, I am typically a diamond polisher. But with this book, lately, I keep writing more and throwing a lot of it out; experimenting on the page. Maybe this is an opportunity for me, to make new weird (honestly, increasingly, more commercially oriented—a story for another time) work. But it also means I am throwing a lot more out than I typically would.

Everything feels like it’s sort of cattywampus lately. Turn on the news, and fresh horrors reveal themselves. People are dying, being deported, can’t renew their passport, or generally live in fear. Scroll social media, and it seems like everyone I know is losing their grant funding, or their job. So many small businesses are closing or stopping orders because they designed a product partially manufactured in China and can’t withstand the burden of these new tariffs. We all know this. Me writing it is not news. But it all makes a stupid, big impact on the creative work, too. Even if you’re not directly impacted by one of thousands of executive orders.

Instead of writing, I find myself with five zillow windows open, paging between possible apartments, places we could live, ideas for our future in a variety of settings. I make ugly work, ceramics or writing, and then throw it out. Probably that is a part of the process too. Like this newsletter. I should probably edit this. I’m not going to.

Everything feels shitty right now. Which is why you should go to the movies. We saw Sinners on Friday with friends. I will not go into details, in case you haven’t seen it yet, but I want to go again soon, because there is so much I missed. I have an auditory processing delay, so it’s hard to hear things in loud settings, like the movies. We also went to the cheap theatre with bad sound, so there was a lot of distortion. But it allowed us to not be here, to occupy some other space. Message me with your favorite scene?

Currently reading:

Same as it Ever Was, Claire Lombardo — I know I’m late to this. She’s always great.

Why am I telling you all of this?

A few days ago, I was talking to some folks about community and writing, and it made me want to write more about this topic. I have spoken some about this before, but I think it’s important to revisit this discussion. In a sense, potters have community baked in. If you are firing a wood kiln, you need an entire group to do so, somewhere between three and 25 people, depending on how long you fire, the size of the kiln, and how sleep deprived you want to be. Ceramics folks share space, equipment. They fire kilns together. They load and unload work in groups, share glaze recipes and techniques. It’s expensive to have a slab roller or an extruder or a pugmill by yourself; many have cooperatives to share risk and costs. And without proper dust extraction, you could put yourself or your community at risk.

Potters are also pretty chill overall, especially compared to writers. Potters have thoughts like “Can I make this big pot? I can make this big pot!” Sometimes there is ceramics drama, but it’s something like “So and so didn’t clean the clay mixer well enough,” or “This person didn’t put my pot in a good place in the kiln, and now I am going to have to refire.” Maybe the occasional “They’re so grumpy today.”

When I went to the clay supply store, the day after the inauguration, the place was packed and smelled strongly of weed. People were chatting, buying materials, trying to figure out what they were making in the new year, before the threat of tariffs loomed large. It was clear: the only way through fascism was to get a little fucked up and make art.

Writers, by contrast, tend to worry a lot if people like them, and to worry, generally, about everything. We can be competitive with one another, instead of cooperative. I am guilty of this, too: probably I am too weird, too neurotic, to be a full-time potter. But there are lessons we can learn from potters. It’s why I keep telling everyone to do writing dojo, where we make work together, separately, quietly, at a coffee shop or wherever else. You just show up and write. You don’t talk to anyone, just get coffee and stay offline and write or make art. Maybe you write a book over the course of a summer or a semester. It feels possible with dojo, somehow.

In many ways, we are in a weird, deeply upsetting place right now. The horrors of the news cycle continue to accumulate. More than ever, it’s important to keep watching—we need people who are here to bear witness and write about what is happening every single day, to remind us to talk about everything in the group chat (ideally in Signal, with disappearing messages; please don’t discuss sensitive information in places that are not secure) and not on social media. To keep an eye on what is happening as it happens. This is vital work; without this information, we have no record of what has transpired. As artists, we need to keep making the work, to document, to keep pressing on. And we need to be there for people, now more than ever.

It is super hard to be a writer, especially lately. I feel constantly distracted and pulled by the internet and various work and life deadlines. I have been traveling some for work this spring, and that’s been particularly exciting, but it also means that some of the editing is being done on planes or in hotel rooms. I probably do my best work in strange places, to be honest, but it’s a switch from working at home. I am trying to repost what I can, read what I can, participate as I am able, but I also try to turn off the news sometimes, so I’m just looking for a few minutes each day (you can use Freedom to block all sorts of websites temporarily, or to limit your access using other tools (Apple phones and Androids can do this too)). Containing or compartmentalizing one’s dread can be really helpful, I think, even for a little while.

I’m meeting with my new editor at the end of the month. We had a little introductory phone call a couple weeks ago, and I’m thrilled with her ideas so far. I think it’ll be good. I feel like the book is fresh again, possible again. I am trying to embrace my potter side, to be open, calm, less anxious, more engaged in the work. And for a bit each day, I can block out the constant horrors and revise the book, or spend time in the studio, making pots, all the while periodically talking with other people about art as community, as creative resistance, and that is great.

PS, my first book, Cost of Living, is now three years old (!). It’s been great to look at Facebook memories from this time—to see what folks wrote about it, to remind me that it’s still out there, somehow. Still a thrill.

I turned in my book to my agent.

It still needs a ton of work. I don’t know how it ends. To be fair, I didn’t know how Cost of Living ended either, until suddenly it did. The book is still happening, so it’s hard to say. I don’t want go into the details quite yet. It feels good to get something in, but I also know there is so much work ahead. For now, I am focused on job applications, working on a new craft talk, and making pots, and will meet with my new editor soon. I also tried a little glow-up, as the kids say. The world is burning, but we still need to feel good about ourselves.

I got my hair cut by the same guy who has cut my hair for decades, since I was a child. He was the former creative director at Vidal Sassoon and, as Ori points out, I have gotten haircuts from him prior to all sorts of important life changes. Almost ten years ago, I flew home for a long weekend to see my parents and get my hair cut (I know, this feels insane, but keep in mind this was 2015, and the flight from Pittsburgh to Chicago was less than $100 round trip, in the dead of winter) and my mom and I looked at this house and called Ori and he and I put in an offer to buy it. Now, I think we might be ready to sell our house. It has served us well in a variety of ways, enabled us to have a safe place to be as we figured out the next stage of our lives, and the role that art would play in it. We have loved living here, but we need a change, with more art, and more creative community, and will see where the universe takes us. I am really excited.

To that end, I am thinking about what goals I have between now and then. Some are exceptionally practical, like fixing the last few things that need to be fixed, finishing projects, so whoever comes to look at the house feels happy and secure in viewing and purchasing. I want to show the house to best advantage. Ori is less concerned about it. Either someone will want our house or they will not, and the price is determined by the market and what people are willing to pay. But I was formerly a licensed real estate broker, and got a general contractor’s license in my town nine years ago (a three hour exam, but very doable), so I can see everything. There are lots of small things like this, easily fixed or remedied, missing a screw or a cover or paint or a wire or whatever else; I just need to put in the time.

On a similar tack, I want to use up the clay I have on hand, so we don’t have to move it. This means there will be lots of affordable pots, mostly mugs, coming soon. I am finally standardizing some processes here, particularly with the translucent, thixotropic clay, of which I still have maybe 400 pounds. I also have some clay from a company that no longer exists. The guy who owned the company and the clay recipes is named Tim. Tim has not, to my knowledge, sold any of his recipes to anyone who has made them. I know some people are frustrated: he had great recipes, just not the best business sense. He is someone who didn’t raise prices enough as material costs skyrocketed, and also perhaps moved the company to a less affordable location, and so he went out of business. I understand how hard that must be, but at the same time, I wish he would sell his recipes to people actually interested in making the clay for sale. I have some clay, some glaze from before he shut down. I’ve been lugging around this clay for years, not sure what to do with it. For a long time, I didn’t want to use it: it felt special, important, like something I wanted to keep forever. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. But I think it’s time. Maybe I’ll save a box in case I want to spend some time reverse-engineering the recipes for clay and glaze, though the glaze is much easier for me to figure out. This sort of thing is something I can do, if I want, given enough time and detailed notes and many hours of firing and refiring. Detailed notes are everything.

Initially, I used the discontinued clay body to make tons of tiny dishes, little pinch pots that I glazed white inside, with specks of iron bleeding through, tiny brown gunmetal flecks in the clay body. I did this after we found out our IVF process didn’t work, a few years ago, and we would not be having a kid. They’re my grief cups, I think. I make my feelings—anxiety mugs, obsession cups, joy cups. The grief cups are little slips of clay big enough to hold a couple rings or maybe a necklace chain at your bedside table. For a while I was shipping some of these out, if you asked for grief in your checkout. I didn’t charge anyone—seemed weird to charge for grief. It’s already a bit of a burden as it is, receiving grief in the mail. I’m hoping to make not-grief things with the clay, now. It’s a plastic, white stoneware that reaches vitrification—that means the temperature at which the clay is less porous, and approaches a glassy, foodsafe density—at 2200F. So there are fluxes in there, to bring down the melting point from a hotter temperature. I’m guessing there’s a lot of tile #6 in it, because that is what makes it so white and plastic, easy to work. Maybe, with time and a new studio, I will be able to reverse-engineer this clay body, but for now, I’m going to use it.

I can’t think about the election right now. I guess we’re just waiting, like everyone else.

Now, you can get cups for normal prices. You can shop here.