It is a long-held trope that you learn when you teach.  And it happens to be true.  Beginning with forming the content of a class or curriculum, one has to assess a body of knowledge, decide how it can be best related to an audience, choose the most relevant information and discard the least.  That process alone is educational, especially if the circumstances for each class change, forcing you to re-evaluate your area of expertise with each outing.

If you are teaching at a place like Haystack, where the students come from a broad range of experiences and skills and ages, teaching becomes a kind of triage.  Each student needs a variant of the basic information as he or she has a singular agenda.  Because the class is twelve days long, there is time to ask and answer the questions that are most meaningful to each student, assessing and hopefully communicating the right instruction and encouragement.  That means that you are teaching, in the case of this group, fifteen different classes after the first few hours together.  It’s amazing and gratifying to see the different directions that fifteen people can take one assignment.

What surprised me the most is that Words of Wisdom, or WOW for short, came out of my mouth, unbidden and unplanned.  When talking about the roles of intuition and intention in making art, I said, “Trust your intuition, but don’t rely on it.”  WOW.  I just love the formulation of a philosophical notion that would fit on a bumper sticker.  I had never articulated this idea before, certainly never so succinctly, but it reflects a line of thought that I had followed over a period of time.  The mythology of the muse in art vs. hard work and perseverance has always been a mystery.  It took a student’s question to reveal a point of clarity that I had come to without realizing it.

I also learned that kindness works, generosity always comes back around, nature is a balm, and creativity is boundless when nurtured, pushed and celebrated.  The images here are some of the responses to assignments.  We were careful to keep in mind that we were making expressions of ideas, not finished objects.  Still, these and many, many more, stood on their own as provocative, enchanting, strong objects.

As you may have been able to tell, I have not had internet connection for a week and will not have it for another week.  I am at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, teaching and learning from a group of 15 students.  It has been a wonderful first week and I expect the same from the second.  Please come back next weekend for a full update.

One of the beauties of Haystack is that it is at the far tip of an island full of trees which does not allow for high speed anything, let alone something so advanced as wireless connection.  One can concentrate on the artistic task at hand with few distractions.  Of course, like most advantages, there are disadvantages.  I am sitting in the parking lot (three spaces) of the Deer Isle Library which happens to be closed on Saturday after noon.  Luckily their wireless is husky enough to allow for pirating outside the building.

See you in a week.

Sunday morning, 10 o’clock, I leave my home in Portland. I love my house.  I love my husband.  I love the gardens in June.  Then why am I leaving?  I’m going home.  What?  Let me explain.

Home is where you are who you really are.  For me it has always been where I have felt safe and loved and able to create my life.  (I remember hearing of a child who was in desperate trouble explaining that he was hanging out on the streets because home was where he didn’t feel safe.  That was a revelation to me.)  But there are other types of home, places that allow us to be who we really are with a different set of criteria.

Today begins a two-week (actually 12-day) course that I will be teaching called, “Making Connections, at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.  There will be twelve students, ranging in age, as far as I can tell, from early 20s to 70, with a broad range of experiences in both life and art.  The content of the course is very flexible, depending a great deal on the responses of the students.  It is not prescriptive or technical.  That means that there will be a lot of talking and working and changing of directions.  Each of us will be continually challenged and called upon to step off the edge.  It will be the kind of work that one can only do in a place where one is safe and supported and encouraged.  Sort of like home.  That’s Haystack.

As I said in another post, my intention is to write more frequently from here.  While my intentions are good, the internet connection is not, so I’m not sure how this will play out. Please do check in as you can.  I hope to reward your diligence.

Do you ever get tired of hearing that you learn more from your failures than from your successes?  I suppose it’s true but I think I’ve learned enough.  I just want to have some success with what I’ve learned from all those failures!  Five pieces came out of the kiln this week and they are all teaching me something…I’m not sure what, though.

I’ve narrowed it down to two overarching issues.  One, as teacher Megan Walsh said with fine diplomacy, my aesthetic skills outstrip my technical skills.  In other words, I know what I want it to look like but I don’t know how to make it happen.  Fair enough.  Second, the qualities that I have enjoyed in drawing with charcoal, I have tried to apply to porcelain with iron oxides.  But the firing changes everything.  Materials and processes have their own demands and their own gifts.  It will take time, if not 10,000 hours, at least more than I have given to the process of working with clay.

Meanwhile, here are two pieces I rather liked, both simple in construction and decoration.  And it wouldn’t be fair not to show you one of the “teachers”, i.e., the failures.

I leave on Sunday, June 10, for Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, where I’ll be teaching for nearly two weeks.  I’m looking forward to it as I do to most teaching experiences but with an extra bit of joy.  Haystack is an extraordinary place.  It is beautiful and beautifully run to allow for the best possible learning and teaching experience.  I will try to write more often from there, though the island does not have very good internet connection so posts may come through in bunches.  We’ll see.