My husband came home from the field and the first thing he wanted to do was take a hot shower. It was winter in North Carolina, maybe December, and there wasn't any snow on the ground, but it was cold, the kind of cold you don't want to be out in for four days straight, but he had been. The Army had said so. Gabriel came in with camo paint still all over his face. The way the olive greens and blacks had dried made his whole face look like a bruise. We kissed; a reunion, one of many. He was home again. He wanted to shower. Of course he did. Go shower, I said. Off he went. A few minutes later I heard something shatter in the bathroom.  

"Everything OK?" I called out from the kitchen. 

He opened the door a crack. His shirt was off. "Don't freak out," he said.  

I saw pieces of his tungsten wedding ring all over the floor. The ring had been too cold for too long. It rolled off the counter and broke. Gabriel knows full well how fast my mind can move. Give me two strands of anything and I'll knit them into a story. A shattered ring? A broken marriage! Divorce! A tell-tale sign! Something worse...someone else?  

"Stop," he said. He had caught me red-handed. "It doesn't mean anything." 

As a lover of narrative, as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, I'm lightning quick to want to match up metaphor with meaning. Synchronicity with story. I see life as art. I see art as life; it's this tailored congruency. I translate one into the other and back again. 

Safe to say, Gabriel and I see the world quite differently. When I get into one of my "loops," overlaying a narrative lens onto our everyday living, Gabriel will say, "A rock is just a rock." But I have a rock in my desk, this piece of frankincense, rough-cut and xanthous, I kept from a writing exercise in grad school. I remember our teacher, Elissa Schappell, passing them out. Amber, Susan, Lillian, Miranda, Melanie, and Katrine were around the table, too. I remember the square layout of our classroom, the type of chair (jet black with a bendy back), and where I sat (in the seat furthest from the door with my back to a pair of radius windows looking out onto a Columbia quad). Details are everything to me. They animate. They color. They light the fuse of art. They make any story "go."

My desk drawer is full of Post-it notes with ideas that I'm still working on, neon pencil erasers, recipes for elderberry syrup, a poem I wrote about my mom but never showed her or even typed up, a deck of tarot cards, and a quotable card that says, "calm down." To me, everything contains a story, a history, be it a sweater, a bookshelf, a plant, a muffin tin. I save voicemails, letters from friends, screenshots, college transcripts. Right now, I have 32,209 photos on my phone and 1,269 videos. I never considered myself to be an archivist; I consider myself a writer. I want to capture every detail. I want to remember it all. But how do I make sense of my love of detail? How do I make art from my overwhelm? 

*****

Before I graduated from my MFA program, I submitted my completed thesis and met with two fiction writers. We had moved to North Carolina, so my meeting was virtual, on Zoom. Gabriel and I had planned to see family at the lake, and I considered our drive out there, after my final conference, my "finish line," the end to my MFA experience. I imagined driving west on I-40 with a powerful royal feeling emanating from my body. I'd now be a Writer with nothing but potential before me. But that was not the case. The meeting did not go well. I was in low spirits. I was depressed. Maybe, I thought, I was "too sensitive" to do this writing thing. Maybe my love of details would never line up "right." I couldn't see my path forward, and to me this was the same thing as saying there was no path. For months, honestly, even years after that conference, before I got too far in a creative project, I convinced myself I was blessed with foresight: I could see every possible roadblock in sight. Oh wasn't it wonderful to save myself from even having to try? 

*****

But how do I make sense of my love of detail? How do I make art from my overwhelm? And, how do I step over my self-pity and fear? I look to the masters. I think of Natalie Goldberg, the best-selling author of Writing Down the Bones, and how she found her own way to build a writing practice. "Every time I thought of a topic or idea, any flash at all, even if it seemed to have no connection to writing—the apples in fall at Nora Zimmerman's orchard in Talpa or the story I'd heard about the man who ate a car in India—I jotted it down at the back of my notebook." When she sat to write, she picked a few topics, listed them at the top of her page, and wrote for two hours. Structure is what saves her. Structure is what gives her a boundary to play within. What does my structure look like? What is yours? 

I, too, find calm with the structure of time. I, too, use a marker of two hours (I set a timer) to make progress and cover some ground. I try to write from seven to nine AM. I don't beat myself up when I can't. And if I want to keep going, if I can keep going, I do. 

In my life, I continue to play with connection and context. I can't not. I love writing. I love making stories. When the details do all match up, as Richard Hugo says in his essay “The Triggering Town,” "There's [...] an exhilaration that can't be explained to anyone who has not experienced it." It's electric. My work is not in pleasing others with what I write. My work is not even in fully understanding what manifests through me. My work is in the details, of gathering them as I go, collecting them in my basket, and showing up at the page with all of them to see what shines. My work is the writing. Making the edits and moving sections around. It's like quilt making, seeing which pieces fit and how all the elements come together. Needless to say, while I'm working, if I stay focused, I am nothing but my absolute happiest. 

And what about the wedding ring? Gabriel got another one. In fact, there have been many. None of them the same ring I put on his finger at our small wedding ceremony near the rowboats in Central Park, but the ring is not the marriage. The marriage is the marriage. I see that all so clearly now. 

Erin Pesut studied writing at Warren Wilson College and earned her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Chautauqua, Whale Road Review, West Trestle Review, Poetry South, Camas, and HeartWood Literary Magazine, among others. She was a finalist for CRAFT's inaugural Creative Nonfiction Award. Born in South Carolina, she now lives in Vermont. www.erinpesut.com

A robust life that engaged my body more than my head and laptop—that was the silent longing driving my entry into ceramics in my mid-thirties. During the day I was miserable. Midlife was so close, yet the career path I was on seemed deeply uninspired and full of land mines. I had a job with a good title at a nonprofit, seeming like a solid step forward yet rife with insane personalities and hidden local politics. I was stuck between the optimistic potential and the stark reality of this role.

At the same time the sense of my forties was both expansive and open like a field, full of potential and ready to be filled.

The thick mess of clay on one’s hands takes some getting used to in this sterile world we often prefer. Sanitize, bleach, mop, wash our children’s clothes or pajamas when they’ve been worn just once. Computer-based jobs, heady project management. Meetings, structures, marketing, social media—we spend our days in our heads, communicating with robots, and utterly disconnected from our bodies.  Our hearts and souls hardly have a chance. 

Imagine if it weren’t ludicrous to believe that you could make a meaningful living as an artist. What if career counselors taught that the options for a life well lived stretched beyond the practical “marketable” skills, if they believed that corporate jobs weren’t better? What if society didn’t sell the idea of a perfect house, many children, and 9–5 dreams? Perhaps we would know that reliability and extra-clean, folded toddler clothes are a farce. Maybe we would be stretched beyond thinking of where we could always get a job. Maybe we would design the society, social systems, and cultural imagination that valued creative and happy people as much as 401Ks, real estate value, and practicality. 

What if we didn’t relegate our passions into weekend hobbies, given just a few hours a week of attention? What if we translated them into a livelihood, and we saw them represented in vibrant local magazines and newspapers: more people who built things with their hands; more people finding ways to navigate this world led by their hearts instead of their bank accounts; more people willing to trade a bit of money and security for more beauty and passion.

The mess begetting a beautiful hand-made structure drew me in quickly. As soon as I had a taste of the wet ball of clay rising up into a round vessel, I was hooked. It was so drastically different from the daily life of complicated relationships in non-profit management and the basics of child rearing. Something physical, tangible, a bit magical and insanely different from anything I’d done or from the way I’d lived my life thus far. Mud into a vessel, water into wine.

Bare hands, motorized wheels complete with speed pedals, spread legs, sharp tools, and powdered chemicals. Raw and alive, it is everything primal that we crave when the noise of the world quiets down. It’s the yowling response to an inner urge. There’s no room for argument—it is or it isn’t, and no other opinion matters unless I want it to. It’s the ugliest and most complicated of processes necessary to create beauty.

Ceramics has grown exponentially in the last decade, with hobby potters developing around the globe at rapid rates. Thanks to social media, many have carved out a nice living selling their stylized mugs for niche tastes. During the pandemic, community studio members set up their own home studios and drove up demand on kilns such that Skutt, the popular manufacturer, had a five-month waiting list. Kilns are notoriously expensive to buy and install, requiring a roughly $5000 investment—wheel, clay, and glazes notwithstanding.  People have been getting serious.

The equipment is one huge part of the buy-in, but the mindset and love of process is even more vital. I once met a lady so very excited about ceramics, yet she could not return after the first few classes. The sustained mud-on-hand sensation proved too much for her.  She simply couldn’t be that messy; she couldn’t move beyond the thick and wet coating, no matter the result, no matter the outcome. It was a cost she wasn’t willing to pay. When I suggested the significantly tidier avenue of hand-building, she gave a vague “maybe,” but we both seemed to know she wouldn’t be back. Some things push people too far beyond their boundaries, and some boundaries are just too strong.

The mess before the masterpiece—it’s what so many of us fear. Usually because we don’t know what the structure will be. Sure, we want an awesome life complete with a satisfying job, dynamic and loving partner, perfect children. But are we willing to leave mediocrity for it?  Are we willing to leave the bloody but ok-enough job? Are we willing to fail first? To make a few wrong turns?

Perhaps we want to make a tall vase, but so many things can get in the way of that. Perhaps we didn’t wedge as well as we’d thought and there’s an air bubble that throws off one of the first pulls.  As we go to shape the shoulders we knock it off center, unable to regroup despite our efforts.  Or maybe there’s a loud bang in the street that startles us and jolts our careful hands as we’re trimming and the foot has a huge gauge. External forces so often throw us off course.

Maybe we’ve thrown the perfect piece, yet in the final stage we leave the glaze too thick and it runs off the pot in the kiln.  Worse still, through no fault of our own, our pot is ruined in the final fire because of someone else’s dripping glaze from a shelf above.  Or whoever is unloading the kiln drops the pot when putting it on the shelf.

Some people want the guarantee of the outcome before they’re willing to be free enough to be ruined.  If I know I’ll get a better job soon, I’ll tell off my boss and quit this miserable place. If I know I’ll find my dream man, I’ll leave my detached husband. If the mess is manageable, if the costs aren’t too high, if I can maintain some control.  If I know the people around me won’t negatively affect my success, won’t put up roadblocks, maybe then the mess is worth it. That type of thinking means very few messes will ever even begin, very few lives will ever get changed.

The longer I live, heck, the longer I do anything at all, the more I realize that the best things in life follow the biggest messes. This metaphor is what brings us back to art, to sport, to new careers, to marriage, to divorce, to spontaneous moves, or new inner urges.  Humans like the struggle, the journey, more than the short-lived satisfaction of achievement—any married couple can vouch for that.  Enjoying fruit of one’s labor is short-lived peace; we need more challenges, more tests of ourselves, we need to change, grow, evolve.  What if I picked up a new skill, a new language, a new city of residence, then how would my life expand?  What new adventures would I have?  It’d be thick with challenge at first, and then eventually a new form of life would emerge. Earth into vessel, water into wine. 

Early in my pottery days, my then goal was to build a teapot. I’d sneak to the studio after work, sometimes with muddy farm boots still on; from slaughter to the pursuit of elegance. The components are tricky beyond throwing a well-shaped pot, adding rims and designing a lid that fits.  The cohesion of the pot, from handle to lid and spout, all need to speak to one another in style, size, and shape. The intricacies of getting the lid to fit, the handle centered, the spout sliced at the right angle and pouring well continue to challenge me. The mess was constant and varied. Not just muddy hands, but dry trimming pieces littered around the studio. Discarded spout and handle options, carving and slicing tools, a bucket of water to keep clay moist and pliable.  The teapot remained elusive.

In the beginning I thought I just needed a hobby to escape from the non-profit drama, something that wasn’t work or kids. Something truly my own. Thankfully, at the time I didn’t know the mess that would come, just how dirty and sticky life would get before it settled into something more smooth and rhythmic.  Before there was something that I got to control, that measured my abilities in such a tangible way.

Eventually the stark contrast between my pursuit of beautiful pots with the job at the nonprofit became impossible to ignore. In one instance there was immense creative joy, in the other I was constantly butting up against impenetrable walls. I knew I couldn’t go on like this, and once I made that realization, the job dissolved unspectacularly just a month before my 40th birthday. It was behind me. Suddenly I was able to walk into my forties with open space in which to expand and time to regularly work with my hands. 

With all of my newfound freedom, I set a goal to build that pinnacle-project that had been getting me stuck earlier—a teapot. The combination of a variety of skills that considers a range of factors including matching handle and spout size and angles. First the round body, high belly with a well-trimmed foot. Then the lid, practicing styles with several sugar-jars. Handle thickness, curve to support the weight. Now that I was free from non-profit drama, the teapot came together smoothly and quickly.

Soon thereafter, I let myself dream and conceived of a community art studio in my neighborhood. With concrete and deliberate steps, the dream slowly became reality. I leased the space, kitted it out, marketed its programs—all without ceramics and focusing on other mediums. I should have known by then that pirouetting around what I really want never works out in the end.

I opened the studio and closed it six weeks later thanks to COVID-19.  Five months after that with the studio crawling along under capacity restrictions, I woke up one morning with the cliché “why not me?” and knew that I needed to buy some wheels and add ceramics to the studio offerings. Invest. It was instinct with a bit of justification and experimentation. Spend money when it feels scarce. Defy odds, put goodness out there when so little is visible.

If I knew how mud would grow to encompass my life, would I have sunken my hands deep into that bucket years ago? Who asks for so much trouble?  For so much drama?  For so much mess?  Why couldn’t this stay as a nice little side hobby, as most potters have?

I realized years ago that in spite of my ability to juggle and coordinate, I really have the bandwidth for only two major areas in my life. Work and family are the two that are dominating in this phase. Loving on my kids is a non-negotiable daily requirement. So, if I have work, then I don’t have time for a hobby.  Which means, the hobby takes center stage and becomes my work.

It is not how I’ve ever planned it, indeed so many times I’ve tried to worm my way out of this pattern and “just get a normal job.”  But the mythical normal job, something I’ve heard about in rumors and casual conversations, hasn’t been in the cards for me. There’s usually a murky period that precludes a wonderful new stage, a swamp to wade through before the clear field of warm sunshine. Coming to accept my reality, that ebb and flow, has been the goal of my midlife.

I now have seven more wheels, a kiln, 1000-plus pounds of clay, glazes, and all the fixins’ of a busy studio to manage in the hardest of times. Ironically, I find it hard to get enough time to quietly throw and dive back into the mess that led me here, but when I do, I hear that quiet inner whisper, ever so soft, saying “yeeessss, keep going.”  Steady on.

Now when I dress for work, it’s in jeans, and I put on a nice sweater that I inevitably take off as soon as I get in, replaced by a clay-caked apron. Hauling 50-pound bags of clay, wedging large rolls of reclaimed clay until my shoulders are slightly sore and building more muscle. Mid-40s and with young children is an odd time of life to get a physical job and it’s exhilarating. I mix the powder of glaze materials with ease now, can usually tell the right thickness with my finger alone. On the wheel I center the clay, pull up the walls, compress the base, and then get busy shaping the belly and final form. Hands wet and caked with mud, my midlife is a getting a shape of its own. This mess is an enormous improvement on the non-profit world I left. Still filthy with complications and mud, I’ve become comfortable with this chaos of my own making. In fact, I’ve fallen in love with it. 

Gena Mavuli is a writer, potter, and owner of Create: Art in Community. She holds a B.A. from University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and an M.A. from the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Gena resides in Boston, Massachusetts with her family, but her mind enjoys 1000 lives in 1000 different locales each night.

In the summer of 2013, I was trying to write a novel called The Dictionary of Lost Words. The main character, Waller Lewis, is a laid-off newspaper reporter whose wife has left him. He washes up at a ramshackle house that he’s inherited from his mother that may or may not be haunted. While he makes the house livable, he sleeps in his camper and thumbs through old dictionaries, collecting unusual words.

It wasn’t going well, for Waller or for me.

Every morning I reported to my home office in what had once been my oldest son’s bedroom. I sat on the futon that Perry left behind and paged through my own dictionaries—the 1936 Webster’s I bought at a yard sale. The 1977 edition I won in high school. An unabridged one of my mother’s.

In a red notebook with an Emily Dickinson quote on the cover—“I dwell in possibility”—every day I jotted a few words that might interest Waller. For some reason, I started with the letter F (for failure?). Fulguration, “lightning,” was the first word I wrote down. I proceeded to L and then double-backed to I, making it only as far as “implexion,” “rare – the act of enfolding or entwining” before abandoning the enterprise.

Meanwhile, I had gotten Waller to the old house and peopled his new world with a crusty cast of characters—Claudia, an eccentric artist who sneaks into the house to paint; Carl, her father, who evicts Waller from a seasonal campground; a mysterious, unnamed woman he sees in an abandoned summer hotel who may be an old flame; Bonnie, his shrewish estranged wife, and Abbie, the ghost of the woman who once lived in his house.

Chapters piled up, complications ensued, but I became more confounded as time went on. Where was this story going? The novel was a jumble of words in need of a plot. Every day in my journal I posed more questions. Is Waller running from something? Does he have a secret? “Until I get a better handle on Waller’s predicament, the book will continue to founder,” I wrote on June 25.

It did not help that I had committed to a raft of freelance assignments to cover the gap between semesters. I hated every minute of it—the phone calls, the interviews, the fact-checking—but with no summer classes to teach, I needed the money.

At some point, my mind shifted away from Waller. I did not recognize this as it happened. I remember only an idle question, a noodling that seemed more personal than creative. But I think it started with the bulletin board.

When I moved into Perry’s room, I commandeered his brother’s corkboard and hung it on the wall. I began tacking up images—famous paintings, old advertisements, vintage family snapshots—a habit from my college days, when I posted beach photos to remind me of home. But this wasn’t homesickness so much as nostalgia. 

Every time I got stuck on Waller, my eyes would stray from my computer monitor to the bulletin board, where I had posted a black-and-white graduation portrait of my aunt.

At 97, Dot moldered in an assisted-living facility in Virginia, her once brilliant mind lost to dementia. One of my mother’s three older sisters, she had led an incredible life. In 1957 she earned a Ph.D. in plant ecology, an unusual feat for a woman of that time, by doing field work in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Dot popped in and out of our lives—every summer she showed up with a carousel of wildflower slides from her world travels; during the school year she sent us birthday checks and a subscription to National Geographic. Mostly, she and my mother corresponded.

What had her life been like? I wondered. How difficult was it for a woman to do field research in the 1950s—camping on Mt. Le Conte with a shotgun to ward off bears? Did she struggle to get hired as a professor and earn tenure? What had she given up along the way? At 53, I was the same age Dot had been when she finally married—a diffident 64-year-old widower she met at church.

At first, these were just questions about an interesting woman. But I could not think about Dot without confronting my mother’s relationship with her as a sister, our relationship with her as nieces. It was all implex—“enfolded, intricate, entangled, complicated”—and the more I dwelled on it, the more uncomfortable I grew. Why was it that we never visited Aunt Dot in Virginia, yet my cousins did so frequently? Why did my mother seem set apart from her more prosperous sisters, one of whom lived in Delaware, another in West Palm Beach? What did my mother think about being left behind in Rhode Island when her three sisters moved away?

“The thing is, you can’t expect to go digging around in the past—no matter how innocuous it seems—without your shovel hitting a box,” I wrote on July 6.

I was supposed to be working on another chapter about that hapless word-collector, Waller Lewis. But instead on July 6 I unleashed in a self-described “white heat” all of the resentments that I’d been carrying around for years surrounding my mother’s family, describing myself as “so mad I want to undo my bulletin board.” Then I proceeded to sketch out a story of “two sisters or three,” “each jealous of the other,” “betrayal,” “estrangement.” “One sister goes up to the mountains to study—and to escape,” I wrote. “And the other is climbing her own, metaphorical mountain.” Although the novel would evolve through many drafts in seven years, those central elements in what I came to refer to as the “sisters book” never wavered. 

But like a spouse stuck in a bad marriage, I soldiered on far too long trying to salvage my relationship with Waller Lewis. I engaged in dialogues with him. “I told you from the start I was a failure,” he replied. “I’m even a failure at being a protagonist.” I listed five things to do with him, including “kill him” and “set him free and see where he goes.”

But I did not follow my own advice, at least not at first. Who wants to abandon months of planning, writing, revising? Deep down, I was cowed by the real novel I must write. It would be long, messy, and emotionally difficult. It would take me to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and to rural Florida. It would mean years of rewriting and 91 queries to find an agent. Even now, seven years later, that book—Sisters in Exile—is still not quite done.

I don’t know what happened to Waller Lewis. He’s back there, somewhere, dutifully contemplating words like “levant” (verb: “to decamp; to run away; to abscond”) and “katabasis” (from the Greek, “the retreat to the sea made by the Greek mercenaries … any similar retreat”). Maybe someday I will free him from his musty camper and ghostly, rundown farmhouse. But I doubt it.

The problems that bedeviled that novel in 2013 have not gone away—its aimless narrative, feckless male protagonist, air of hopelessness. I had just left the newspaper industry after three decades, a fraught parting. I was starting a new career as an adjunct college instructor of writing and English that often left me feeling incompetent. Onto Waller I unloaded my fears of failure; the story hit a wall because he was merely a surrogate for my frustrations.

Today, my aunt is back up on my bulletin board, keeping company with Gilbert Stuart’s famous, unfinished portrait of George Washington. Unlike The Dictionary of Lost Words and Stuart’s painting, the novel that Aunt Dot inspired will soon be complete. But there is something to be learned from Stuart’s best-known work. I wasn’t thinking about Waller when I tacked Washington up there a couple of weeks ago, but now the father of our country stares back at me soberly, as Waller might regard me from the page. What is he saying about what it means to be unfinished? The portrait is not done—only one quarter of the canvas has been painted, and George’s head seems to float on a blank cloud. But Stuart saw the painting as raw material (he made 130 copies that sold for $100 each, a princely sum in the early nineteenth century). The incomplete portrait became the iconic image of our first president, the one we see hanging in courthouses and town halls, on stamps and the dollar bill. Stuart painted five other presidents, as well as five lesser-known portraits of Washington. He was not troubled by this bit of unfinished business, and neither should we worry about ours. One way or another, all our artistic efforts bear fruit. Maybe they don’t turn out the way we expect. Maybe we are forced to walk away from them, to put down the pen or the brush, to set aside the half-molded lump of clay. But they are not failures – they are not even detours. They have led us to the creative present we are in right now, and in that moment lies all artistic possibility.

“Lost Words” is the winner of Critical Read’s 2020 The Creative Block Essay Contest.

Betty J. Cotter is the author of the novels 'Roberta's Woods' (Five Star, 2008) and 'The Winters,' which earned her a Fiction Fellowship from the R.I. State Council on the Arts. The first chapter of her novel 'Moonshine Swamp' was selected for the premiere issue of Novel Slices (2020) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The first chapter of her novel 'Sisters in Exile' placed first in the Tallahassee Writers Association's Seven Hills Literary Contest and was published in its anthology in 2021. She holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.