How a few dominoes
became a wood kiln
This didn't start with a plan. It started with a fire, a respected teacher, a bad batch of clay — and a long line of people who kept showing me the next step.
A friend — a police officer — responded to a fire at a ceramics center. Of all things, it nudged him to encourage me to find my way back into clay. Around the same time, I learned that my first ceramics teacher was fighting cancer. I reached out — it was wonderful and gut-wrenching in equal measure. He recommended I consider Waubonsee Community College, whenever I was ready to reconnect with clay.
A ruined batch, and a fire that caught anyway
My first semester there, I mixed a bad batch — some stray chicken grit left odd blemishes in my pieces. Rather than toss the work, I figured a wood kiln might hide the flaws. It didn't hide anything. But the blush and the layering of ash — the fire caught me, and I never fired any other way again.
I owe a lot to the people I met along the path. Visiting artist Judith Duff showed me that this field — so often dominated by men — had room for voices like hers. At a 2016 wood firing conference, I showed a flawed piece to Tara Wilson and asked how to avoid the mistake next time. She told me to build my own kiln.
River Song Pottery
My crew — my kiln-family — gather four times a year to load and fire about 500 pieces each time. It's a long process: roughly 17 hours to load, a day of rest, 48 hours of coaxing the fire from kindling to a roar, then three more days of cooling, before we discover what we accomplished.
None of this happened alone
Every piece that comes out of that kiln carries someone else's fingerprints on it, one way or another. Mine too.
