During this period I began winning prizes in exhibitions. Sometimes it was an embarrassment, because often Pete was on the jury. People were openly critical: "How dare you give your own student a prize?" Pete is said to have answered: "Well, there are three of us on the jury and, besides, Paul's is the best pot.
      Sometimes this controversy became notorious. I remember the time I won the first prize in an exhibition at the Emily Lowe Gallery in Coral Gables, Florida for one of my tall pots. The gallery director gave me the purchase prize, all right, but refused to show the piece in the exhibition because he thought it so ugly and badly designed. Last fall, when I happened to be there for my retrospective exhibition, I discovered the pot still sitting forlornly in the basement.
     The Coral Gables exhibition generated criticism that we in California had unfair advantages, that we had more powerful electric wheels and larger highfire stoneware reduction kilns than anyone in the country. I recall thinking at the time that they were missing the point if they thought that the quality of a pot depended on bigger and better equipment. Many years later, when I happened upon the techniques associated with raku it became clear that equipment was not that important. Now I could make small pots of quality with low-tech, raku equipment, sometimes with hardly any equipment at all-just my little old oil burner and a stack of bricks I threw together in twenty minutes to make a kiln.

Inside the Mountain Cabin Evelyn Stirred

     I had already taught for a number of years, so I was determined to become a production potter after completing my MFA. Ginny and I decided to move to Aspen, Colorado, to buy some land and build a house and studio.
     Around this time, Ricky Peterson, who taught ceramics at Scripps College in Claremont, California, accepted an offer to go to Taiwan and help with governmental programs in ceramics. Millard Sheets, the director of our school in Los Angeles, was asked to help find a replacement for Peterson, who was taking a leave of absence. He called me and said, "Paul, would you go to Scripps for a year?" I said, "Fine."
     So I went out to Claremont and started teaching at Scripps College. The first year stretched to a second, and then to a third. Apparently Peterson liked what he was doing in Taiwan and, in the interim, I had settled in. When Peterson did return, he found other employment in the art department. The school asked me to continue to teach ceramics.
     When I first started teaching at Scripps, there were only a half-dozen middle-aged students, to whom ceramics was more of a hobby than a profession. I told them they were welcome to continue working but I was not going to do their work for them. They had to learn how to prepare clay and wedge it, mix glazes, and fire the kilns. Well, they found that a little too difficult and left. Young people who came instead, really liked it. So we began to build kilns and otherwise upgrade the department. There was a lot of vitality at Scripps. I brought to the job what I had learned from Peter Voulkos. I worked in the studio, as Pete did, and I demonstrated all the techniques I had learned from him. In the process, I realized what an amazing amount of information I had received from him. Looking back, I think my timing in working with Pete was perfect. He was a production thrower when I first went to study with him, and he had all the skills consistent with throwing forty bowls in the morning and trimming them in the afternoon. Pete passed on to me everything he knew about the craft of clay, and I sucked it up thirstily.
      I ran the Scripps class in Pete's way. I'd tell my class: "I'm going to demonstrate at 10:00 o'clock for twenty minutes, and it will be something I hope will be of benefit to you. You are wel-come to watch. But I'm giving no assignments." At the same time, I tried to provide necessary information. If I saw everyone making bowls, I'd show them how to make bottles. When everyone made bottles, I'd make teapots. I had to be one step ahead of the students. Eventually all the information I passed on was absorbed, in varying degrees, by the students. I came to believe that education should be this: undergraduates and graduates in the same room, learning from each other, sharing equipment, doing everything at the same time. That's the way it is in the real world.
     Of course, it's a lot easier to do this kind of teaching in a one-person department, since with one person you don't have to decide what part of the course to teach. A negative side was that any time I was gone for more than a week, the energy of the class dropped. As soon as I returned they started working again. On the whole, I was lucky in that my previous teachers were good role models. They were all single teachers in their departments and did all their own work simultaneously with the students, without any barriers of rules and regulations.
     One benefit of teaching is the necessity of explaining what you're doing to someone else. You have to figure it out yourself. I never wrote down any of the information on ceramics, and I think that encouraged me to simplify. For example, it was previously thought that the secret of a glaze was in the formula. One collected formulas like secret potions, measured and mixed complex ingredients precisely, and tried to fire them successfully. I moved away from that. Nowadays, I don't measure any materials. All my glazes are variations of a 1-2-3 or equal parts formula. Very simple: just handfuls or scoops or tons or whatever in those proportions.
     Students have their myths, and I like to explode them. For instance, the myth about air bubbles in the clay that blow up in the firing. Of course, it's not the bubble of air that bursts but the moisture in the clay as it turns to steam. More recently there was the terra sigillata myth. Conventional wisdom required that one make it on a gram scale, with sodium silicate, hydrometers readding specific gravity, a ball mill, and such things. Three years ago I went to Nicaragua where, theoretically, I was to help people with their pottery. I saw a woman potter take the slip she had been throwing with, brush it onto her half-hardened pot and begin polishing it. I laughed to myself and said, "Why, that's terra sigillata'." When I returned home, I re-evaluated my approach to terra sigillata and began simplifying. My most recent experiments involve only 25% ball clay and 75% china clay, thinned with water and immediately applied for burnishing. "You mean, you're not going to take the top water off and throw away the bottom? Isn't it important to deflocculate it?" "No, I guess not, if it works."