– Creek Road Pottery LLC Newsletter – July 5th, 2026 –
Hello from rural Pennsylvania, where the wood kiln is halfway up, the garden is producing its first harvests, and yesterday was the 250th birthday of the United States of America. The last two weeks have been a mix of kiln building, book reading, rocket kiln testing, and the kind of heat that pushes everything indoors except the writing. This newsletter covers the stretch from late June through the 4th of July, and the thread running through all of it is the same one it always is: do the work, catch yourself when you’re hiding from it, and keep moving forward one brick, one pot, one decision at a time. The kiln build is progressing. The garden is feeding us. The fall shows are on the horizon. The summer reading has been exceptional.
The Kiln Build
Ana is moving forward, slowly but with real progress. I spent a full day dry-stacking the arch to confirm I had the correct bricks in the right positions and enough of them to complete the build. After finding I had the wrong type of sand, too coarse for slurry, I drove to the landscaping store and picked up two bags of fine pool filter sand. Mixed it 50/50 with fire clay to a milkshake-like consistency and started stacking. About seven rows up I realized the base was uneven and the error was compounding with every row. When stacking bricks, if something on the bottom is off, it becomes more of an issue as you go up. If I had been smarter about it I would have caught it at row one rather than row seven. On the bright side, it gave me practice on brick stacking and the proper thickness of slurry between bricks.
I also loaded the previous owners’ handwritten firing notes into Claude A.I. by photographing the pages. It has been a huge help, as many times information about firings is recorded but left in the notebook and never looked at until the next firing. Loading everything into A.I. allowed an overall analysis comparing firings, working out stoking patterns and troubleshooting techniques, and creating centerlines for damper and draft placement. I trust but verify, and if things are incorrect I let it know so it can learn. More hard bricks came available from another local wood-fire artist, and I hope to make a few trips out to have enough brick for a small fast-fire kiln for my own work. The heat has slowed the build considerably, as stacking brick in one-hundred-degree weather would be dangerous. Any stacking needs to happen in the early morning or evening for a few hours when things are cooler. Can you see the mistake below?
The Books
The heat has been good for one thing: reading. I have been working through two books that have been sitting on the shelf waiting for the right time, and the right time turned out to be a hundred-degree week with the air conditioner running. Wood-Fired Stoneware and Porcelain by Jack Troy covers firing reactions and variables in the early chapters, laying out ten points about what actually happens inside a wood kiln during a firing. How clay-body fluxes interact with fireborne alkalies. How the firebox creates intense heat zones. How stacking density affects heat penetration. Every one of those points spoke directly to what I am trying to work out with Ana. I can’t wait to read more of this great text. I thank you Jack!
The other book is The Self-Reliant Potter by Andrew Holden, which I was able to sign out of the library since it is out of print and very expensive to buy. Both authors write from deep experience about making pots and firing kilns, and reading them alongside each other while building a kiln has made the learning feel less like studying and more like conversation. I also went back to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art this week, specifically the section on how the professional acts in the face of fear. Pressfield writes that the amateur believes he must first overcome his fear before he can do his work, while the professional knows that fear can never be overcome. That distinction has been sitting with me ever since. I have been the amateur more times than I can count, waiting for the fear to leave before starting. The fear never leaves. You just get tired of waiting for it.
The Garden
Rachel and I pulled the first real harvest from the garden this week. Radishes, kale, broccoli, and the cauliflower is next. The radishes were a little disappointing as some of them grew tall rather than producing well, though it might have been the variety, since other radish plants did fine. We made a nice salad for dinner with what we picked. When eating from the garden back home my dad would always laugh and say how lucky we were to eat a free meal. But we all knew that no meal is free, and a lot of work goes into growing a garden for sure.
The garden this year is part of the same plan everything else is part of: growing food that is getting expensive at the store and depending a little less on systems we don’t control. I have been uploading grocery receipts to Claude A.I. and tracking month-to-month cost comparisons, and the numbers are making the case for the garden better than I could on my own. The first real win showed up on a grocery trip this week when we no longer needed to buy bagged kale. That is a small number on its own, but it is a real one, and real numbers are what add up over a season.
Do the Thing
Epictetus wrote in the Discourses that every habit and every faculty is confirmed and strengthened by the corresponding actions. The faculty of walking by walking. The faculty of running by running. If you wish to be a good reader, read. If you wish to be a good writer, write. Two thousand years later and it is still the truest thing I have read about making change. You do not become the thing by thinking about the thing. You become it by doing it. I paid off the credit cards by making one payment at a time. I am building the solar system one component at a time. The wood kiln is going up one brick at a time. None of those things happened because of a breakthrough. They happened because I kept doing the small corresponding action.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in the Meditations that the impediment to action advances action, and that what stands in the way becomes the way. I think about that line when I am standing in front of seven rows of brick that need to come back down because the first row was uneven. The obstacle is not separate from the work. The obstacle is the work. Taking those bricks down and restacking them is the kiln build. Every correction, every wrong sand, every row that needs to come apart, those are the steps that teach you how to do it right. Lewis Hyde’s The Gift also landed well this month. After reading Hyde I feel a lot better about both working and making art. In my view you become an artist by creating art, just as a runner becomes a runner by running.
Thank you for following along and supporting Creek Road Pottery. I still have five slots open for the Creek Road Pottery Collector’s Club. Thanks so much for the five of you who signed up! I hope everyone is having a great summer. Happy 4th of July if you celebrate! Every comment, visit, and bit of encouragement is most helpful to hear. Soon, I hope to show images of the finished kiln once fully built. Be sure to keep making work that matters for the people who care.
Until next time,
Alford Wayman
Artist/ Owner
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