Juggling Chainsaws "One is a writer, or tries to be one, the other is an artisan, or tries to be one, each wants to be an athlete, though not on their best day." So writes my old friend from childhood and fellow artisan, Andrew Gallimore. "When asked why she became a potter and I a writer, Gina has always answered that she likes pots with words in them, as she loves stories with a beginning and an end; this is what I like too. And it was no surprise when Gina's first book made that list. She writes as one who has no agenda other than to be of some small service to those that read her work. I'm grateful to her for the many hours she has spent over my pottery bench, to her for the many times I've found the pot shop a peaceful refuge, a sanctuary where one can leave the cares of the world for a while." In her new book Pottery: Juggling Chainsaws, Gina shares her adventures in both art and writing. But her pottery side also intersects with another genre that has also found its way into our cultural space, science fiction. She reveals her personal fascination with the universe, and how that feeds into her art. I asked her about that: Beth: Can you share your thoughts about SF? What draws you to it? Do you think SF has given people the courage to ask questions that would be hard for them to ask any other way? Gina: Science fiction gives us permission to ask big questions and think about how little we really know. You can't really blame people who think there are little green men living in Martian cylinders, but I know I don't really believe they have a different species of dog that only responds to certain calls. I grew up reading books like Tom Swift and Star Trek, which I guess you would call science fiction. I read the first Star Wars movie over and over when it came out, just because I loved the way the story was written, in the style of a fable, and I think the way it got people excited about physics (though perhaps not the best approach to physics) in a way that a "real" science fiction book would not. A lot of my early writing experiments were SF because I don't know anything about how to write a convincing love story, or fight scene, or mystery, or any of the things I think people are supposed to read if they have the word "novel" on the cover, so I wrote them that way. And over the years, that's how my non-SF writing has developed, by watching how SF handles different topics. I'm very interested in the way that science fiction allows us to examine the space between good and evil in a world where human beings can be considered gods. It has also led me to write "serious" essays, which I didn't do before, about things like nuclear weapons. I always thought SF stories were silly compared to real stories, but now I'm thinking that maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Beth: Have you always loved writing and the stories that come from that? Have you always been interested in exploring the other parts of life that make up a person's life? Gina: I have had all sorts of different interests and hobbies as I've gotten older. Growing up, I was into the theatre and writing plays. Then I did a little theatre and a little painting, then a lot of drawing and painting. Once I left high school, my interests got all over the place. For a while I was into a lot of really interesting stuff like Buddhism, Taoism, and metaphysics, but then I grew out of that. For a long time I was really into pottery and pottery techniques and pottery philosophy. When I was younger, before the Internet really took off, I would spend hours and hours looking at online museums of ancient Chinese art or medieval European sculpture, trying to figure out how they were making those wonderful-looking white stone objects with the holes in them. I'd spend hours and hours looking at old art books, mostly reproductions from all over the world. I got really into this and eventually collected quite a bit of old art, which was exciting. I made about ten little pieces of art when I was in high school, and I made these tiny little things in high school that were made from some of my old bits and pieces. But then, in high school, I stopped making things, and when I was twenty-five, the first time I tried to make something, it didn't work. I didn't even think of it as failure, because in the back of my mind I was still a complete pottery virgin, but for the next five or six years it never once occurred to me that I could ever make a vase again, or a mug, or anything that looked like it had any sort of human craft behind it. My new book contains a story about me and my friend Andrew and his wife, trying to build a new workbench for our art. You have to understand that neither of us have worked with wood for more than twenty years. We actually owned a huge three-car garage full of wood at one point, and in college I did all the furniture design in an old art school. But since the mid-1990s, we've both been living with artists who work with wood and other media and our apartment has a garage with no wood in it. So when my friend Andrew was visiting me in Virginia, and we were having our first conversation about making things again, I asked him, "Would you like to help me make a new workbench for my pottery stuff? I have everything right here!" The next day we were out at his barn and made the bench. This is how it is when you live in a city where you don't have any wood around and there aren't any good options for local woodworkers to give you things made out of wood, just like when you're twelve and your parents can't think of anything for you to make for Christmas because you've never made anything before. So there are two sides to this. One side is that we got a lot of joy from getting the project done that day and using all that wood, since we've never had the opportunity to work with wood in that way before. And the other side is that all of my friends and I have been through our twentieth year without one of the most important tools for all of us, and I couldn't even conceive of putting wood back into my life until I'd started working on my book. So that was my experience making the book. Beth: When we read your book we often get the sense that you love being a potter and a writer, and sometimes one art informs the other. Could you talk about your passion for both art and writing, and why you love working in both? Gina: When you love something as much as I love making pottery, you can't stop thinking about it. And because I love both of them, I get so excited about what's coming out of the kiln, and as soon as I start watching that film about the making of a pot and being inspired by that, I think of all the ways it is like a story. It has a beginning and an end, there's conflict and the characters are trying to overcome obstacles and work through their emotions, so I don't know what would motivate me to write if not stories. The thing about doing a craft is that once it starts looking like something, you know you're going to have to come back and fix it. The best I can do is try and make something pretty or funny, even if the technique is crude. If I make something and it looks great, I know how that pot should have been made, and once you learn that about an object, and it has that, then you can learn about how it actually got made in the first place. This is like learning about history. If you know how history is made, you'll know how to appreciate it. You see it this way because you had a hand in it. At the time, I thought I was just learning about pottery, and I would learn what I had to do to make that piece, and that's what I would focus on. I learned about clay, I learned about firing and the different characteristics of the different clays, and about the different techniques. But none of that stuff was very interesting. When I was learning pottery I really wanted to get a great glaze, so I learned how to develop glazes. I learned how to design and experiment, so that I would have a very clean glaze on my pottery. I wanted to make glaze changes in order to get a certain effect, but I didn't know how to accomplish that. As I developed techniques and skills and the discipline of making pots, I learned about how pieces of pottery and their history had been made in the past, and I learned about how the whole process worked, what glazes were made from what stones, and what people wanted to see in a pot so they made it. When you see a pre-Renaissance Italian bowl that's as pretty as any of the pieces in my book, you know that the person who made it wanted to show it off and give it that beautiful shape. The idea is that, once the things are made, you have no idea why they've been made. But what I saw in all that information was how to get to the point where I made the vessel, and so I learned to create a design, all by myself. For me, all the knowledge that