Product Description

An intimate family memoir about the power of love in the face of adversity:  the passionate pursuit of art-and the brave art of living simply-by four generations of a fiercely independent Southern family.

Almost a century ago, a New Orleans society woman vowed that her three sons would become artists. Turning her back on bourgeois life and abetted by her skeptical husband-a grain merchant-she bought twenty-eight acres of woodland on the Mississippi Sound. Beside a sleepy bayou, in the shade of towering pines and magnolias, she opened an art colony, one of the first of its kind in the South.

Her passion for art pulled the family through the hard times of the Depression and endured into the present. Her oldest son, Peter Anderson, founded Shearwater Pottery and, yearning "to make Shearwater synonymous with perfection," drew the entire family into his adventure. His brothers, "Mac" and Walter, made strange, wonderful pieces, though Walter Anderson eventually left his wife, his children, and the pottery to search for his own Nirvana and to capture, in writing and in watercolors, the wildlife of the Mississippi Coast.

Drawn by the exquisite work of Shearwater Pottery, the authors discover that painting, poetry, and storytelling-much of it by strong, unforgettable women-are still an essential part of the family's daily life. Intimate diaries, letters, and poems lead the reader into a stormy, passionate, sometimes heartbreaking past. Meticulously researched and compassionately written, Dreaming in Clay gathers one family's eternal legacy of wisdom and beauty: the healing power of art, the consolations of writing and of memory, and the spiritual treasures given to us-if we care to receive them-by the natural world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #661624 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10
• Released on: 2000-10-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Booklist
Vanderbilt University English and Spanish literature professor Maurer and his wife Iglesias, an amateur pottery collector trained as an academic, discovered Shearwater Pottery of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, by chance. Their first visit, however, convinced them they wanted to tell the family's (and the pottery's) story, drawing on interviews and family members' journals as well as archival research. Over the years, Shearwater became an art colony, with painters, carpenters, sculptors, and writers as well as potters practicing their arts. Maurer and Iglesias not only discuss their works (there's a helpful appendix on the "marks" the pottery used over the years) but also describe marriages and illnesses, the struggle to keep the business going during the Depression, and family members who left Mississippi and, years later, returned to the family business. An involving, often moving narrative. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Inside Flap Copy
An intimate family memoir about the power of love in the face of adversity:  the passionate pursuit of art-and the brave art of living simply-by four generations of a fiercely independent Southern family.

Almost a century ago, a New Orleans society woman vowed that her three sons would become artists. Turning her back on bourgeois life and abetted by her skeptical husband-a grain merchant-she bought twenty-eight acres of woodland on the Mississippi Sound. Beside a sleepy bayou, in the shade of towering pines and magnolias, she opened an art colony, one of the first of its kind in the South.

Her passion for art pulled the family through the hard times of the Depression and endured into the present. Her oldest son, Peter Anderson, founded Shearwater Pottery and, yearning "to make Shearwater synonymous with perfection," drew the entire family into his adventure. His brothers, "Mac" and Walter, made strange, wonderful pieces, though Walter Anderson eventually left his wife, his children, and the pottery to search for his own Nirvana and to capture, in writing and in watercolors, the wildlife of the Mississippi Coast.

Drawn by the exquisite work of Shearwater Pottery, the authors discover that painting, poetry, and storytelling-much of it by strong, unforgettable women-are still an essential part of the family's daily life. Intimate diaries, letters, and poems lead the reader into a stormy, passionate, sometimes heartbreaking past. Meticulously researched and compassionately written, Dreaming in Clay gathers one family's eternal legacy of wisdom and beauty: the healing power of art, the consolations of writing and of memory, and the spiritual treasures given to us-if we care to receive them-by the natural world.

About the Author
Christopher Maurer, professor of Spanish literature at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is known as a critic and translator of Federico García Lorca, Baltasar Gracián (The Art of Worldly Wisdom), and Juan Ramón Jiménez. María Estrella Iglesias, an academic adviser at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is the author of Temas, an introduction to Spanish literature. Her collection of American art pottery has been featured on Home & Garden Television.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Story of Art in America
This is a great book telling a wonderful story of art in America. This is what American art is all about and how this little pottery enterprise made its mark on the art world. You will enjoy this book very much.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 10/22/00
THE STORY OF A FAMILY'S DEDICATION TO EACH OTHER AND THEIR ART

By Lynna Williams.

Maria Estrella Iglesias, a collector of American art pottery, was in an antiques mall near Nashville when she saw a pottery vase glazed "an extraordinary blue." Seeing it across the cluttered room "was like catching a glimpse of the ocean," and when she turned it over she found a name and mark unfamiliar to her. Iglesias couldn't know it then, but that chance introduction to Shearwater Pottery would open up an extraordinary world apart: the personal and public history of the Andersons of Ocean Springs, Miss.

Some readers may already be familiar with the brilliant work of painter, printmaker and muralist Walter Inglis Anderson without knowing the story of his role in the pottery, and the broader story of his family's passionate commitment to art as a way of life.

Four generations of Andersons have created Shearwater's art and, while cordially disliking the term "artist," have nurtured potters, painters, sculptors, poets and writers, from the Depression to the present. The story Iglesias and her husband, Vanderbilt professor Christopher Maurer, tell in "Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi" has passion and torment sufficient for grand opera, all borne of a relentless dedication to the making of art. It would be a remarkable story in any time. In the America of the 21st Century, when art is so often viewed as extraneous in our daily lives, or as just another commodity to be consumed, it takes on a special, almost electric, resonance. Maurer and Iglesias' book, which starts with an account of their own "falling into" the Shearwater world, is a compelling account of lives in which art, for better and worse, is as basic a necessity of life as air and water.

It began with a marriage, 100 years ago. After a 12-year courtship, George Walter Anderson, a prosperous grain dealer, wed Annette McConnell, a lawyer's daughter educated at Newcomb College in New Orleans, a central force in the post-Civil War resurgence of arts and crafts in the South. By 1907 there were three sons: Peter, Walter Inglis and James McConnell.

From the beginning, their artistic mother wanted art to wash over them, to be fundamental to who they were. Their businessman father dreamed of "Anderson, Incorporated," the family functioning as a unit. "Dreaming in Clay" documents how both parents' wishes shaped their sons' lives, from their free spirits and work ethic, to their specialized educations, to their vocations, to their choice of wives for whom love and art were one, inextricably linked. As in fairy tales, both wishes-for art, for a family enterprise-came true, but not at all in simple, happily-ever-after fashion.

As an enterprise, Shearwater Pottery began after the family's move in 1918 from New Orleans to Ocean Springs, a place where the beauty and wildness of the natural world led inevitably to the making of art. Oldest son Peter was 22 or 23 when he built a kiln in the side of a hill. One of the pleasures of "Dreaming in Clay" is its careful record of what was involved in the making of modern pottery, and an artistic community, in a "sleepy coastal town that had never had more than a nodding acquaintance with art."

Slowly, amid Peter's ongoing education with established artists intrigued with the experiment at Ocean Springs, the family worked to perfect the technical aspects of producing pottery: the right kiln, the right glazes, the right touch with wheel and hand-thrown pots. The Andersons were getting a business on its feet, but artistic concerns were paramount from the beginning: More than 2,500 pots considered unacceptable -- sometimes entire kilnloads -- were intentionally destroyed before Shearwater opened to the public. The name for the pottery came from a book about birds but was used in tribute to Mississippi's black skimmers, which shear the surface of the water to scoop up small fish. The name reflects what has become Shearwater's enduring connection to the Mississippi landscape.

In writing "Dreaming in Clay," Maurer and Iglesias were given access to the family's archive, and it is in the letters of the day that the family's struggles and triumphs come most vividly alive. Nowhere is that more true than in the stories of the two oldest sons, Peter and Walter Inglis (called Bobby by his family), and the women they would marry, sisters Patricia and Agnes "Sissy" Grinstead. Pat was "transported" the moment she saw the handsome Peter Anderson, and was immediately adopted as a "true" member of the clan. Bob's courtship of Sissy was long and arduous, and drew him into producing decorative pottery and figurines at Shearwater as a livelihood, a way of showing that he, too, could support a wife. The two were married in 1933; four years later, Bob had a devastating mental breakdown. Not long after, Peter, too, was hospitalized, suffering from depression. Peter's illness was more easily treated; Bob's involved a more prolonged hospital stay, and the latest, and most extreme, of psychiatric treatments. When he returned home to Ocean Springs he would find his art again but never be a part of the family in the same way as before.

The book's account of Sissy and Pat Anderson is fascinating in its picture of women determined that both love and art would survive. The resolve of all the family to see each other through, no matter what, helps make "Dreaming in Clay" a highly readable and remarkable testament. We're able to appreciate the survival of Shearwater Pottery into the 21st Century in part because it is also the continuation of a family that has lived, and lived through, its passion for art.

Dreaming in Clay -- A Dream of a Book!
I wrote the 1st review of this book. There are 3 typo's in the second paragraph. It should read "Shearwater POTTERY not potter, (2) struggled not strugged, and (3) their ART not air. Thanks for letting me make these corrections.