I have spent the past four weeks hiking in remote areas that I haven't explored. I go there for a fish. One whose name I will not utter, for to name a desire too early is to risk scattering it like a hatch disturbed by a careless step. Instead, I fish in silence, carrying the weight of a wish that has not yet broken the surface.
Each time I head to the riverbank, I find myself in a philosophical headspace, waxing on. Alone. Only the quiet corners of my brain can hear the echoes. However, my reflections do not align with those of the fly-fishing traditionalist or the fishing philosopher. I imagine stories of crickets and grasshoppers. I imagine them one day printed on glossy pages in the sort of magazine that lies in a waiting room, half-ignored yet oddly eternal.
Perhaps I spend too much time with my mind in the air and not enough with my fly in the water.
There is no hum of crickets or scatter of grasshoppers, which means they are hunkered down – watching. I imagined a steely-eyed tribunal of guardians, silently reporting back to unseen powers about whether I was worthy to be gifted a good story to tell.
By rights, this is the moment I should tether these musings back to clay, to speak of the universal bond between earth, water, and hand. Yet I find myself caught in wonder. Wonder at the voices that have flowed through Studio Potter for over fifty-two years – a number large enough to humble me, because I have not lived so long.
This month’s issue does not circle a single theme; instead, it casts three distinct lines: an interview, a technical, and our free article this month is a critique. We call this a trifecta in fishing lingo. Together, they remind me of those crickets and grasshoppers of my imagined stories: patient witnesses to complexity, watching and reporting in, each with their own story. Perhaps I am like them, too, the crickets, that is; content to sit in the reeds, observing, listening, chirping out the good word, and taking joy in the infinite patterns of the world as it moves past. I am grateful that Studio Potter offers us such a lens, so that what is fleeting might be seen, shared, and held a little longer.
Randi O'Brien, editor and executive director