In 1977, following the publication of my book, Salt Glazed Ceramics, I discovered, dismayingly, that my passion for that subject had expired, due to running out of questions to explore. Shortly afterward, in an antique shop I came across a wood fired jug from La Borne, France, that led me to Rob Barnard, who was preparing to return to the States from Japan, where he’d been working in Shigaraki.
In the summer of 1978, he showed a few of us how to build a modest anagama at Juniata College, in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where I live and taught. What began as an innocent inquiry turned into a rabbit hole on the scale of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, in which I have been figuratively spelunking ever since. It was a turning point in my teaching career, and eventually enabled my writing in 1995. As E. B. White put it: “I discovered that having given a pig an enema,
