I remember after my father died when I packed up all the pots I had made that my parents had saved at their loft over the years. I was surprised to see the beginnings of forms and motifs some of which I am still trying to capture. When I think back to those early attempts at making pots it’s like being pre-literate. I didn’t have the words to describe how a pot filled space, what it’s volume was, or why it was enticing. I often wonder where did the ideas come from. In a few cases I can define a specific influence. I recollect a dinner with Robert Ellison when I was in high school. He showed my parents and I some of his George Ohr pots. My dad said “I remember the things Catherine made after I showed her Picasso’s ceramics. I can’t wait to see what she makes after seeing these twisted and inventive pots.” Today in the studio I was tired of my go-to solutions. Instead I wanted to work as if I was digging potatoes — my hands feeling in the dirt without seeing , yet finding the hard shape of the prized new potato.

“Children make up the best songs, anyway,” he [Tom Waits] says. “Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.”

-From Elizabeth Gilbert’s terrific [Link:] 2002 GQ profile of Tom Waits