Being a beginner is a lot harder than it sounds

Boston Globe

a day ago

The teacher explained how the wheel worked. The spinning flat metal disk was controlled with a foot pedal; the splash pan would catch excess water and clay.
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She sliced a chunk from a big block of clay, weighed it ('You want about 2 pounds'), kneaded it, rolled it into a ball, and slapped it onto the center of the wheel. With the wheel spinning, she demonstrated how to hold wet hands against the clay so that it would 'cone up' into a tall volcano shape, and then how to press it down until it looked like a hockey puck.
Once the clay was centered, we would create a divot in the middle, widen and deepen it with our thumbs, stop the wheel, and check the depth of the hole using a needle tool. Start the wheel again and 'collar up,' using the fingers of one hand inside and one hand outside the spinning pot to gently cause the vessel's walls to rise and grow thinner.
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'And now you're ready to shape it,' the teacher said, demonstrating with fingers and tools how to make a bowl, a vase, a tall cylinder. I marveled at how mysteriously obedient the clay was; the centrifugal force of the wheel combined with the prompting of her fingers told it what to do, and that's what it did.
After having us cut and knead our own pieces of clay, she patiently took us through the process again. At the end, we each had a stubby cylinder — wow, we made a pot! 'And now,' the teacher said, 'you can use the rest of the time to experiment and play on your own.'
This was where I got into trouble.
When I coned up, my volcano was a lopsided bumpy spiral, like a cone of soft-serve ice cream. Coned down again, coned up: same problem. The teacher showed me how to place my hands. I collared up, and for a moment I had a pretty nice cylinder, but then the top of it whirled off into my pressing-too-hard moving-too-fast hands.
'Cone down and start again,' the teacher advised. More soft-serve ice cream. The clay was becoming overworked; I needed to stop there, with a bizarre twisted little mess of a vase that the teacher diplomatically called 'kind of sweet and wonky.'
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Things got worse with the next piece of clay. I couldn't remember the steps. I didn't want to monopolize the teacher or call attention to my bewildered fumbling. I used too much water and the wheel kept spinning, and I should have turned it off to think for a minute, but my slimy hands kept doing things to the slimy clay, which was now sliding and disintegrating all over the wheel. It was like the time at summer camp when I tried to learn to water ski, fell, forgot to let go of the bar, and was towed through the lake on my belly. Utter panic.
In the end the teacher came over and kindly salvaged my pot.
We cleaned off our tools and our wheels. I was feeling embarrassed and frustrated and shaken. It's one thing to muse about wanting to be a beginner at something and another to actually be that beginner, to know nothing and be humbled by a demure-looking piece of clay. 'Never again,' I said in the car on the way home.
But later that evening, I was online watching introductory wheel-throwing videos and looking for openings in upcoming Mudflat workshops. Next time I would try to expect even less of myself and remember it takes time and humility to relax enough to truly begin learning. I was haunted by the clay. It would be willing to do what I asked of it, but first I would have to learn how to ask.
Joan Wickersham's latest book is, 'No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck." Her column appears regularly in the Globe.