TALL

TALL is my seventh story, published by the Journal of the American Art Pottery Association. There are fifteen essays in this collection so far, but TALL was among the first written with the premise of using different pieces of Fulper Pottery to tell stories about my family. It remains one of my favorites.

CLICK ON THE COVER OF THE JOURNAL to read the full article (reprinted here with permission) and/or scroll down to listen to: TALL, read by the author.

TALL, read by Anne Fulper:

About Her

Anne Fulper grew up on the Delaware Canal in Bucks County, PA, in a home dotted with ceramics from her grandfather’s Flemington, NJ pottery. Fulper is included in the permanent collection of major U.S. museums, with one of the largest collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Having never known, their “Master Craftsman” grandfather, Anne and her sisters were thrilled to find six notebooks, hidden under the eaves in the attic of the family home, written in their grandfather’s large, fluid scrawl. Here were the secret formulas for the glazes that made Fulper Pottery unique. As a way of connecting to a vanished past and, because they knew the look of those glazes down to their bones, they turned those handwritten recipes into the Fulper Tile Company (1985-2000).

Anne’s collection of essays, Shards, is synthesized from a trifecta of personal experience:

• writing and performing scathing satire in NYC with The Sleazebuckets and Noh Radio
• working with the chemistry of the glazes at Fulper Tile.
• a childhood growing up surrounded by vases, ewers, jugs, planters, lamps, powder boxes, perfume burners, bookends, candlesticks, flower frogs, ashtrays and crocks.                     

Now these pieces of pottery launch 15 memoir vignettes about a mid-20th century American family whose forebears, owned a pottery in New Jersey. Anne takes the pot off the pedestal and tells the tale behind it.

In addition to Shards, are other autobiographical essays, all written with an ear to performing aloud and accompanied by an audio version.

“I hope the acoustics in here will be good for recording”, thought Alice doubtfully.

drawing by Tenniel