Lady Potter by Rebecca Pyle

Handmade pottery? Wasn’t God the only real potter? Pinch of earth, wasn’t that how he made Man? And Woman? Creatures, his earth, his religion binding it all together? 

Here, a lady potter, trying to copy him! She was as subversive as writers of fairy tales. The greatest consolation for them was reminding each other modern technology would lay her low, make her as arcane and obsolete as a blacksmith or a candle-maker—a troubled witch with tangled hair, making meaningless unwanted things from dirt. 

But as long as the pottery woman lived, they still drove by her studio filled with golden, quavering light. They wondered when they saw broad shoulders, or slender shoulders, any person at all, who they were, what they were saying, what they were plotting as they moved about and made their pottery, that pottery which only now and then was sold. The signatures on pottery were so wild and crazy you couldn’t even make out who the maker was. Wild as wind or river or clouds, these signatures must, they decided, be the potters’ way of hiding their identities, to keep themselves safe. They were guilty, the two decided, and they surely knew it, and had devised a way to sign something but never be held legally responsible for their crimes. 

Rebecca Pyle is a writer and a visual artist whose work is findable in The Vassar Review, Sand Hills, The Banyan Review, The Rappahannock Review, LandLocked, Map Literary, The Bangalore Review, Anacapa Review, Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, The Galway Review, The Chattahoochee Review, New England Review, and Fugue. See rebeccapyleartist.com.

19 December 2025