Bill King Writers Week - Silent Auction

[[Auction proceeds go to the Bill King Writer's Week Endowment (BKWW).]]

Artist's Statement, Gordon Johnston:

"Your Time and Mine -- Letters from the Fire"

These fourteen clay pages are poems that passed back and forth between my oldest, closest writing friend Bill King and me over the last several years. By the time Bill died in 2023, mere weeks before his award-winning collection of poems Bloodroot was published, I had lost count of the number of poem drafts we had exchanged since we met in 1990 and the number of streams we had fished together (though I have not forgotten a moment of our nights camping in the wilds of West Virginia and on sandbars along the Ocmulgee River in Georgia). These poems, arranged in conversation with each other, are my attempt to look back over the years of poems and compose one final poem of both our voices – a poem that would be true to the everlasting boyhood we shared.

The process of making and wood-firing firing pottery is a way of sustaining an old and vital human connection with the watershed that appealed to Bill and me both. Potters work with earth, air, fire, and water – the primal elements – just as Native people did a thousand years ago. Writing our poem on river clay and letting the unpredictable fire do what it will with the words joined me and Bill in a small way to the natural and human history of the middle Georgia river, the Ocmulgee, that he and I canoe-camped on several years ago – the river that I call home. These clay pages also join Bill and me to the community that came together to make the firing happen – all those hands that split cord after cord of wood, stacked it, and fed it into the kiln around the clock for a week. Writing is solitary work, but Bill was not a solitary person, nor am I. It feels good to think about the temporary community that formed to fire these poems into stoneware.

I’m grateful to my longtime friend and collaborator in the arts, Roger Jamison, for making the clay pages and welcoming me to fire them in his legendary dragon kiln in Juliette, Georgia.

When you’re scratching your friend’s poem through a thin coat of glaze onto a tile that will be soaked in a 2,000-degree flame, you’re aware of elemental forces beyond your control. Tiles crack in the heat. Glaze melts and runs, washing out or vaporizing letters and words. The cave kiln is as likely to obliterate the poem as it is to set it in stone. I am equal parts grateful for Bill’s life and aggrieved by his death, but I didn’t fully arrived at that point of balance until I gave the poems up to the kiln. I like the think Bill would be pleased with what the fire gave back.

The Bill King Writers Week hosts visiting authors on campus for public workshops, readings, and more. This year's visiting writer is Gordon Johnston.

As part of his visit, Gordon is also auctioning clay tiles inscribed with poetry (in honor of Bill King).