Spring Updates: Cooking, Poetry, Pinch Pots, and a Persistent Winter

I’m only up for a short post today. I’ve had a lot of evening events during the last week. I’m behind on grading papers. I’m squeezing out some time to keep up with my writing, but only a bit. We’re trying to figure out summer plans. Things keep rushing on and keeping up’s a challenge. It’s blogging week. What can I share today?

Harissa paste

*We peel away the charred layer at the top, and the interiors of the vegetables have an incredible roasted flavor. We puree them, mix with olive oil, and freeze.*

An evening of world poetry

I page through photos that I’ve taken these last two weeks, and I see that actually, I’ve done a lot. Cooking projects, lessons with students, a couple of short walks. On Friday night, we held this year’s World Poetry Slam event, where students and staff read poems in 34 different languages to a full auditorium. Last year, I was an attendee at this event, but this year I was part of the organizing team, and we worked to recruit a great variety of performers from the school community. Some students shared poems they had written themselves, others by famous poets from their home countries. Some shared personal stories about what a poem meant to them. Some shared about the significance of the languages they were presenting in, including indigenous languages, creoles, dialects, languages the world over. It felt good to be able to help bring this event to the community.

Returning to ceramics

After a couple of years on hiatus, I’ve revived the ceramics club with students. We had our first meeting this past week, making basic pinch pots. As a wheel-thrower by training, pinch pots have been a new skill for me since coming to Norway. I’m really enjoying exploring them. I found a series of inspiring videos that I shared with students this week:

“How to Make Easy Pinch Pots” – this video is long but well worth the watch. This ceramicist makes three really impressive pinch pots!
“Building more complex forms from simple pinch pots (with minimal tools)” – this video is long too, but so cool. The artist Lori Phillips makes this amazing vase with a bunch of pinch pots combined, and she shows some incredible textures that can be made in the clay!
“Paulus and clay” – this video is about the ceramic artist Paulus Berenson. He connects his pinch pots to the way humans engage with the earth.
“Imiso Ceramics: Bringing ceramic art to life” – this video showcases the ceramic artists Andile Dyalvane and Zizipho Poswa. They talk about the connection between their work and cultural expression.

The world outside

We had a rush of beautiful spring weather, and then winter has reared back. As I type this morning I look out across the fjord. Snow is falling in great waves of air. It is just on the edge of melting as it hits. I see drops of meltwater waiting to fall from the nearby fence.

My family in North America tell me they’re having a resurgence of the winter too. I don’t know enough about global weather patterns to be able to say, but I’ve wondered sometimes if these broad patterns are connected, some enormous air masses all moving together, bringing in the cold or warm.

Daffodils. A year ago, my husband bought a little pot of bulbs that we enjoyed inside for a week or two. We had the good luck to remember later in the spring to plant them out in the yard, and during the last week or so our little daffodils have sprung and bloomed. Crocuses are fading, and our neighbor’s daffodils are still a week or two off. Maybe their yard gets less sun. Maybe ours are an earlier variety. It’s good to have a little color on the earth.

*The night’s snowfall on a railing, the next morning heading into class.*

On one of the springier days, I sat on some steps by the water during lunch, watching this little creature swim. It looked like it was trying to reach the rock, but it didn’t make it. It looked like every time it approached, the rising lip of the surface tension was too high a hill to climb. It got swept back into the fjord.

I’m typing this post on Saturday, and this afternoon will be the Las Americas cultural day. I’ll do a short banjo performance. I’ll make a short speech about these western continents. The invasion of Ukraine continues, and many of our students have it in their minds daily. I was really glad to hear about Ketanji Brown Jackson being confirmed as a justice on the US Supreme Court.