Interview: Martha Sink on making pots

Inspire • Create • Serve

Interviewed by Moristotle

I became acquainted with Martha Sink in her role as a librarian with Alamance County Libraries. Questions would arise when I tried to use the libraries’ website, and I was directed to Martha as the person who could answer them for me. Indeed she could, and she was also quick to act on suggestions I made for improving the website. My wife and I even made a special trip to the libraries’ main location so we could meet her.
    When I emailed her recently just to say hi, she told me that her 37 years as an employee of the Alamance County Libraries system had been “a long time” and she had “a new career lined up and underway.” She said that she “figured that when [she] was more interested in throwing pots than coming to work, [she]’d know it was time to retire!”
    I told her I thought my readers would like to hear about her plans, and she agreed to do an interview. My questions are in italics.
    Photographs of some of her creations are interspersed throughout the questions and answers.

Goines On: Housing development

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Goines took his morning walk into the adjacent housing development to the south, where Mrs. Goines loved to walk because of its openness and the interest of its road paving and housing construction. Its clubhouse and pool were the first construction site he came to, only a couple of hundred yards in. The building looked almost finished, though only a small fraction of the development’s projected 400+ dwellings had been constructed and moved into. Perhaps the first home-buyers had been promised a clubhouse soon?

Fiction: Jaudon – An American Family (a novel) [8]

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Chapter 8. Peace

1886. May 1 – A general strike begins in the United States and on May 4 escalates into “the Haymarket affair” in Chicago, which eventually wins the 8-hour workday in the U.S.
    May 8 – Pharmacist Dr. John Stith Pemberton invents a carbonated beverage that will be named “Coca-Cola.”

On the range there was peace. For the first time in years, there were no Indian raids, bandit attacks, or range wars. James had opened two toll roads across his land. The price was so low per head that even the hardest-core ranger saw no benefit in not paying it.

Help promote edRogers’ latest published novel

By Moristotle

“Readers play a significant role in selecting the winner,” says Amazon’s announcement of its 2019 Kindle Storyteller contest with an award of £20,000 to an outstanding writer publishing in English through Kindle Direct Publishing.
    Personally, I think edRogers’ latest novel, BODY COUNT: Killers, deserves to win on its own merits alone, but Amazon’s judges will look not only at the books entered, but also at reviews of the books on Amazon.

Goines On: Ziggy’s scarves

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Usually Goines didn’t take his morning walk until after Mrs. Goines returned from hers. But this morning he went out before she returned, which was what used to happen when Ziggy was still alive. Goines would look for “Ziggy’s mama” on their round, and all three of them enjoyed the encounter when it happened, which depended on their relative routes. He wondered whether he would spot her this morning and, if he did – and she spotted him – whether she, too, would think of their encounters when Ziggy was with him, and of how they would stop and she would give Ziggy a sweet potato treat.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Mind your own business

By Bettina Sperry

Early this morning, the last fox cub was lost to some unknown cause. Perhaps entangled with the hoof of a horse, I really don’t know, but I found it in the pasture next to the house – not in the dog run, not in the road, but with the four horses kept close to the house. Its body was still soft.

All Over the Place: Measures of a town’s health

A long poem in two parts

By Michael H. Brownstein

About two months ago, my town, Jefferson City, Missouri, experienced a very strong tornado – actually missed my house by about 300 yards. The whiplash was incredible – so much debris I filled too many garbage cans again and again for almost three weeks. In addition, the Missouri River flooded. A 10-minute ride to Menard’s for supplies – we had a bit of very, very minor damage – that usually takes 15 minutes round trip turned into a 2-hour fiasco.

The Loneliest Liberal: Electric fans

By James Knudsen

If you’re a fan of electric guitars, the preceding several weeks have seemed like the grown-ups fighting at the dinner table. A little background: in mid-June, Gibson, the legendary, iconic, revered, guitar maker, released a video titled “Play Authentic.” The video admonished guitar makers who make guitars that resemble, emulate, or otherwise copy the legendary shapes for which Gibson is known. Many guitar players felt this was a shot aimed at them as well, and the fallout on YouTube and other social media sites was swift, fierce, and unfavorable toward Gibson.

Goines On: Time after time

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Goines tried to remember how long ago it was he’d concocted a theory why his battery-powered toothbrush seemed to beep its 30-second signals sooner early in the morning than it did at night. It must have been about a year ago he’d emailed a friend his conjecture that the difference had something to do with variations in the operating rate of whatever device a human brain uses to estimate the passage of time.

Fiction: Jaudon – An American Family (a novel) [7]

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Chapter 7. Empire

1881. The post at Fort Griffin is abandoned. Residents of the civilian community begin moving to Albany, the county seat of Shackelford County. Lt. Bullis and 30 Seminole-Negro scouts pursue a band of Lipan Apache raiders into Mexico. It is the last action against Indians conducted by U.S. Army units in Texas.
    1882. The Texas and Pacific Railroad reaches El Paso from Fort Worth. The San Antonio-El Paso stagecoach line goes out of business.

James began to buy land in 1882. He was 33 years old and his empire was growing. He didn’t buy just any land. He bought ranches that surrounded the open range. The open range was government land that everybody could use, and comprised well over 5,000 acres of grassland. It was open to anyone who paid a small fee to the government to graze their animals on it. James couldn’t buy it, but he could block access to a large porion of it.

Goines On: Sinning

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A niece of Goines emailed him that she wished they hadn’t made the vicar in the new season of Grantchester “quite so weak sinfully.” Goines and his wife hadn’t watched it yet, but they decided to catch it that evening. And when he told her what his niece had complained of, Mrs. Goines told him what the first vicar she had ever heard had to say about churches. Goines realized instantly that this was the stuff limericks are made of:

All Over the Place: I lie about food

By Michael H. Brownstein

I lie about eating.
Don’t eat that,
my wife says,
that’s not good for you,
you’ve had enough.
She asks,
What are you eating now?

Movie Review: Midsummer Desert 2019

Midsommar: The worst movie ever?

By Jonathan Price

We live in a movie desert. Those of us not fortunate enough to live in LA or New York or some other hub of creative movie theater distribution encounter a summer full of sequels or remakes, no longer just the second or third, but now the fourth or perhaps the tenth. Or we can learn the sordid details about nearhistorical events with which we are mostly familiar. Or we can see the fantastic monsters created by CGI, or their mighty and clever semihuman superantagonists, who use wit and special weapons and skills to defeat them. Into this theater desert enters a film with an “o” and an “ar” in its spelling of midsummer, and I’m hooked by my attraction to foreign films, and to the memories of great Swedish movies.

Goines On: Longevity

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Goines was starting not to think of Mrs. Goines as “nagging” him. The truth was that most of the time she was giving him useful advice – about getting exercise, avoiding contamination of his sinus rinse, protecting his medications from the moisture of the kitchen, and quite a few other things that she stayed on top of more closely than he was always comfortable with.

Fiction: Jaudon – An American Family (a novel) [6]

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Chapter 6. Rio Grande

True to his word, Rafael spoke to Juan about giving his daughter’s hand in marriage. Juan wasn’t happy about it, but, J.F., as James now wanted to be called, wasn’t someone who took being told no lightly. While Juan’s daughter Juana was sweet, gentle, and loving, J.F. Jaudon was hard and in some cases cruel.
    Juan cared for and loved his daughter a great deal, but in the end, the welfare of the whole family came first. Juan, at 40 years old, would have a hard time finding another job if he were let go from the ranch.