To walk into Wendt Pottery is to enter a constantly rotating museum of clay.
At the front of the store, shelves upon shelves are lined with thousands of cups, bowls, urns and plates. In the back, mountains of loose clay wait to be bagged and shipped off for distribution. In the middle, there are buckets filled with cat litter, made as a byproduct of that clay-bagging process.
The business' origin story is a good one, even if owner Michael Wendt has told it plenty of times by now. It goes like this:
It’s 1973, a young Wendt is having a cup of coffee when he breaks a cream pitcher gifted by his wife’s parents. While other young husbands might have tried to buy a replacement, Wendt decides to take a pottery class and try to make a new one.
“ I was thinking about getting a master's,” Wendt said. “But then I changed subjects again when I took the pottery class. I never looked back. I made the replacement, and it was amazing.”
Wendt said he’s been “addicted” to pottery ever since. Indeed, if 53 years has done anything to dampen his enthusiasm for the subject, it certainly doesn’t show. He still loves making pottery and teaching it.
Teaching pottery
“He’s very patient,” said Val Bigler, one of Wendt’s students. “I mean, when you're first doing it, he basically does it for you, but you don't really realize he's doing it for you.”
Some of Wendt’s students are as young as 4 years old. When Bigler started coming, it was for her children.
“ I thought pottery would be a good extracurricular activity,” she said. “None of my kids really got into it, but then I really liked it, so I kept going.”
Today, Bigler is one of Wendt’s many students who has gone on to become a craftsperson in her own right. It’s no surprise considering Wendt has taught for decades, offering lessons in his shop, filling in at Lewis-Clark State College and pioneering YouTube tutorials.
One such video from 2011 shows Wendt’s process for “stack and slam” wire wedging, which might have been the first on the platform to show the process.
“Wedging” is potter-speak for mixing clay into a soft, even, workable texture. It makes “throwing” — that is, shaping clay on a pottery wheel — much easier.
“Stack and slam” is Wendt’s preferred process for wedging, which he wastes no time demonstrating: A lump of clay is cut into two pieces with a wire. One of those pieces is stacked on top of the other. Both are slammed down, marrying the two layers. There is a heavy “thump” sound on the canvas-covered work table.
Wendt rolls the clay toward himself and slams it down once more for good measure. Thump. He repeats the process. Each time the layers of clay double, Wendt counts out loud.
“Two.” Thump, thump.
“Four.” Thump, thump.
“Eight.” Thump, thump.
Around 40 seconds in, or 1,024 layers later, he rounds it down to 1,000 and keeps counting. In about a minute, he’s reached over a million layers, and the clay is soft and uniform. Perfect for throwing.
When Wendt introduced “stack and slam” to the internet, no one else seemed to be talking about it. But years later, Wendt learned that it had gained traction, particularly among those with carpal tunnel and other injuries.
“Somebody said, ‘Well, you've gotta see this video about stack and slam wire wedging,’” Wendt said. “I looked for that, and mine was still there, but people were making their own videos. ”
After the “stack and slam” demonstration, Wendt heads to the pottery wheel, sets the clay atop it and begins to shape a bowl.
Here, too, Wendt is an innovator. Unlike most pottery wheels, his is built for standing instead of sitting, with rests for the user to brace against. The idea came to Wendt when he was filling in to teach a pottery class at LCSC years ago, he said.
“There was a man in the class who had had an industrial accident, and he had … central tremor, they called it in those days. He was so frustrated. And I said, ‘Well, we can fix that,’” Wendt said. “And I built this here.”
The why
Wendt, of course, doesn’t really need to teach pottery. His business has done well over the years — he recalls an especially big boom in the 1980s, when the home shopping channel, QVC, bought hundreds of wind chime bells glazed with Mount St. Helens ash. The bells sold out in minutes.
Even beyond that boom in the ‘80s, Wendt has enjoyed continued appreciation for his work. But despite his comfort and success, Wendt goes out of his way to teach others. The process seems to bring both him and his students joy.
Bigler, who said she doesn’t consider herself creative and struggles with glazing, has nevertheless crafted hundreds of pieces since her first lesson in 2015.
“ Just anything that's really functional,” she said of her work. “Things that people can actually use.”
She’s made pitchers, butter crocks, berry bowls and paint palettes for her daughter. She’s made mugs and cups, a few of which she sells through Wendt’s Lewiston shop, along with hundreds of pet urns for the local veterinary clinics.
Bigler’s own pottery wheel now sits in the corner of her laundry room, where she makes time for pottery in between caring for seven children.
“ I can't really do it as much as I would like and have as much space as I would love,” she said. “But one day, one day I will.”
Neither Bigler nor Wendt seem to find the words to fully describe the addictive quality that’s gotten them hooked on pottery. But watching Wendt’s spirited lesson over half a century after he started, it begins to seem like maybe he doesn’t need to.
“ I'm having fun, because if I get to teach someone that and they like it, even if they don't become potters — I don't care if they become potters or not,” Wendt said. “They can just have a fun occasional hobby.”
To read the audio transcript, click here.
