Adventures with Doris

Doris Petersham believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. And that doesn’t make me special because Doris believed in a lot of people. Fiercely. I was merely one of the many she took on as a project. I will never know what she saw in me that caused her to take me on but I will be forever grateful that she did.

I remember very clearly the first time I ever laid eyes on her. It was the day of the 2004 Pumpkin Festival and Doris was standing in the middle of the small gallery in front of the old Foothills Arts Council building on Church Street. She was conducting a small army of artisans as they transformed the small room into a retail space for the Yadkin Valley Craft Guild, Doris’s most recent passion on that particular day.

A mutual friend introduced us but Doris already knew who I was even though I’d only been in town a few weeks. Doris always knew who everyone was, as I later discovered. Whether she ventured across the street or across the world, Doris either already knew who you were, or she knew someone who knew you. I saw this play out so many times over the years whenever I would go out in the world with her. As someone who is very introverted, I found her vast network to be nothing short of a magic trick, but really, it was just a sign that Doris did her homework. When she embarked on a project, she made a point to find out who all the players were, who the potential players might be, and who she might convince to become a player. And quite often, she became friends with all of them.

By the time our meeting had concluded that first day, she had sussed out what part I might play in her project, convinced me how critical it was that I participate, and secured a firm commitment to do so. I also had the suspicion I had just made a very good friend, someone who would always be there for me and be by my side no matter what. Maybe I didn’t figure that out immediately. But if I had, I would have been absolutely correct.

That initial meeting provided several other clues as to what made Doris tick, though it was quite a while before I understood those clues.

She began her career as a professor at Kent State. She went from there with her husband Miska to found a craft school in Missoula, Montana, then joined up with C.A.R.E. where she taught in Africa, Fiji and Haiti. Finally, she wound up in Elkin, and continued to mentor artists and craftspeople, teaching them to improve their skills and how to monetize those skills. She firmly believed it was possible to make a living as a working artist, and she practiced what she preached, becoming an exhibiting potter when she was well into her 70s. She loaded her Dodge Caravan with a tent, collapsible shelves, and plastic tote after plastic tote of her hand-crafted pottery, and headed off to craft shows. As the van would fill up with all those heavy bins of fragile stoneware, she’d sometimes joke that in her next life, she was going to be a miniature painter.

Most people around here knew Doris as a potter, but she also had a degree in fiber. That’s what her work with the UN involved. She helped poor women in the countries where she was posted monetize their heritage craft skills, weaving and sewing for income, in addition to clothing their families. She had tremendous love and respect for the native textiles of Tanzania and Haiti and fiercely wanted the skills of the artisans producing them to be recognized as valuable. When she found out I could paint silk, she encouraged me to give the craft show circuit a try. She thought there was a market for what I did, and offered to share her booth with me so I could check out the possibilities. It sounded like fun, possibly lucrative, and of course it was always fun to hang out with Doris, so I gave it a go.

Our joint booth was something to behold. We shared a taste for bright, clear colors so our color palettes were similar enough to give the booth some sense of harmony. But my penchant for diaphanous, sheer garments that wafted about in the slightest breeze—not to mention painting nudes on the silk—gave a certain, shall we say, “joie de vivre” to the enterprise. A less generous person would not have been happy to have their whimsical, yet tasteful, display hijacked. But Doris loved it. “Looks like a pottery sale in a whorehouse,” she quipped as chiffon wall hangings emblazoned with life-size naked ladies fluttered in the wind. “Very engaging,” she added. And by and large she was right. By the time I stopped laughing, we had our first customer.

Doris was so full of life, the joy and the verve spilled out into everything she did. Her pottery was so joyful—the colors, the shapes—it all meshed together and made you happy just to look at it. And the creativity didn’t stop when she went into the kitchen. She was an amazing cook. Totally fearless. She was the first person I knew who made sushi at home. And became an expert at the charcuterie board a full decade before they became all the rage. She brushed off compliments with nonchalance. “I got used to preparing food for a crowd when I was working for the UN. We were expected to entertain a lot,” she said. But I always suspected that her colleagues might have been less adept at whipping up dinner for 50 on a moment’s notice.

Even an uninvited guest got the full Doris treatment, as I found out on many unannounced visits when she welcomed me into her home with all the warmth she would have given the most eagerly anticipated guest. Most people begin a visit with perfunctory small talk, but Doris dug right in. She always had news to tell, and had a genuine desire to find out what you had been up to. And I often found myself telling her things I never told anyone else. These conversations moved quickly to her kitchen, and before you knew it, or even realized what was happening, she would have put together a stunning nosh, often presented on a newly developed piece of her work.

She was always excited to share the latest goodie she had found at Costco on her weekly trip, or perhaps a new gizmo she had added to her already well-equipped kitchen. For Doris was a gearhead. I called her a gearhead once or twice, and she didn’t particularly like it. But it was true, she loved tools and gadgets and gizmos. Whether it was something to make kitchen work easier or give more professional results, something to add a new dimension to her pottery, or a new kind of technology, Doris would be the first to give it a try. As we get older, most of us are happy to do things the way we’ve always done them, and to resist change in general. Not Doris. She would fearlessly charge ahead with the latest technology. 

Computer operated laser cutter? Yes, please. 

New set of pottery glazes that will demand a great deal of experimentation to perfect? Also, yes.

Machine to bottle her own sodas? Of course. Why not? And have some charcuterie with that soda. Being Doris-adjacent was always exciting. And always delicious.

Doris was always generous with her gear. Oh, you picked up a side gig catering? Drop by Doris’s house to get some fresh basil from her herb garden, and you might leave with an electric warming tray, a dozen hand-carved African serving pieces, and an entire box of tongs and cheese stabbers. Her kitchen and dining room were better stocked than any Williams-Sonoma, her attic had more textile gear than a garment factory, and the basement had the latest in pottery gear. All of which she was happy to share.

Doris once showed me a beautiful piece of porcelain with a golden vein running through it. I don’t remember if it was piece of Miska’s work, or one of the world-class and world-famous potters that she and Mish had known. It was not unheard of for Doris to serve hors d’oeuvres on a piece from her collection that could have been, and probably should have been, in a museum somewhere. So I don’t know if the piece was kintsugi or merely inspired by kintsugi. Doris explained to me that kintsugi was a Japanese technique where real gold is used to repair a clay piece that has been broken or damaged. The philosophy is that flaws should be celebrated and not hidden, because they are where the beauty lies.

Doris knew I was going through a rough patch, and also that I was always enchanted by shiny things. In turn, I knew Doris well enough to know she was trying to tell me something by showing me the piece, but I had no idea what exactly she was trying to tell me. It often took a while for her life lessons to flip the switch on the light bulb in my head, but she was a firm believer that a lesson learned is more valuable when you work for it a little.

As I recall, I asked her if the little bowl was a metaphor. She didn’t answer directly, so I tried again, and mused aloud that if it was a metaphor, and if the metaphor involved me, was I the broken bowl or the gold that repaired the break?

“You’re both,” she said.

Doris has been gone for almost a month, and I’m still having a hard time envisioning a world without her in it. She was so much larger than life that her absence leaves a gaping hole in the world. I can’t imagine how her daughter Leigh and granddaughter Nicole are faring. It’s going to be tough for them.

As a mutual friend said to me the other day, “she was foundational to the spaces now carved out for all the arts in Elkin.”

Truer words were never spoken.