Nevada potter Dennis
Parks celebrates his exit from the rat race in a new memoir,
Living in the Country Growing Weird. With his
wife and two sons in tow, Parks left a tenure-track professorship
in Southern California 30 years ago, settled in Tuscarora, Nev., a
ghost town, and founded a pottery school that today attracts
students from around the world.
“The town and the
valley made me restive: the sunshine and the big sky, the quiet
pace and potential,” writes Parks, whose book focuses less on
pottery and more on how the rigor and beauty of the Nevada high
desert imprinted his family’s life.
The book
conveys the challenges of a rural existence: how to raise your kids
sans television, the economics of making a living in the boondocks,
the all-important art of negotiating with drunken rednecks. Parks
also chronicles the Tuscarorans’ successful 10-year battle against
a Colorado mining company that sought to prospect under their
homes.
In the transformation from academic to
potter, Dennis Parks became an inadvertent naturalist – an
apprentice of clay and the sagebrush sea. As he searched the land
for native pottery materials, his appreciation for Nevada’s
nondescript wild places deepened. Parks’ memoir reveals the high
desert as something more than a source of inspiration and unique
ceramic materials; it reveals, often humorously, the extent “deep
rural” has shaped his existence as an artist, 20th century pioneer
and family man.
Living in the Country
Growing Weird: A Deep Rural Adventure, by Dennis Parks,
University of Nevada Press, 2001. Paperback: $21.95. 152 pages, 22
black-and-white photographs.
Copyright
© 2002 HCN and Crystal
Mustric
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sagebrush artistry.
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