Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi: Love and Art at Shearwater

About this book

Almost a century ago Annette McConnell Anderson a New Orleans society woman vowed that her three sons would become artists. Turning her back on bourgeois life and abetted by her skeptical husbanda grain merchantshe bought twenty-eight acres of woodland on the Mississippi Sound. Beside a sleepy bayou in the shade of towering pines and magnolias she opened an art colony one of the first of its kind in the South. Backed by his mothers passion for art her oldest son Peter Anderson founded Shearwater Pottery. Yearning to make Shearwater synonymous with perfection he drew the entire family into his adventure. His brothers Mac and Walter made strange wonderful pieces though Walter Anderson eventually left the pottery studio to search for his own artistic path. Drawn by the exquisite work of Shearwater Pottery the authors discover that painting poetry and storytellingmuch of it by strong unforgettable womenare still an essential part of the familys daily life. Intimate diaries letters and poems lead the reader into a stormy passionate sometimes heartbreaking past. Meticulously researched and compassionately written Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi gathers one familys eternal legacy of wisdom and beauty the healing power of art the consolations of writing and of memory and the spiritual treasures given us by the natural world.