PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Vince Montague received his Master's Degree in Creative Writing from NYU in 1989 and soon after began publishing short stories in literary magazines. He also began a twenty-year career as an adjunct instructor of writing at colleges and universities around the Bay Area. His late wife was a filmmaker and potter who died tragically in a car accident in 2009. During her lifetime, he never touched clay but after her death he began to study clay on his own. In 2014, he left his teaching career, reopened his wife's ceramic studio and began making art for a living. His stories and poems have been published in literary and academic journals including: California Quarterly, Westwind. The Florida Review, Talking River Review, Other Voices, Nimrod: An International Journal, Green Mountain Review. He has been an artist-in-residence at Carrizozo AIR (New Mexico), Playa Summer Lake (Oregon), and Willapa Bay (Washington).
Cracked Pot is a soul-baring memoir of love, creativity, loss, grief, and creativity again. Sentence by beautifully wrought, thoughtful sentence, Vince Montague narrates the premature death of his wife, Julia, and how he was able to rebuild his life by way of the clay and kilns and inspiration she left behind for him. 'Just make a cup, ' Julia tells her husband. 'Just make a bowl.' Following and building on those simple instructions, Montague finds a new path forward and, in the process, discovers and experiences the irrevocable persistence of love even in the face of irrevocable separation. --Benjamin Dreyer, New York Times bestselling author of Dreyer's English If you've somehow lost your heart in the fog of grieving, your hands might just provide a roadmap to rediscovery. Vince Montague's Cracked Pot arrives from a chasm of emptiness, building with profundity and grace upward to a quiet roar. --Bruce Dehnert, co-author of the bestseller Simon Leach's Pottery Handbook, master kiln-builder, artist, and member of the International Academy of Ceramics (UNESCO) Vince Montague's Cracked Pot is a wondrous memoir of personal reinvention and the transformative power of art. What Montague has given us is a guide of how to turn tragic loss into transcendent beauty as he traces his indelible journey from husband to widower to potter, the calling of his late wife Julia. This volume, like finely wrought ceramics, is something beautiful you can hold in hand and treasure always. --Roy Parvin, author of In the Snow Forest and The Loneliest Road in America Clay itself is a metaphor that Vince Montague explores in this lyrical and poetic memoir, excavating the notion we are all made of clay, therefore infinitely pliable, remade and rolled out for a pinch pot or a vase. Pottery shards are archeological hints of the heart. Cracked Pot resonates with its multiple meanings and meditates on love and death from title to the last word. This is raw life, raw materials, raw feelings, salvaged by the silken slip of clay, the discovery of thinking with your hands. --Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House
