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 husband---a grain
merchant---she 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 mother's 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 storytelling---much of it by strong,
unforgettable women---are still an essential part of the family's 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 family's 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.
