Poetry, Pottery, and Pete — OLLIE SCHMINKEY

As we recuperate from National Poetry Month, we’ve still got lots of fun things on the horizon (but at a hopefully more reasonable pace…)

My friends and co-organizers surprising me with flowers and a big card signed by a lot of the teams for this year’s Mash-Up! (I cried!)

WHAT’S GOING ON

I Won A Thing!
I’m honored to announce that I won the Palette Poetry Previously Published Poem Prize (try saying that 5 times fast). You can check out the poem here:

https://www.palettepoetry.com/2025/04/23/my-father/

Midwest Poetry Mash-Up Was a Huge Success!
With 10 teams from all across the country, we had so much fun, built so much community, and successfully tricked a bunch of very smart poets into coming to MN and being our friends. A special thank you to all of the volunteers and attendees who made this event possible!

The truly wonderful poets I co-coached with Natalie Kaplan, who are Macalester students and recent grads.

If you were here this year, we hope you loved it! And if you weren’t, we hope to see you next year! (Me and my friends Zach and Tanesha, who run the tournament with me and without whom I would surely perish).

Minneapolis Oddities and Curiosities Expo

Now that April is over, my life shifts a little bit to focus on pottery, and I’ve got a huge show coming up! I hope to see you there! If you like weird stuff, this is the place for you!
Tickets here: https://www.showpass.com/minneapolis-oddities-curiosities-expo-2025/

Slam Poetry is Good Actually

I wanted to share this article written by Kyle Tran Myhre (not just because there’s a cute photo of me in it, although there is). Kyle is someone I think of as a true community player, and I often look to him and his work for ways that I can be more supportive and more in tune with community. Plus, I think he makes a great case here for the power of spoken word, and the article is a great read: https://racketmn.com/slam-poetry-is-good-actually?ref=guante.ghost.io

PROMPT

Here’s a prompt if you feel like writing!

POEM

PETE

OLLIE’S THOUGHT CORNER: A STORY ABOUT POTTERY

A Story About Pottery

I spend about a third of my life making and selling ceramics (under the name Sick Kitty Ceramics, although I hope all of your cats are well). Of course, as someone with (several) non-traditional arts careers, the path towards this was not linear, and it almost didn’t happen at all. Here’s a little bit of the beginnings of my journey as a potter:

I grew up in a small town and went to a small town public high school-- in some ways, this sucked, but in some ways, it was actually awesome. I was always fiercely interested in art (I had my first solo exhibit at the age of 16 in the local arts center), and because there’s nothing to do in the country, I spent so much of my free time fighting off boredom basically skill-building a fistful of hobbies: drawing, painting, piano, drums, oboe, woodburning, set design, sewing, bass guitar, learning how to scream a la Attack Attack, etc. My small town didn’t have all of the resources that a bigger school district might, but we did have a kiln and a very supportive art teacher who let me do basically whatever I wanted. After taking the only pottery class offered, my senior year, I did an independent study in clay, throwing terrible thick little mugs, sculpting faces with their eyes stitched over, and creating a three-foot wide cat skeleton whose ribs were held together with twisted wire (and the skeleton, of course, was wearing big yellow bunny slippers).

When I got to college, there were so many different things to learn, and I stopped doing pottery in order to focus on drawing and printmaking (surrealist drawings were my main interest, and my senior college exhibit showcased three two-foot tall drawings: one of me giving birth to a unicorn, one of me tearing off my own breast and eating it, and the third of me taking a shit on a transphobic professor’s desk). But the spring of my senior year of college, I had a roommate who took pottery, and our apartment was full of dishes that they had made. It felt really special to me, to eat off of something that a person had made, and my interest in pottery was reignited.

I approached the ceramics professor at my college and asked if I could, with my prior “experience,” skip the Ceramics I course (where they primarily focused on handbuilding-- which I wasn’t interested in at the moment because it turns out there’s nowhere to store a three-foot wide ceramic cat skeleton with bunny slippers, and I certainly didn’t need to make another). I only had this last semester of college left, and I didn’t want to waste it making more massive sculptures that stayed in a closet in my mother’s basement. I wanted to learn how to throw, and to throw well. I wanted to eat my toast off of something cool, and drink my coffee out of something cool, and slurp my soup out of something cool.

When the professor asked me what I wanted to make in Ceramics II, I said that I was really interested in making dishes. He scoffed and said, “That’s not art. Imagine if you told [the printmaking professor] that you took her course in order to make Christmas cards.” Despite the shit-on-desk statement of my honors project, I was actually incredibly conflict avoidant and a former-gifted-child teacher’s pet, so I didn’t say anything to him, even though the printmaking professor encouraged us to make usable, everyday objects and would have never in a million years said something so dismissive and elitist.

Despite this, somehow, he let me into the advanced course.

And I fucking hated it. By which I mean, I loved ceramics, and I hated him. He was one of the least encouraging and least kind professors I have ever worked with. When I say I was a teacher’s pet, I mean it. For better or for worse, I was a people pleaser with a penchant for kissing ass, combined with a genuine desire to do well and learn skills beyond what was necessary for a good grade. I was an incredibly dedicated and intentional student, spending hours each day practicing my throwing. I spent virtually all of my free time trying to both improve my skill and to prove myself to this terrible man. At every step, he only had negative things to say. I could not please him, no matter what I made. At one point, I told him I wanted to make mugs that combined sculpture and function in the shape of cute animals, and he straight up told me “That’s not art. Art is not cute,” and refused to let me make the mug, even on my own time. (I literally cried, and scheduled a meeting with my trusted drawing professor to process this, and she very kindly listened to me and told me not to give up). I spent the rest of the semester frustrated, making work I didn’t like in order to impress a man I didn’t like even more.

And then, he died.

And now, I make a third of my living selling cute (and creepy) little animal mugs, and the hundreds and hundreds of people who have bought my work definitely think it’s art.

But of course, there’s more to the story:

First off, I want to acknowledge that it was sad for some people that he died (I don’t think he was universally hated or anything; he was just not a good fit for me), and I’m not trying to make light of this. But if there’s one thing you know about me, it’s that I’m not going to shroud a mean man in platitudes just because he’s no longer around (see: my entire body of work). This professor had a hugely negative impact on how I felt about ceramics, as well as my self-esteem and the way I viewed myself as an artist. Here at this point in the story, I really want to say something kind about him, to balance things out— but that simply was not my experience. Him dying, in all seriousness, was quite possibly the only thing that saved my relationship to making pottery.

After he died (natural causes), he was replaced with one of my favorite professors on this planet, who allowed me to do an apprenticeship a few years after I graduated (an opportunity I never would have gotten under the old professor, who was notorious for cherry picking his favorites, of which I was decidedly not one). Ceramics is super cost prohibitive, and as a recent grad barely scraping by, there was no way I could have afforded to work in clay without this apprenticeship. This new professor was kind, encouraging, and she had an actively non-elitist stance and a love of all of the ways clay can be used: cute, scary, functional, performance, you name it. She helped me for years, until I moved into another potter’s studio, then a friend’s basement, and now, finally, almost ten years later, I have a studio in my own home. I feel immensely grateful for her support, and because she saw something in me, I was able to reconnect with an art form that has since become a deeply meaningful and healing part of my life.

The moral? I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s about the power of a single person to change your relationship to an entire medium. (This is honestly something I think about a lot in my own teaching, of how to be like Professor #2 and not Professor #1). Or maybe it’s about trusting the chaotic path that life can put you on, and that happiness doesn’t always come on a timetable? Or maybe it’s that sometimes, in life, you just need to wait for someone to get out of the fucking way, so you can meet the person you were supposed to meet and live your dream.

Love,

Ollie