From: Jack Saunders
To: Pete Knickerbocker, Spider's Nest Pottery
Subj: Reply to "Jack Neff"

Jack and I grew up together in Delray Beach.

We corresponded with each other when we were in the service.

I knew his first wife, Boots, and introduced him to his second wife, Karol Anne.

When he and Karol moved to New York, when Jack entered the Art Students League, I visited them in Weehawken, where I met Brother Bruno, and Toshiko, plus several painter friends.

My wife Brenda and I lived with Jack and Karol at Penland. John was a baby. Brenda and I left, because we had no income, and Brenda was pregnant with Owen. I took a job in Winston-Salem.

After that, Jack and Karol split up. I think Karol took both children (Claire was born by then), but later, I believe John lived with his dad.

I have lost touch with Karol.

When my son joined Dolye Lawson's bluegrass band, I drove him up to Bristol, Tennessee, to join the band, and stopped at Penland on the way back. I stopped in Cindy Bringle's studio to ask directions to Jack's house. The last I heard, he was living in a cabin outside Burnsville with no electricity or running water.

Cindy told me Jack had died, and nobody knew how to get in touch with me.

It affected me. We had been close friends for a long time.

She said John was a student at the school. I went up to see him. It was awkward. He was shy. I told him I was sorry to hear about his dad. I had all kinds of questions, but it didn't feel right to ask them.

He was too young when we left to remember me, but had read my books, or heard stories about me.

When we lived together in Laurel Cottage, Jack had paintings he had done in Delray Beach, at the League, and at Alford. They took up a lot of space in the basement. These were paintings he felt like keeping.

What happened to them, I wondered. Did Karol have them? Did John? Had Jack made friends in Burnsville? Did anybody have them? Had they been thrown out? Were they slowly disappearing to moths and rust? Mildew? Rats, roaches, and silverfish?

I didn't know, and didn't know who to ask.

Then I heard that there was a fellowship in John Neff's name at Penland.

I didn't know he had committed suicide, but suspected it.

Jack used to sit at his Paoli wheel smoking canned pipe tobacco and brooding. I was his helper in the pottery. I mixed clay for him, mixed glazes, loaded and unloaded the kiln. We talked about art. Cézanne would break out into the quiet streets of Aîx and scream, "Le monde, c'est terrible."

He viewed pottery as a practical compromise to painting, a way to make a living he could stand to do. He liked being a potter. But he really wanted to paint.

At the time--right after you all graduated from Alford: I'm sure you remember--there was a recession on, becoming a production potter was difficult, and being a fine arts potter, well, the galleries and museum gift shops, with their juried shows, didn't have much room for newcomers.

Jack couldn't sell his pots.

He visited us in Winston-Salem, where I was working as a janitor, or porter in a department store, to support my wife and son, and told me I was wasting my time, I was an artist, I should be writing.

I didn't tell him he was a married man, he should be supporting his wife and son, he was selfish and irresponsible.

Anyhow, he said he had decided that, if he couldn't sell his paintings, and he couldn't sell pots, he might as well paint. He had quit throwing pots to paint full-time. That's when he and Karol broke up and that is why. She moved back to Akron and moved in with her parents because Jack wasn't supporting her, and didn't intend to.

What a mess.

I think of Jack a lot.

I think about what happened to his oeuvre, or life's-work, a lot.

Did it just disappear? Was it all for naught?

What part did Jack play in his son's suicide?

I don't know enough to say.

I know I managed to write and hold a marriage, and family together, both.

Not an easy job.

I knew Jack when he was a telephone lineman for Florida Power and Light.

He was a postman in New York City.

He and Karol and I went to see La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and The Red Desert one afternoon on the same bill--a triple feature. You can't do that in Delray Beach.

I still have a couple of Jack's salt-glazed pots.

I remember sitting up with him at Penland, throwing the salt in the kiln, shutting her down, waiting to see what we got.

I don't understand why he couldn't sell his pots.

On the other hand, I haven't been able to sell my books, either.

Van Gogh didn't sell any paintings.

If it weren't for Theo, and Theo's wife.

I wrote a book about the two of us called SCHOOL OF THE SOUTH.

SCHOOL OF THE SOUTH. October 27 - November 18. 56,000 words. Laurel Cottage Cottage Industries, me and Jack Neff's Atelier du Midi. I didn't cut my ear off, or shoot myself in the stomach. I write Robert Olen Butler, who is writing a story, online, at Inside Creative Writing, at his FSU web site, and tell him about Inside Vernacular Writing, at The Daily Bugle, but he does not reply. I drive to Lloyd, Florida, for the FSU Anthropological Society Hale G. Smith Memorial Pig Roast. Brenda and I drive to a bluegrass festival at Jack Wingate's Lunker Lodge, on Lake Seminole, in Bainbridge, Georgia. I buy Spring Creek Chronicles, tales of commercial fishing and hunting on the North Florida Gulf Coast. The buyer of APRF offers me a job, at work. For how long, no one can predict. But I made it through the transition.