Making Things in the Margins
The margins are enough.
Not every night, not every week — but over time, across all those quiet evenings, something gets built.
It's usually after 6 or 7pm when I sit down in my studio.
Josh is in the den with the dog, video game on, the comfortable background noise of someone else winding down. The house is quiet in the way it only gets after a full day has finished asking things of you. I've already put in a full day at Innisfree Village — the work I love, the community I've given eight years of my life to — and by the time I walk into my studio I am already calculating. How much do I have left? What can I actually do tonight?
Some evenings the answer is a lot. I sit down, the clay finds its way into my hands, and somewhere around 11pm I look up and realize I've been completely absorbed for hours. Those are the evenings that remind me why I do this.
Some evenings the answer is not much. The couch gets me first. Two hours I didn't plan to lose, then bed. No studio, no clay, no Anam Cara. Just a body that needed to stop.
Both of those evenings are part of the same story.
I have endometriosis.
I've written about it before and I'll keep writing about it because it's not a footnote to my life — it's woven into everything, including this business. The fatigue that comes with it is not the kind that a good night's sleep fixes. It's deeper than that. It's the kind that makes you negotiate with yourself at 6pm about whether you have enough left to be creative, or whether tonight is a survival night.
Anam Cara Clay Goods was built in the margins of that negotiation.
Every piece I've ever made was made in the evenings, after the day was done, with whatever energy I had left over. Some of those pieces were made on good evenings when I felt like myself. Some were made on slow evenings when I could barely focus but sat down anyway because the clay is the thing that brings me back. And some — more than I'd like to admit — were planned and never made because my body said no and I had to listen.
That's what making in the margins actually looks like. Not just busy. Not just tired. Making something from nothing, on a body that doesn't always cooperate, because the making matters enough to show up for anyway.
I think about this a lot…
When people ask how I do it all. The honest answer is: I don't, always. Some evenings I crash on the couch and that's the whole evening. Some weeks the studio is quiet for longer than I'd like. The business grows in fits and starts, not in a straight line, because the person running it is human and tired and doing her best with what she has.
But here's what I've learned about making things in the margins: the margins are enough. Not every night, not every week — but over time, across all those quiet evenings after Josh and the dog settle in, across all the slow hours when I got carried away and forgot to watch the clock — something gets built. Slowly, imperfectly, one evening at a time.
Anam Cara Clay Goods is that something.
It exists because I kept showing up in the margins. Not always gracefully. Not always productively. But with enough intention, enough love for the work, and enough willingness to sit down with whatever I had left — to let the clay do what the clay does, and trust that it was enough.
On the evenings I can't make it to the studio…
I try to be kind to myself about it. My body has taught me a lot about what rest actually means — not laziness, not failure, just the necessary part of the cycle that makes the making possible again tomorrow.
And tomorrow I'll sit down again. After 6 or 7, when the house is quiet and Josh is in the den and the studio is waiting. With whatever I have left.
That's always been enough to build something beautiful.