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Jody Lewis | Episode 1028
Born and raised in Alabama and Tennessee, Jody Lewis is a transplant to Canada. Having earned a bachelors in biology and a master’s in public health, Jody assumed that he didn’t have a single creative bone in his body. But things started to change for Jody when a friend showed him all the work she had in a pottery class and he knew he had to give it a shot. After talking a 10 week course, Jody was obsessed! Jody has since turned this new passion into a small business venture that is thriving.
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Do you have a making calendar for your year?
Yes, I have a few. I am not an organized person but I try to fake it as best I can and I just have to have physical things to write things out. So I do have calendars, I have a yearly over arching where I write in the month what I want to do in those months and then I have weekly where I go Monday through Friday what I am actually going to do. And then I do a daily. What are my todays tasks.
Could you do what you do and be profitable if you were willy nilly in your schedule?
Oh man, I hate to say no because I know some people are. But there is a practical side of my brain that I try to fight that with everything. A lot of potter friends who are willy nilly , I don’t know, we talk about this a lot because people think I am so organized. But it’s the only way I can function. I can’t see making your income year to year if you are just changing all the variables. You have to keep some variables the same to carry over to the following year.
How do you balance out your income when you come to months like January and February?
I think this is probably a good point to bring up my partner. She is great for me and the business, she’s a huge supporter. She is sort of the reason I started doing this and she encouraged me to do it. She has helped so much with this business so I am in a privileged position that the pottery doesn’t have to pay all of our bills so it allows a lot of freedom to be able to kind of structure the business.
Do you do things related to ceramics, like teaching or demos to make ends meet?
I do teach. I love teaching. I don’t have the space for it so I have to work with my local community studio to do classes. I want to do more classes but it’s such a high demand teaching wise. The teachers have been there many years teaching their classes. There is a bit of shortage of that. I know virtual classes is something else to do. So I don’t really do a whole lot of that but I would like to get into that more.
As a creative how do habits make you a better and more creative maker?
Yeah, so I think structure for a lot of people feels like boundaries and it feels like limitations of them, but for me structure allows more time for creativity. So if I don’t structure the things I need to do, like making mugs or glazing or going through the process, if I don’t stick with the basics then I won’t have the time to make vases or have the more creative time. I am not sure if that really makes sense but in my brain it is like, Yes that is exactly how I work. I don’t know if there is a better way to say it but structure makes me be a better creative.
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