Visiting the Asheville Kiln: A Wood-Firing Weekend

Twice a year, usually in early spring and late fall, our partner kiln outside Asheville fires its wood-burning anagama, a long, tunnel-shaped kiln built into a hillside that takes a full weekend of continuous stoking to reach the temperatures we need for stoneware. I try to be there for both firings. It's the closest thing our ceramics work has to a ritual, and it's where most of our serving bowls and mugs get their final surface.

Loading the kiln takes the better part of a day on its own. Pieces are packed close together, sometimes touching, sometimes propped on wadding to keep glaze from fusing them to the shelf, and their placement determines almost everything about how they'll come out. Pieces near the firebox get direct flame and heavy ash deposits; pieces in the back chamber fire cleaner and cooler.

The firing itself runs around sixty hours, stoked in shifts around the clock by whoever's on site that weekend, usually four or five potters trading four-hour watches. Wood goes in steadily, never all at once, to keep the temperature climbing without spiking. By the second night the kiln is holding somewhere above 2,300 degrees, and the firebox glows bright enough to read by from ten feet away.

Nobody sleeps much during a firing weekend. There's a rhythm to it, stoke, check the temperature, stoke again, that becomes almost meditative by hour thirty. We trade stories, argue about glaze chemistry, and watch the kiln the way you'd watch a fire you didn't want to go out, because at this stage, that's exactly what it is.

Cooling takes almost as long as firing. We seal the kiln once the last stoke is in and then wait, four or five days, before it's cool enough to open. Opening a wood kiln after a firing is the closest thing to Christmas morning that adult life offers potters. You genuinely don't know what you'll find until the door comes down.

This March's firing gave us the ash-glazed bowls that became part of Maker Series No. 4, along with a batch of mugs with heavier flashing than we usually see, more orange and less grey than a typical load. We don't fully control that variation, which is part of why wood-fired pieces carry a different price than our electric-kiln stoneware.

I'll be back in Asheville this fall for the next firing, and I always come home smelling like woodsmoke for about a week afterward. It's a hard trip to describe to people who haven't stood next to an anagama at two in the morning, stoking a fire that's been burning for a day and a half already, but it's the part of this work I'd give up last.