The Potter's Wheel on Main Street

In downtown Asheville, North Carolina, a ceramics studio called Earth and Fire offers a class they call "Second Chances." Instructor Maria Gonzalez takes pieces that students have abandoned — lopsided bowls, cracked vases, collapsed mugs — and demonstrates how a skilled potter can reclaim them. She wets the clay, centers it again on the wheel, and begins reshaping what everyone else had written off.…