The part of this I don’t usually say out loud
I Built This Place and I’m Still on the Outside Looking In
I built a room for people to make art and find each other. Turns out I am the one person in it who rarely gets to do either. Here is what the last year and a half has actually been like.
By Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole. This one got more honest than I planned on it getting.
There was a night in my garage studio where not one person made a single pot.
I had two classes back then, which was the entire operation: a garage, a few wheels, and about a dozen people who kept showing up week after week. That night we got to talking before class and never stopped. Somebody pulled out a game. Somebody else went for food. Three hours later every one of us went home with hands as clean as when we walked in.
Nobody was annoyed about it. It was one of the best nights I can remember.
That was the thing I was trying to bottle.
Those two little classes gave me some of the best friends I have ever had, and almost nobody ever left. People stayed and stayed and stayed, and it was not really about the pottery, though we made some genuinely ridiculous things in there.
There were no big rules and no expectations and nobody was managing anything, because there was nothing there to manage. We were a group of people who liked being around each other and happened to meet up around clay.
I fell in love in that garage once. She fell in love with me back.
And somewhere in the middle of all that I started thinking that a lot more people should get to have this.
So I went and built it.
Ten thousand square feet of it. And I got what I wanted, which is the part I need you to hear before anything else, because this is not a sad story and I do not want it read as one. The room is full. People have met their best friends in there. A couple of them met their person in there. It works.
It just works differently than the garage did.
In the garage I had a dozen friends and some clay. Here I have employees who are counting on me, and payroll that goes out whether or not it was a good month. I have a Google review sitting at three stars because somebody’s mug cracked in the kiln. I have bills that would make your eyes water, due whether anybody walks through that door or not. I have to think about scheduling and work ethic and whether the person I hired last month is actually doing okay.
None of that existed in my garage. All of it exists now.
And all of it adds up to one thing that changed everything.
I am not a guy at pottery anymore. I am the guy who owns the pottery studio.
Before I tell you what that costs, I have to tell you about something that happened to me a long time ago. I am going to be vague, because there is someone in this story who cannot tell you her side of it, and that matters to me.
I took an art class once. Not pottery. That is all I am going to say about what it was.
The woman who ran it was interested in me. She was not subtle about it and it went on for a long time. I was not interested in her. Not even slightly.
And I never said so.
Not once. Because I loved that class, and I loved the art form, and I had made real friends in that room, and every single time I opened my mouth to tell her the truth I thought about what saying it would cost me. My spot. My night of the week. My people.
So I let it sit there and rot for month after month, and I got very good at deflecting and very bad at sleeping.
I hated it. Not her. I hated the position.
I hated feeling like I had to lose a piece of me to keep a piece of me.
I hated feeling like I had to lose a piece of me to keep a piece of me.
When I opened The Clay Hole I made myself a promise about that. Nobody who walks into my building is ever going to feel what I felt in that room. Not from me. Not once.
I have kept that promise every day since, and I would make it again tomorrow morning without thinking twice.
And it turns out that keeping it comes with a price, and I am the one who pays it.
Here is what that actually looks like from where I stand.
I see the same people constantly, week after week, for months and sometimes years on end. We talk. We banter across a wheel for an hour at a time. And something real starts happening, and usually it is not romantic in the slightest, it is just the front end of a friendship, the kind where you catch yourself thinking, oh, this person is going to be in my life.
And then I stop.
Because what if they are only being nice? What if this is them doing exactly what I did in that art class, smiling at the person who runs the room because the room is worth smiling for?
Fuck.
So I wait for a signal. A clear one. And the clear ones almost never come, probably because the person across from me is reading my careful silence as disinterest and being polite enough not to push. So the whole thing goes surface level and stays there. It turns into a nice in-studio friendship that never once leaves the building.
And here is what I know about connections. There is a window. If nothing happens inside it, nothing ever happens.
I used to be so good at this.
I mean it. Before The Clay Hole I could read a room like a book, and I knew the difference between somebody who wanted to be asked and somebody who was just being kind, and I knew where the line sat without having to think about it. So I asked. The invite, the date, whatever it was. I trusted myself completely.
Now I doubt every read I have. And the doubt has gotten worse with time instead of better, because I have tested it a few times and I have been wrong.
Three times since we opened I took the swing anyway.
Three people I honestly believed there was something there with, and I do not mean a crush from across the room. I mean real conversation and real laughing, the kind of thing you can feel coming at you from both directions at once.
Two of them turned into hangouts. Not dates. Hangouts. And they were some of the best evenings I have had in years, the kind that are easy the whole way through, where four hours go by in what feels like twenty minutes.
So I asked. Carefully. Far too carefully, probably.
Both of them gave me a version of the same sentence.
“What if it goes bad? I don’t want to lose my place here.”
And both times I backpedaled so fast I nearly fell over. Forget I said anything. It’s nothing. We’re good. Because my whole promise was that nobody ever feels cornered by me, and there I was, being the corner.
It fizzled both times, and both of them kept right on coming to class. We are friendly. It is as though the hangout simply never happened.
The third one never even got that far. I asked about hanging out at all and she told me almost immediately that she would be too worried about losing her place here.
Not one of those three did a single thing wrong, and that is the part that gets me every time I think about it. They were right. They were completely and obviously right, and I would have said the same thing standing exactly where they were standing.
All three crushed me a little.
Not in a dramatic way. Just a quiet drop, the kind you feel in the car on the way home. Because every one of them confirmed the same thing from a different angle, which is that I am going to be on the outside of this, and that it is not something I can fix by being a better guy.
And I am going to say the other part out loud, because leaving it out would be dishonest.
It was emasculating.
I know precisely how it read from the other side, because nobody on earth daydreams about being pursued by a man that careful. There is nothing good in that story. A guy approaching you like you are a legal liability is not anybody’s fantasy, and the worst part is that I could hear myself doing it while I was doing it.
And I still cannot stop. Because I remember that art class, and I know how shitty it felt to be the one sitting in that seat.
I tried to engineer around it, because that is what I do with problems.
If one on one puts pressure on somebody, then fine, I thought, I will do groups instead. I will organize hangouts, get a bunch of great people into one place at the same time, and then nobody has to feel singled out by anything.
I have organized a few of those now, and they are genuinely fun.
And I am still the owner at every one of them. It sits in the room the entire time, politely, like a coat nobody will take off. Everybody is a little bit on. Nothing ever goes deep.
That is not the kind of friend I am. I like the real ones. I like sitting across from somebody and being two humans in a room together, not a person and a position. And in my own building I do not get that option. Ever.
I am always the boss. I am always the owner. I am always the guy who could, in theory, take away somebody’s favorite place in the world.
I would never do it. But “I would never” is not the point and it never has been. The power does not stop existing just because I promise never to use it.
The power does not stop existing just because I promise never to use it.
I did date one member, not long after we opened.
We gave it a real try and then it ended, the way most things end. That part was just the two of us and it was fine.
What came after is the part I never could have predicted. Somebody else came into the picture once we were already over, and it got complicated in ways that had nothing to do with either of us and everything to do with a situation neither of us had any say in.
She does not come here anymore.
Which is the exact thing those three were afraid of. So what am I supposed to say to them now? It happened. I cannot even tell them they were wrong, because they were not.
I am not a risk-averse person. I never have been. I think the good part is worth the ending, every time. I would rather have had the thing and lost it than never had it.
But that is an easy thing for me to say. I am the one who still has the building when it is over.
I want so badly to brush past the fear and tell them it would be fine. That I am not vindictive, that I know how to be a grown-up about an ending, that nothing here would change for them.
And I cannot promise a single word of it. Not honestly. I can promise you exactly how I will behave, and that is the only piece of this I actually control. I cannot promise what anybody else will do afterward, and it turns out that everybody else gets a vote.
That is the whole reason the promise is not mine to make. It is not that I would break it. It is that it was never only mine to keep. They know themselves, and they know exactly what it would feel like to walk back through that door afterward, and they know that far better than I ever will.
I built this place so people could stay for years. Their escape. Their third place. Somewhere nobody bothers them and they get to make their stuff in peace.
I do not get to build that and then be annoyed when it works.
Fuck.
I do have friends here. Real ones.
Every single one of them arrived the same way. At some point each of them threw caution straight out the window, said fuck it, and decided to see me as a person first and sort out the rest later. They took the risk. It has been great.
There just are not many of them. For most people the math does not come out that way, and I understand the math completely.
So here is where I am, a year and a half in.
I built the best pottery studio I know how to build. I filled it with the exact thing I had in that garage and I handed it to hundreds of people. And I will never once get to walk in here and have it the way they have it.
I do not get to just show up on a Tuesday. I do not get the version of this where I am only a guy who likes clay. I do not get to be a member of my own place.
It gets lonely in a crowded room. Did you know that was possible? I did not, not until it was my own.
But I genuinely do not think it is unsolvable. I have never once met a problem that did not have an answer buried in it somewhere, and I refuse to believe this is going to be the first.
Here is what I have worked out so far, and it is not much. I am always going to need the clear signal, which means that anything past these walls, friendship or otherwise, is going to have to start with you. I cannot be the one who starts it. That is not me playing it cool. It is the only version of this I can live with.
There has got to be a way to be part of this place instead of standing outside of it.
I will figure it out. I always do.
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole
About the author
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole · Draper, Utah
Dan Pearce is an author, artist, and the founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah. Before pottery, he spent a decade as one of the most-read bloggers in the world. His blog, Single Dad Laughing, ranked #2 among personal blogs worldwide and drew more than a billion reads before he retired it in 2020. He has published six books, including the memoir The All-Important, Well-Fed, Giant White Man, and built an audience of more than three million followers. He has also worked professionally as an animal artist, illustrator, body painter, and poker player. Not in that order, and yes, all of those are real.
In 2022 he launched Dan Pearce Ceramics, known for one-of-a-kind pieces he has never once duplicated, and every sale went toward building The Clay Hole: 10,000 square feet, more than a million dollars invested, and a community of hundreds of members built from the ground up to put people first. Of everything he has made in twenty-five years of chasing creative work, he considers the community the best of it.