A true story, in permanent marker
The Signature Wall
How a kid who faked the signatures in his own yearbook grew up and started collecting real ones. By the hundreds.
In seventh grade, I got my first yearbook.
I took a pen and scribbled my own face out of it.
Not a bully’s face. Not the face of some kid who’d wronged me. Mine. That’s how much I hated myself at twelve years old. I looked at my own school picture and decided the page was better off without it.
They tell me it’s always good to open an essay with something gut-wrenching. So there you go. It gets funnier from here, I promise. Mostly.
By ninth grade, the big trend at my school was signing the leather bottoms of each other’s Jansport backpacks. If you were somebody, your backpack proved it. A walking guestbook of your own popularity, dangling off your shoulders for the whole school to see.
Nobody signed mine.
So I did what any reasonable, emotionally stable fourteen-year-old would do. I made up signatures and wrote them on there myself. Different slants. Different pens. Different pressure on the letters so they’d look like different hands.
And I felt cool.
I really did. That’s the part I need you to understand. Walking down that hallway with a backpack full of fake friends, I felt cool.
By tenth grade I had a whole system. I’d sit alone in my bedroom and forge notes into my yearbook. “Stay rad, Dan!” “Never change!” “Best summer ever!” I wrote myself some really quality friendships that year. I didn’t have the guts to ask many real people for their signatures, and let’s be honest, not many were asking for mine.
I’d been doing versions of this since eighth grade. And somewhere in all that forging, I learned something that would take me a very long time to unlearn: if reality says you’re worthless, you can just invent a different reality.
It was more important to me to feel valuable in the fantasy than honest in the reality.
I’ve turned that sentence over a lot in the decades since.
It was more important to me to feel valuable in the fantasy than honest in the reality.
Teenage years don’t last forever. Thank God.
Somehow I gained confidence. Somehow I became an adult. I grew. I adapted. I found myself. I lost myself. I found myself again. I gained more confidence. I grew some more. You get the idea. Being a human is mostly just doing that on repeat until something clicks.
And somewhere in all that growing, signatures worked their way back into my life.
Not mine. Let’s get that straight, because this is where it gets funny. My signature is everywhere now. It’s on thousands of pieces of art. It’s in thousands of books. It’s pressed into thousands of pots as my maker’s mark. Not to brag or anything, but I’m obviously a pretty damn important person.
(I am not. I am a guy who owns a chair that people write on. We’ll get to the chair.)
But seriously, it was never my signature I cared about.
It was everybody else’s.
Somewhere along the way I became obsessed with giving other people the chance to leave their mark in my life. To feel special. To make it official, the way yearbooks were always supposed to make it official. We shared space together. We shared a moment in time together. We shared an experience together. And now there’s proof.
It started with notebooks. I’d hand one over and ask for a note and a signature. Then it spread. Laptops. Clothes. If something was mine and it held still long enough, somebody eventually signed it.
Then, in 2017, I searched high and low for the perfect chair. Not the most comfortable chair. Not the best looking chair. The perfect chair to be signed. These are very different shopping categories, and I do not recommend explaining yours to the furniture salesman.
I found it. And everyone started signing it. Every friend. Every poker player. Every family member. Every partner. Every niece and nephew. Every you-name-it who spent real time in my home and in my life.
It started with a few signatures. It’s still going. Top to bottom, front to back, side to side.
When I opened my first little pottery studio in my garage, I built a ceramic tile wall behind my first kiln. And I gave that wall one rule.
You didn’t get to sign it because you stopped by. You didn’t get to sign it because you were family, or because I liked you, or because you asked nicely.
You signed it because we made art together. That was the whole rule.
Over the few years I ran that garage studio, a whole lot of signatures went up on those tiles. Every single one of them earned the exact same way.
You signed it because we made art together. That was the whole rule.
Then I started The Clay Hole, and suddenly we had a much, much bigger wall.
I signed it first. Nobody else. One signature on a great big blank wall.
Which is either the loneliest thing you’ve ever heard or the most hopeful, depending on how you squint.
Because think about it. The kid who forged signatures alone in his bedroom grew up, opened ten thousand square feet of pottery studio, wrote his name on the biggest wall in it, and then started handing out Sharpies to every human who came to make art there. That’s either growth or the longest revenge plot in history. I choose growth.
Eighteen months later, the wall has hundreds of signatures on it. Real ones this time. I’ve checked the slants.
Members. Friends. People who came once, played with clay for a single night, and left a little piece of themselves on the way out. Eventually it will be thousands. Who knows. Maybe someday, tens of thousands.
So why do signatures matter this much to me?
I honestly don’t know.
Maybe it’s the sadness I carried over the lack of them growing up. Maybe it’s the strange power of a signature in general, how binding one small scribble of ink can be. Maybe it’s the beauty of desecrating something that was never supposed to be drawn on, and doing it with a giant statement of unity. Maybe I just like looking back and knowing exactly who came and went from my life.
Probably all of it. Again, I don’t know and I can’t say.
But here’s the part I do know.
I never remove a signature. Ever.
Some of the people on those walls and on that chair are people I still love most in this world. Dear friends of decades. Some of the most amazing humans I’ve ever known.
And some of them are enemies, of sorts. People I fell out with. People who turned out not to be who I thought they were. People who hurt me. And probably a few people I hurt, because falling out usually takes two, and present company is definitely included.
Nobody gets removed.
Why?
We shared space. Those people shaped me every bit as much as the dearly loved ones did. They were as much a part of this ridiculous, beautiful journey as anyone else has been. I would not be who I am, or where I am, without every single person who ever left their mark on my life. The ones who stayed. The ones who went. Even the ones who left marks in the other sense of the word.
We sign art after we create it.
And people leaving their signatures behind after helping create me? Well. That’s just what artists do, right?
We sign art after we create it. That’s what artists do.
So here’s my invitation. It’s a personal one, from me to you.
Come make art with me.
Come share some clay with me. Come sit down at a wheel with mud on your hands and try something you might be terrible at, right next to a whole room of other people being gloriously terrible at it too. Clay doesn’t care who you are. It humbles the hell out of all of us equally. Laugh at what you make. Be weirdly proud of it anyway. That’s the whole gig.
And when we’ve done that, when we’ve actually made something together, I’ll hand you a marker and point you at the wall.
Sign it big. Sign it small. Sign it fancy or barely legible. Add a doodle. Plenty of people have.
Because your name up there will mean exactly what every other name on that wall means. Not that you visited a pottery studio. That we shared space. That we shared a moment in time. That you left your mark in my life, and that I will keep it there forever. No matter what.
I spent my teenage years forging proof that I mattered to people.
I plan to spend the rest of my life collecting proof that people mattered to me.
The wall has room. Come find your spot.
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole, Fellow Human
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.