JACK TROY

Maine Arts Journal Spring 2026

Morning Coffee

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by Stuart Kestenbaum
©2026

Kestenbaum tea bowl by Jack Troy copy

My friend Jack Troy is a potter and a poet. A few years back, he asked me to read a manuscript of his, and as a thank you, sent me two tea bowls. While his form is related stylistically to Japanese tea bowls, for me it’s one of my go-to cups for morning coffee. I love to pour the dark liquid into the off-white interior.

Jack is eighty-eight years old. I think he has made thousands of these cups over his career, each one made from a small ball of clay, centered and thrown on a potter’s wheel, trimmed, and glazed. Each of these cups holds the space made by his hands. It’s like there’s a breath inside the clay. Today, a light snow is falling. It is covering the dirt path. The ice has a flat gray hue as the season begins to change. The snow is a mottled white. The surface of this cup is like the surface of the earth. This morning the clay and the landscape are one.

The clay, eroded stone and organic material, remembers all this. It remembers the slow geologic time of tectonic plates and the ice shields. It knows the freeze and the thaw and the endless flow of water. And the clay remembers the fire, the flames that touch its surface and draw oxygen from the glaze.

Jack’s hands are connected to the hands of all of the makers before him. He knows the traditions, and within the traditions are the skills that the hands learn. The feel of the material. The knowledge of its properties. When he opens the vessel, his hands reach back to prehistoric makers who dug clay from riverbanks, who drew with pigment on walls of caves. His is the knowledge of trial and error carried over lifetimes of those makers and his lifetime too.

This cup has no handle, so my hands wrap around it when I drink. I think how this simple form has traveled through time, how it is like the two hands of our ancestors coming together to form the first bowl, to scoop water from a stream.

I pick up the cup to drink. I put its lip to my lips. As I tilt it, I watch the bottom reveal itself, liquid moving like a tide ebbing, like an ice sheet retreating. This is a morning blessing. This is the world inside the cup that Jack made, putting fingers to clay, opening up the center, tilting his head slightly, and listening to the ancient silence.

Full view of the image at top: Jack Troy, Tea Bowl, reduction-fired stoneware, 3.25 in.

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About Jack Troy

Jack Troy is a potter, teacher, and writer, from Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where he taught at Juniata College for 39 years. He has taught more than 260 workshops in the U. S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, and other countries, and has worked at the Institute of Ceramic Studies, Jingdezhen, China; he was an Invited Artist at Japan’s Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park. His education in ceramics has included trips to 26 countries. Having published over 100 articles in ceramics publications, he also wrote Salt Glazed Ceramics, Wood Fired Stoneware and Porcelain, as well as Calling the Planet Home, and Giving it up to the Wind [poems]. His work has been exhibited widely, and is in numerous collections, public and private, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery, Auckland (NZ) Museum of Art, Kalamazoo (Michigan) Institute of Art and Alfred University. He received the 2012 NCECA (National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts) Excellence in Teaching Award, and gave the closing talk, “Anecdotal Evidence,” (accessible on You Tube) at the 49th NCECA conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2015, and was accorded Watershed’s “Legend” status with Paula Winokur and Wayne Higby in 2017. 2022 is Jack’s 60th year as a potter.

Onward, Upward, and Outward at the Wheel


This is Jack Troy’s 63rd year as a potter. He has taught more than 260 workshops and published over 120 articles and book reviews in ceramics publications in addition to writing Salt Glazed Ceramics and Wood Fired Stoneware and Porcelain. Jack Troy lives in Huntingdon, PA, where he taught at Juniata College for 39 years and started the ceramics program in 1968. He has taught more than 250 workshops in the US and eight countries. His book, Wood Fired Stoneware and Porcelain, and Salt Glazed Ceramics are standards in their fields, and he has published more than 100 articles and book reviews of every major ceramics periodical published in English. He and his crew fire two anagamas three times a year. Castle Hill is a favorite place to remind himself that learning and teaching are inseparable.

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