Happy 250th anniversary to the United States. Two hundred and fifty years is certainly a remarkable milestone in the life of a nation. And yet, anniversaries have a way of reminding me that time is measured differently depending on where we stand. As I write this, I have one foot in the US and the other stepping into Mexico to be with my husband, who lives and works there full-time.
Over the past six months, 70,689 readers have visited the journal's website, but only 35 percent have come from within the United States. Our Board of Directors and our authors cross borders with ease while living, teaching workshops, building kilns, and exchanging ideas around the world. Mentioning this anniversary is not simply to celebrate a nation, but to recognize how much larger the world of Studio Potter has become than any one country's borders.
The minerals beneath our feet were here long before nations named themselves, and they will remain long after today's borders are redrawn. The stories in these pages belong to landscapes, communities, migrations, traditions, and conversations that have never fit neatly inside the idea of a single flag.
This, from my perspective, is one of the gifts of working with clay. It reminds me that we can be rooted in a place while also recognizing that our histories stretch far beyond the birth of any modern nation. Many of us carry ancestral stories that reach back centuries, even millennia, before the lines on today's maps were imagined. Others have histories marked by migration, displacement, forced diaspora, or the search for a new home.
That complexity leaves room for celebration and reflection to exist side by side. With one foot in the US and one foot out, I can acknowledge the significance of a nation's anniversary while also holding space for the longer histories, contradictions, and diverse experiences that shape the people living within and beyond its borders.
This has always been the spirit of this journal. It is not a landlocked publication. This month's contributors speak exactly to that mindset. It is a gathering place. In that sense, our community has always been larger than any one country. It belongs wherever there is clay, conversation, and a willingness to learn from one another.
Randi O'Brien, editor and executive director