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Q&A: Appalachian Potter Josh Copus has ‘Mud in the Blood’ [1]
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Date: 2025-06-20
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Josh Copus is an artist and creative entrepreneur in Marshall, North Carolina. His many pursuits include pottery, brickmaking, and the Old Marshall Jail Hotel, an art hotel and historic preservation project inside the former jailhouse on Marshall’s main street.
I spent nearly a week with Josh, observing a wood firing at his pottery compound.
Enjoy an excerpt of our many conversations, below.
This interview is part of the Living Traditions series focused on the contemporary artists and makers who are maintaining pre-industrial pottery practices. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Josh Copus dug a “lifetime supply” of local clay from a tobacco farmer’s field a county over from his home in Marshall, North Carolina. He says his relationship with the farmer, Neal Woody, is even more important than the clay that provides his livelihood. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan)
Anya Petrone Slepyan, The Daily Yonder: Tell me a bit about your background, and how you got introduced to ceramics.
Josh Copus: I’m an artist and creative entrepreneur. And I was raised in Floyd County, Virginia, which is in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, in a very rural place. I grew up in the alternative community, so I was raised on a hippie commune, and my parents moved there to go “back to the land.” And so many people in my community were artists. That was quite common. So I had a lot of role models for how to do that and it never seemed like a weird thing to do.
My friend Seth Phelps, his father, Tom, was a potter. And they made face jugs together. So Tom would throw the pots on the wheel, and then Seth would sculpt these faces on them. And that’s actually a very interesting historical folk pottery tradition that came with the slave population and was sort of adopted/co-opted by the European descendant potters in the southeast. And, of course, we didn’t know any of that, I was just like, playing Dungeons and Dragons. But Tom said, if you make these face pots, I will take them to my shows and sell them, and I will give you the money. And I just remember thinking “That’ll never work. No one’s gonna buy these things. But it seems like a really cool thing to do, so I’m gonna do it.”
Tom took the pots that we made to his show and sold them, and he came back and he gave me the money. And I just remember, even at 15, being like, I think I discovered, like, the meaning of life. I just got paid to do something that I was gonna do anyways, just because it was cool. Other than my parents, you know, Tom is 100% the greatest influence in my life. I mean, he showed me my life’s work when I was 15. So how often does that happen?
DY: What do you make? And what is your process?
JC: Right now I make things that feel like rocks, is the best way I can describe it. I make what I want, and then I figure out how to sell it.
I use materials largely that I am harvesting myself from the ground, and then I wood fire – those two things are collaborators in the process of making ceramics. So the materials and the firing process are not simply means to an end. I am combining my personal life experiences and ideas with materials that have a lot to say and have a lot of character.
One of the things that I love about wood firing is it can surprise you. You can actually make things that are beyond what you could imagine. I’ve pulled things out of the wood kiln that I don’t even understand. Like, how did that happen? It’s alchemy. It’s magic.
One of the things I talk about is that art-making is a series of decisions. You’re basically doing problem solving, and the problem is how do you make a good pot? For me, the more opportunities I have to make choices along that journey, the more it feels like mine.
A wood-fired piece sits in the garden of Josh Copus’ pottery compound. Copus sees the local clay he uses and the wood firing process as collaborators in his artistic practice. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan)
DY: Most of your clay comes from a farmer’s field a county over. How did you come by it?
JC: So, when I was in school, I became interested in digging clay out of the ground, and I was pretty convinced that you could just do that. The body of work that I am making now starts at this point, because I was looking for ways to make ceramics that meant something more to me. And so this pretty magical thing happened where this guy, Gary Jackson, brought this sample of clay into the studio. And so he took me and my two buddies out to Leicester [North Carolina], to this field. And it was an old tobacco field, like they were actually growing tobacco in it at that point. And Gary showed us this clay and then he just left, and I never heard from him again, like, poof, he was gone.
It turned out the field belonged to a farmer named Neal Woody. And this is so long ago that I looked Neal Woody’s phone number up in an actual physical phone book. I called him and said, we do pottery, and we found some clay in your field. And he was like, I know pottery, I’ve got some. And I was like, great, because we made pottery out of the clay that we found on your land, and we would like to come and give it to you. So we went out to Neal’s house, and gave him some pottery we had made out of his clay. And he was so into it. There’s this amazing thing, when someone who makes pottery picks up pottery, they do it in a very specific way that makes it obvious. And Neal did it. He held it, he picked it up, he turned it over. He rubbed the foot.
And he did have some old pots that were his grandmother’s – old folk pots, and those things had major value to him, they were heirlooms. So he had a reverence, he had a framework for understanding pottery that I think was unique in the larger world. He understood it in a cultural way that was generational, and also as a farmer like you know, he knew that dirt.
And so he let us dig his clay. And I just asked him straight up, “how does this work?” Like, do I pay you? I don’t know how this works, so you tell me. And Neal said something to me that I’ve kept with me my whole career. And you got to understand, [at this moment] I’m a 25-year-old college kid that grew up on a hippie commune, and Neal is a seventh-generation tobacco farmer from Leicester who’s like, 70. We could walk past each other on the sidewalk and not know to say hello. But the material had brought us together in this way, and created a friendship that was very important to me. And so he said “As that old dirt sits in that field, it ain’t worth nothing to me.” He said, “it’s what you do to it that gives it the value.” And I almost broke down.
We dug 11 dump trucks [-worth of clay] out of Neal’s field, and he never took one dollar. He got plenty of pottery. And I used to think that what I got out of that was this clay. And as I moved through my life and started to see it in a different light, I’ve realized the material itself is actually not the most important thing. It really was the friendship and the connection. Neal’s gone, you know, he’s passed away, and I still have a big pile of that clay that is my lifetime supply, but the friendship with Neal is more valuable than the stuff.
DY: How are relationships like the ones you had with Tom and Neal important for continuing pottery traditions?
JC: When I was coming up, everyone took the time to help me, share things with me, show me how things are done, and so I have made it my life goal to pay that forward. And one of the reasons why I think that matters is because I think pottery saved my life, and you never know the impact you have on someone. Even the tiniest kindness or giving someone the slightest amount of attention can change their life forever, in a way that you could never imagine. And so it’s important that we pass it on, and as long as there are people that want to do it, I’m going to devote myself to offering them everything I have. So we’ve got two young blood, 20-year-old kids from Oklahoma that drove 14 hours to do this firing, and so that gives me a lot of hope for the future.
DY: Marshall was devastated by Hurricane Helene last November, and your hotel and restaurant were severely damaged. What made you decide to rebuild?
JC: I love living in a place where people know who I am. Of course, that can have its drawbacks. When you live in a city, there’s anonymity, and you can kind of be an asshole and get away with it. But I think it’s good to live in a place where people know each other, and I think our fabric is woven tighter. And I think when something traumatic happens, you see that the stitching is of higher quality, and you don’t tear as easy. There’s a resiliency to that that’s like, built in. And, you know, my neighbors, we look out for each other. And I think it’s bigger than our politics or our beliefs. In Madison County, we’re not far removed from where you actually needed your neighbors to survive.
In Marshall, our whole town was destroyed by the flood of Hurricane Helene. We had a crest of 27 feet. I said out loud, our town was destroyed. And what happened was I realized that our buildings were damaged. But the town is not the stuff, the town is the people, and the people are still here, and that’s why we’re rebuilding. I would not have reopened my restaurant and my hotel if it wasn’t for the people.
This interview is part of Living Traditions, a multimedia project about folklife in central Appalachia. In this series, we bring you an assortment of stories about traditional cultural practices, both time-honored and emergent. Read more Living Traditions.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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