Description: Seventy years ago, on the beautiful southern coast of a state renowned for its artists, writers, and poets, a very unusual family business was born: Shearwater Pottery, of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Since 1928, the pottery workshop and art colony at Shearwater have changed little. The Anderson family hasn't computerized; they haven't advertised; they keep their revenues in the same wooden cash box on the same desk in the same showroom in the woods that the family built during the Depression. They still break any piece that doesn't live up to their expectations, and their best pieces that doesn't live up to their expectations, and their best pieces often aren't for sale. But when a firing of hundreds of pieces hits the shelves in the showroom, those shelves are stripped completely bare by collectors in a week. Shearwater has become a thriving, profitable, and intensely personal enterprise, at once a joyful inspiration and the setting for some of the family's darkest hours.

"Dreaming In Clay" is the story of four generations of poets, writers, painters, potters, carpenters, and sculptors, but it's also the story of four generations of mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, and children, and their efforts to keep their family together in the face of the Depression, war, and the changing industrial and cultural face of the Deep South. Intimate, compassionate, and saturated with local color, this remarkable family portrait explores the cultural legacy of the South, the relationship between art and love, and between art and insanity, and how a family that continues to resist calling what they do "art" resolved the conflict between making a living and making what they love.

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