When I first set out to write about Alex and Connie, I decided, sight unseen, what I wanted to discuss. I wanted to ask, from my own perspective as a native Southerner: Why should we care about the life of a man from Massachusetts and a woman from California who had adopted the traditional crafts of Western North Carolina? These crafts were originally simply modes of survival for the poor. But I wondered, were they now becoming the “artisanal” pursuits of the sons and daughters of the privileged class?

I felt really clever about this angle. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, with deep roots in the Georgia towns of Cordele, Monroe and Cartersville. I’m as proud of my kinfolks’ strength and survival as I am ashamed of the legacy of hate for which the South is more often known. Part of my life’s work is celebrating, through food and writing, the richly diverse cultures of Southern people, black and white, rich and poor.

I’m protective of those cultures, so in writing this piece I thought it would be really interesting to look at Alex’s work critically — as a co-optation of a traditional Southern craft by a rich kid from the North. And it’s a legitimate question: Leach and Cardew both came from privilege, so could they have done the work they did without the patronage of inheritance? Are the British and Northern potters who come here for the clay colonizing North Carolina pottery or preserving it? Would Henri Matisse have had the time to to change the way the world sees color had his father not been a rich grain merchant?

So I went to East Fork asking all these tough questions. But the more I tried to get answers, the more they eluded me. After two weeks I began to feel like I was slamming a pickup truck into a solid cinderblock wall, putting that bitch in reverse, backing it up and doing it all over again. Finally I had to come to terms with the fact that my approach had been wrong all along. I couldn’t write the story I had set out to write, because that story wasn’t true.

I came to see more and more clearly that while Alex’s work bears his own distinctive voice, his lexicon is pure North Carolina, as much as his clay, his glazes and his wood ash reflect the Carolina landscape.

Alex Matisse is not an outsider. The only thing he’s ever been, since the day he took that first apprenticeship, is a North Carolina potter, one who became what he is today through his own effort. His famous last name didn’t have a damned thing to do with it.

Still, Alex understands why people ask the questions. “It is the great thing that consumes me to the point of destruction,” he says. “I’m much more aware and sensitive to other people’s perceptions of me having to do with privilege. It is part of my narrative. I think about it all the time.

“You have two options. One is to not tell anybody, to hide from what you are trying to do, what you’re not comfortable with. The other is to be open about it, and that’s hard. It’s not the attractive narrative. I’m trying to reach a point in my life where I’m upfront and honest that [my family background] is just part of who I am.”

Matisse feels a deep artistic connection with Daniel Johnston, Vigeland's teacher and a potter who grew up in far more humble circumstances in central North Carolina. But sometimes, Alex finds himself comparing his own artistic struggles with the more real-world struggles that faced Johnston as he built his career.

“He is the genuine article, a fantastic, amazing potter, and if there is a story of someone doing it on their own, it’s his story,” Alex says. “Not that mine is devoid of struggle, but if it is devoid of that kind of struggle, how does it have merit? The only thing I can I say is: Good art transcends everything. Good work transcends all of that, and if you are going to make good work, then the good work stands on its own. And I’m not saying I make good work. I’m just saying that I’m striving to do that. If you are a creative person, you create regardless of your condition, and the work is first and foremost.”

Over the five weeks I spent visiting East Fork Pottery, I came to agree. The phrase “all wealth is from the earth” has been ringing in my mind all this time. The joy of making something from only the most basic elements — earth, air, fire and water — with your hands, making it truly, transcendentally beautiful: Nobody owns that, and nobody can take it away. Nobody has a corner on authenticity, whether you’re from the South or not, whether you’ve had economic struggle or not, no matter who your daddy or your granddaddy or your great-granddaddy is.

In searching for the South, we often end up defining ourselves by what we are not, rather than celebrating who we really are and where we came from. If we’re going to be truthful (and we should be) about celebrating ourselves, then we better get real and recognize that everybody is somebody and everybody is from somewhere. We all just happen to have landed here in this particular, peculiar corner of the earth: by birth, by choice or by happenstance. No matter why we’re here, here is where we are, and here is where we create.

In our work, we meet our ancestors — whether our blood ancestors or our spiritual ones — and we are connected to them in one long, loving arc of beauty. They give us stories that feed us and teach us how to live. And whether you’re from Massachusetts or Mississippi and whether your history is rooted in the salt of the earth or the noblesse oblige, your work can be your redemption. You can use your work to forge a meaningful life, to reach out over the past and into the future to make something timeless, something beautiful, and your work will stand on its own merit as a result of your struggle.

Alex Matisse came to the South to do his work because this is where he could do it best. And that’s a Southern story if I’ve ever heard one.