As an industrial arts major at Appalachian State University, Gary Clontz always thought he would become a shop teacher. Now, as a clay instructor and chairman of the Haywood Community College Professional Crafts Department, Clontz realizes those best-laid plans often go astray.

It’s a lifelong lesson for an artist like Clontz, who found a way to thrive under HCC’s highly acclaimed crafts program, one that combines a unique blend of art techniques and business skills.

But art didn’t come so easy to Clontz at the beginning.

With his scholarship from Broyhill Furniture, an award that required he work off his earnings in the mills, going on to teaching shop classes seemed natural, if not practical — woodworking, circuitry, maybe a little fly-tying and hunter’s safety.

It wasn’t until he was staring down the barrel of a closed elective course offering on leatherworking that his advisor recommended he try something new — pottery.

“I honestly said, ‘What’s that?’” Clontz said.

His only experience with the medium was through elementary art class.

“Like everyone else I’d made an ashtray in third grade,” Clontz said.

So he signed up.

His first encounters with clay were wrought with failure. A sympathetic handful of graduate students took Clontz under their wing, coaching him and cultivating not just a desire to pass the class, but to continue his studies in clay. He took every class ASU offered and enrolled in as many independent studies as the school would allow.

After graduating, however, Clontz was obliged to work off his Broyhill scholarship. It was that or pay it back. He spent a year in New York being miserable and was looking for new work when a friend told him about the potential for a new clay program at HCC.

Mary Cornwell, an HCC board member and a home demonstration agent with the N.C. Department of Agriculture, had come up with an idea to mix Western North Carolina’s craft traditions with entrepreneurial business sense. Through her travels around the region she’d found that many local crafters were being taken advantage of financially.

“I guess, bottom line, they didn’t really understand the value of what they were making,” Clontz said. “Artists are not by nature or by course business people.”

Clontz quit his job at Broyhill on a Friday and began work at HCC on Monday. His eagerness, however, couldn’t make up for the program’s lack of structure. Attempts to teach budding artists traditional business courses were a bust. How the information was being presented just didn’t make sense.

“It was a horrible failure; it couldn’t have been worse,” Clontz said.

Fortunately, the college found a way to lay out some visionary planning that would help nurture artists like Clontz while at the same time give them the business tools to be successful when it came time to sell their work.

Administrators began to look for ways to retool the program. In 1989 North Carolina Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning was looking for ways to teach individuals how to run their own small businesses. The organization had been working through high schools to teach entrepreneurship with the idea that post-graduation students could open their own businesses.

“The problem was high school students aren’t adults,” Clontz said. They couldn’t go off-campus; they weren’t old enough to get loans.

The following year, NC REAL consultant Jonathan Sher returned to HCC to help incorporate the entrepreneurial concept into the professional crafts program. The idea was to teach less theory — think no more macro/micro economics — and more how-to, from advertising to bookkeeping, contract negotiation to analyzing competition. Students would create their own workable studio, marketing and business plans.

“It’s personalizing the business experience so there’s ownership in the idea,” Clontz said.

The concept made sense because like the program, it was hands-on.

“For craftspeople, everything we do results in something tangible,” Clontz said.

Students didn’t receive these lessons from outside the professional crafts department. Rather, their instructors — Catharine Ellis (fiber), Robert Gibson (design/photography), Wayne Rabb (woodworking), and Robert Blanton (jewelry/metals) — made them a part of their routine classes.

With this blend of art and business, the craft program at HCC became the only one of its kind in the nation. Recently it was recognized as the 30th recipient of Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Award. The award is given in recognition of outstanding contributions to the preservation or interpretation of the history and culture of Southern Appalachia; or in recognition of outstanding contributions to research on, or interpretation of, Southern Appalachian issues.

Close to 70 graduates of HCC’s program have gone on to become members of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild, a juried group of crafters that operates out of the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Liz Spear, a guild member, spent 13 years as a potter in Iowa before coming to HCC in 1991 to study weaving.

Because she was so long in the business of being a crafter, she already knew the basics. What she was looking for was something she could really apply. Upon meeting weaving instructor Ellis, Spear immediately liked the feel of the program, the practical approach to the craft industry.

“It’s a whole lot closer to real life as a crafts person,” Spear said.

What she gained from the experience was two-fold — figuring out who she was as an artist and connecting with the local community.

“In North Central Iowa the only time you saw friends was out on the circuit,” Spear said. “Here the levels and layers of craftspeople are so deep.”

The program forced her to focus inward, looking at herself in terms of her interests and her own marketability versus other artists.

“It made me slow down and figure out what it was I wanted to do,” Spear said. “In the Midwest I was working for other people; I was the anonymous craftsperson.”

Though she wanted mostly to weave yardage — large pieces of fabric — the fabric itself wouldn’t sell as well or for as much as the products it could be turned into. Spear delved into her background in sewing — a “self-defense” mechanism developed as a result of her mother’s sewing slowness — and began turning her fabrics into clothing. This specialization allowed for a cross-marketing partnership with another weaver and HCC graduate, Neal Howard, who only makes scarves and shawls. Spear and Howard share a booth at craft fairs.

As the HCC craft program continues to evolve and earn respect, the challenge is to accommodate the growing interest, as the crafts industry represents an increasingly viable portion of the Western North Carolina economy. According to Handmade in America statistics, the craft industry contributed $122 million to the economy in 1995.

Now, HCC’s program needs new studio space, a permanent craft display center and just more room in general, but as with most community colleges, funds are limited. The arts at HCC also suffered in terms of continuing education classes. The building where those classes were taught was flooded during last year’s September hurricanes, Clontz said.

“We really would like to grow, but to a certain extent our facilities have limited our enrollment,” Clontz said.