Translation from Spanish 

We rarely have the opportunity to bring to this section a book that unites two artistic activities, for this reason, those of us who love both literature and ceramics can find in this beautiful book, also very carefully edited, a source of satisfaction and emotion. Chance makes me write these lines on Saint George's day, and it is a fortunate coincidence, since the book in front of me is, like the tradition of the book and the rose, the union of two ways of giving beauty, of offering love and culture. 

Or love of culture.

In the book titled “Tales from Broken Plates” the author offers us precisely that: stories in which he invents a story from the fragment of a broken plate. Stories in which the love for ceramics becomes stories. Mark Lawson Bell makes a literary exercise that goes beyond simple fiction, since by incorporating a real, concrete and palpable element, a fragment of ceramic found by chance, about which nothing is known, he somehow mixes reality with reality. fiction. It seems to give the fragment a new life, it shows us that a ceramic work (a clear metaphor for any human activity) consists of successive cycles, of uses, of emotions.

The author says that he has been collecting for years those ceramic fragments that we find on the streets or paths, the same ones that fill the showcases of museums if they are, in someway, special, but which we usually ignore if they are plates or utilitarian pieces for “regular” use. However, for Mark Lawson Bell, every humble piece of broken plate has a story behind it. Obviously, in most cases it is impossible to know that story, but that is where literature comes into play, offering us, through the author’s hand, these stories, these explanations of how these ceramic pieces were broken.

These stories can be micro-stories, even seem like a kind of Western kaiku, but also a short story or an anecdote, sometimes humorous. But in all of them we are surrounded by an atmosphere of life in the countryside, of tranquillity and balance, even when the balance is broken and the plate ends up on the ground.

The author, in a final twist, shows us, as if it were the catalogue of a hypothetical exhibition, the ceramic fragments with an explanation of the circumstances under which they were found, what motivated the story or what made him reflect or get excited.