Ashley McCorkle
Ashley McCorkle is a co-founder of Southern Crafted and the writer of Our Journal. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, where the shop stands at 114 Bull Street.
He grew up here, at the edge of the Lowcountry, where an oyster roast is a ritual rather than a meal. Southern Crafted began with an oyster plate: he and Deborah McCorkle picked one up while shopping for a hostess gift, turned it over, and found it had been made three thousand miles from the water the oysters come out of. They put it down and went looking for the people who make the real thing. More about the shop.
Trained as a furniture maker
In the mid-2010s, while still working in technology, he served a two-year apprenticeship with the furniture maker Gary Rogowski at the Northwest Woodworking Studio in Portland, Oregon. The training was bench work and joinery, and it was also a reading list: David Pye on the workmanship of risk, James Krenov, John Ruskin, and William Morris. Alongside the writing he studied construction method — the cabinetmaking of Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and the joinery of Greene & Greene.
It is the reason the shop has the standard it has. Knowing how a dovetail is cut, and having read the people who argued about why it should be cut by hand, changes what you are willing to put on a shelf.
Before Southern Crafted
Over twenty years in technology, doing research that supported user experience and industrial design on consumer tech products. The last stretch of it was building a practice for sensing the cultural shifts that shape how people adopt technology — work that turned out to be less about devices than about ritual and belonging.
It sent him to sociologists rather than market reports. Bourdieu's argument that taste is a social position rather than a private preference is still the most useful thing he has read about why people buy what they buy, and it sits somewhere underneath every decision about what the shop carries.
What he writes about
Craftsmanship, materials, and makers — how a thing is made, who made it, and what it is for. Recurring subjects include studio pottery, Lowcountry foodways and entertaining, sweetgrass basketry, heritage textiles, furniture and joinery, and the economics of small-batch American manufacturing.
How the reporting is done
Southern Crafted buys almost nothing from wholesale markets. He has driven more than two thousand miles to visit workshops instead, and most pieces in the shop were chosen in the maker’s own studio. Journal articles usually begin the same way — at Ben Owen III’s pottery in Seagrove, North Carolina, at Corey Alston’s stall in the Charleston City Market, in Tommy Mitchell’s tole workshop. When an article quotes a maker, he was in the room.
Selected writing
- Seagrove Pottery & The Legacy of Ben Owen III: The Revival of Chinese Blue
- Corey Alston’s Sweetgrass Baskets Were Made to Be Used
- Oyster Roast as Cultural Exchange
- Craving Carolina Rice
Elsewhere
Southern Crafted, 114 Bull Street, Savannah, Georgia