Looking for some end-of-summer reading material? Check out our latest Writers’ Project interview, where bestselling author JT Ellison talks about her research, her writing routines, and her new book, The Immortals.
You’ll also find plenty of food for thought in our archives, where we’ve stored our previous interviews with Jeff Abbott and Damon Young.
Our latest Writers’ Project interview just launched!
This time, we spoke with bestselling suspense author Jeff Abbott, who told us about his life, his writing routines, and his new book, Adrenaline.
You can read the interview at the Writers’ Project website. And if you missed our last interview, with Damon Young, be sure to check it out in the archives.
Exciting news this morning: We’ve just launched a new feature on the website of our parent company, Exaclair, to celebrate writing, creativity, and the tools and minds that make it all possible.
Called the Writers’ Project, it includes interviews with authors from around the world who share tips and techniques and talk about their latest projects. Australian author Damon Young is our inaugural feature; visit the Writers’ Project homepage to learn more about Damon’s writing habits, his new book, Distraction, and the “tangible, intimate quality to the marriage of pen, ink and paper.”
Agatha Christie, disorganized writer — who knew? According to an article on Slate, a newly discovered stash of notebooks reveals the “utter derangement” in her method:
Her less-than-refined writerly day began with finding her notebook, which surely she’d left right there. Then, having found a notebook (not the one she’d used yesterday), and staring in stunned amazement at the illegible chicken scratchings therein, she would finally settle down to jab at elusive characters and oil creaky plots.
At any one time, Christie would have half a dozen notebooks going … [her] promiscuous note-taking meant that any one novel or play might be distributed over multiple notebooks and many, many years.
To learn more about the notebooks, check out John Curran’s newly published book, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making.
Image via.
Photo by Daniel Azarian
Tell us a bit about yourself — where are you from, where do you live, and when did you start writing?
I live in Philadelphia, in a small village just outside the city, so I have the best of both worlds. I know some of my family lived here in the early 1800s and after a brief foray into Ohio, we returned.
I’ve been writing all my life. I have a copy of my first story, “The Tiny Party,” about a fairy named Flash who told her sister Tiny to arrange a birthday party for her. Tiny did so, and invited Jane, Mary, Sally and Bubble. There was a chocolate cake with white icing and pink candies. Flash collected birthday loot of flowers, ribbons and socks. At another time I will tell you about The Fairy Wedding, when Glisen got married and Bubble played the organ. These exciting tales are written in pencil on yellow tablet paper. No idea of Clairefontaine paper and Herbin inks then! As I grew up, I whipped off a poem for every event, some of which my mother saved for me. There was never any question in my mind that the main purpose of life was to write about it.
When and how did you get into fountain pens and ink? Do you have a favorite pen or ink, either generally or for specific purposes?
I got my first fountain pen, a Waterman which I still use, when I was in my early twenties, a gift from my husband. I’ve been passionate about inks for about five years but I’m a lifelong diarist and I’ve collected notebooks all my life. Recently I discovered the colony of those who love pens, inks, and notebooks on the internet, where I spend happy hours reading reviews of inks and comparing colors.
A favorite color, no. Not just one. I keep a dozen or so pens in an old moosehead cream jug beside my favorite chair, where I have my morning coffee and start writing. Poets sometimes speak about the duende, invisible spirits who bring us writing. I think they help me choose which pen and ink is right for the day or for a particular task. I tend to keep a special pen for each color, as much as I can. For example, I have Herbin Vert Olive in a vintage green marbleized Shaeffer with gold accents. I might put another green in that pen but never another color. I just realized — this sounds a trifle obsessive, doesn’t it? My blues go in a blue Cavalier Pilot, my favorite just now. I write very small so I like fine or very fine nibs and these Cavaliers are very smooth. Karen Doherty (your colleague, I know) just very graciously gave me some Rose Cyclamen, which I lovelovelove. I bought a special pen for it, a silvery-pink Cavalier.
Can you tell us a little more about “Les Encres de Monsieur Herbin”?
Guest blogger Shlomi Harif is a transplanted Austinite, poet, writer, cook, and co-chair of the Austin International Poetry Festival. He also contributes to the the Drashpit.com ‘zine, a weekly odd look at portions of the Bible.
Over the winter break I visited the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin with my eleven year old daughter. It’s a very small museum – a person can browse the entire space in the space of an hour.
What caught her eye, and mine, was the exhibit of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. There’s a thrill seeing his roll-top writing desk, easily deciphering his script when he wrote out a stanza of “The Raven” for a fan. He used a stick pen; India ink stained parts here and there. Little splotches of ink on the pages pulled his ghostly hand into my field of vision: I could see where he stopped, dipped, blotted. Where he paused, then resumed writing. There were numerous letters to and from friends, memos to publishers, cryptic messages to lovers.
In today’s digital world we’ve lost these physical scraps of our footprint on this world: they’re relegated to inboxes and folders, or printed out in some grim, relentlessly linear typeface like zombie handwriting. I’ve postcards and letters from when I was a summer camper, paper-thin aerogramme envelopes written after I’d moved overseas. Letters my parents received, stamped by military censors. Love letters from my marriage that spanned not quite a generation. Letters from girlfriends whose children are parents. Letters from relatives who’ll never write again.
We’ve lost an amazing connection with our past. Unlike the buggy whip or the clay tablet, written letters are more than just words whose medium has passed. They’re pricelessly annotated: flourishes of the script, cramped little words clearly written in the dark, in haste, stained with tears, grease, or blood. Reducing them to electronic bits, trite acronyms and fractured English sucks the marrow from the bones of their message, leaving a harrowed skeleton without the beauty of a full bodied letter.
Those of us who write in journals, who consecrate our thoughts, ideas and feelings to the printed page are carrying on a sacred tradition, one that blogs, twitter feeds and facebook “walls” can never replace. Nor should they, as the power of our words is diluted, somehow, when they’re cast to the ether’s wind instead of being nestled into an envelope, or blotted into place on a single side of a single page of a singular book.
Karen posted this on Rhodia Drive last week, and I thought our readers might enjoy it, too — a poem by author Tree Riesener about J. Herbin ink.
As always, we love seeing the artwork that our little community produces, and poems are no exception. So writers… keep it coming, no matter what inspires you!
Les Encres de Monsieur Herbin
Encre Authentique, “Lawyers’ Ink,” for orders of execution, though paper crumbles, glowing in the night for three hundred years, enduring black legalese, these letters.
Grise Nuage, grey clouds of 1943 for Irene Sendlerowa, savior of children from the Warsaw Ghetto, for her heart broken, but never broken, of little ease, these letters.
Bouquet d’Antan, please please don’t leave, words in sorrowful faded rose, desolation unremembered, only watching the rain, writing, sorrow without surcease, these letters.
Cafe des Iles, never say you love me, and if we meet, I’ll pretend I’ve forgotten your face. Faded brown written on leaves, let them blow away in the breeze, these letters.
Violette Pensee, I will bury your bottle in fragrant petals, write by the light of candles on turtles’ backs, pen delicate lyrics of love and loss, plus an occasional tease, these letters.
Eclat de Saphir, flashing blue scooped from the sun-glinted ocean, sign room service for two, “Etouffee d’ecrevisses, Pinot Grigio, Mousse au chocolat,” caprice, these letters.
Lierre Sauvage, shadowed green, forest tree, flow as I copy out Akhmatova, “The glass doorbell rings, don’t touch me,” thoughts Stalin’s shadows could not seize, these letters.
For more information about Tree Riesener, visit her blog or her website.
