February 25th
We talk a lot about writing on this blog, and inspiration and creativity. But I’m wondering: what are you reading?
I just finished Janet Malcolm’s awesome work on the relationship between authors and their subjects, The Journalist and the Murderer, whose smart analysis of the story behind Fatal Vision is relevant to both fiction and non-fiction writers. Before that, Rebecca Goldstein’s Mind-Body Problem. I’m not sure what I’ll read next.
What about you?
Image by Wonderlane.
February 12th
Photo by Daniel Azarian
Inscapes
, Angel Poison
and Liminalog
(each available for purchase on her website), and has published widely in literary magazines. Read more about Tree at her website and blog.
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”?
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February 8th
Image via Bitterjug
Like many people, I often have ideas about work or writing projects right as I’m falling asleep. I know I won’t remember them when I wake up, so I keep a little notepad and pen next to my bed to jot them down.
Here’s the thing: If I use a regular pen, I run the risk of not being able to decipher my groggy, sleep-blind scrawl when I wake up. I thought I’d solved that problem a couple years ago at the Museum of Natural History gift shop, where I found an inexpensive ball-point pen whose barrel had a light in it. It was perfect—it gave me just enough light to see what I was writing without disturbing anyone or jolting me awake.
But the light bulb broke after a couple of months, and since nobody had any idea where I could replace it, I ended up consigning the pen to daytime use and buying another like it on eBay. That pen, too, has since fallen apart, despite my best efforts to keep its inexpensively made pieces in line.
In the age of cheap manufacturing, is there anyone out there who makes a high-quality version of this pen? I realize it’s a novelty item, and it’s not like I’m about to shell out big money for it. But I can’t, in good environmental conscience, buy another cheapie with the expectation that it’ll last a few months or a year, then break and be thrown in the trash.
Got any recommendations?
January 20th
Guest blogger John Cullen teaches literature at Ferris State University and has a lot of dogs and horses. He’s been a fountain pen fiend for about thirty years; here are his thoughts on the Habana…
(Image via Writer’s Bloc.)
Well, generally I have gotten pretty cynical about journals over the years. I hate to think how much I have spent only to end up throwing journals away because they will not open flat on the table or the paper inside the journal is so bad it makes the writing experience feel like punishment. Add to that the fact I use a fountain pen and you can see why finding a good journal has been a trial.
Recently I got on a chat board where people discussed these issues in depth and many people recommended I get a Quo Vadis Habana notebook. In fact, people spoke in glowing terms about these journals. Yeah, right, I thought, but then I figured I would give one a try. What a pleasant surprise this journal has been!
The Habana is roughly 5 x 9 inches and comes with 80 pages of Clairefontaine lined paper. The cover looks and feels like leather, and the spacing on the white paper is generous. So from a cosmetic perspective, this is a great journal. There is even a stretchy band to keep the journal closed.
But how would it work when actually put to use?
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January 12th
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.
January 4th
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.
June 29th
Thanks to Pentamento for the first review of our new Equology eco-friendly notebooks and planners… Reading it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to post my own photographs and impressions, so here goes.
I, too, love the heavy duty rubber-like cover, to which pictures don’t really do justice—it’s soft and bumpy and dry, sort of like a cat’s tongue:
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June 24th
One of the new products from Rhodia this year (already available at Vickerey!) is the no. 10 staplebound notebook, an adorable 2 x 3 pad that fits right in the palm of your hand.
I fell in love with it immediately at the Stationery Show, but I still haven’t decided what to do with the one that Karen sent me. Ink tests? Tiny notes, or sketches? I’ve got half a mind to create a mini flip book, but it’ll probably take me a while to get around to actually doing it. (In the meantime, I’ve discovered, it’s not half bad as a paperweight.)
Closeup after the jump… What would you do with this notebook?
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June 22nd
The Pilot Varsity is a strange animal indeed: a so-called disposable fountain pen with a stainless steel nib that sells for a couple of bucks, which is just about what you’d pay for a decent rollerball. I came across it by chance when a pen aficionado I know (who restores vintage nibs in his spare time) gave one to me to play with; they were, he explained, a sort of guilty pleasure.
For that amount of money, you might not expect very much, but I was pleasantly surprised—to a point.
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June 15th
Before I traded the uncertain existence of a career in academia for the uncertain existence of a career as a freelance writer, I spent a year in Cambridge getting a master’s in medieval literature. One of the perks of studying in England is that there are a lot of old manuscripts lying around, and included in my coursework that year was a class on paleography—the study of handwriting.
So we learned about the different hands that were used (Secretary, Anglicana, Textura), letters like thorn (“th,” and, thanks to an alternate form that looks a lot like a Y, the source of the misguided “ye olde” that graces so many would-be “shoppes”) and yogh (a sort of guttural “g”), and the crazy abbreviations that were used to make the task of copying a long manuscript a little easier.
One of the things that stuck with me is the fact that scribes would often add their own personal notes to the end of a manuscript. Most would simply say: “This manuscript was completed on such-and-such a date by so-and-so, humble scribe,” but some would append things like: “…who, God willing, is now headed to the pub for a drink.” Some scribes would complain about how poor they were; others might make little drawings.
At any rate, when I first took J. Herbin’s medieval writing set for a test drive, I began to sorely sympathize with those scribes!
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