Never mind romantic love–let’s talk about love affairs with paper and pencils and words!
Me too, me too! Pens and pencils. Paper, notebooks, erasers, paper-clips. I loved them all. I loved my father’s old Remington Portable typewriter with its clackety-clack keys. I was a goner from the moment I realized that the wall was not the only place I could apply a crayon. Putting writing implements to paper made me feel as if a part of myself were melting into words and images and ideas.
It invites our most intimate scribbles while its creamy, pristine pages cast doubt upon the merit of our words. What ideas burn so brightly that they should besmirch generous, bare pages? Yes, blank books promise—but they also protest.
True. When your handwriting has degraded to a scrawl, it seems as if form and content have both deserted you, leaving you looking especially stupid.
Yet when people find out you’re a writer, they give you these gorgeous gifts of journal notebooks. The notebooks then sit on your shelf in a row and mock you with their deliciously smooth, blank pages. So when I started teaching at VCFA back in 2006, I took one of these gifts to residency. I took notes during faculty and graduate student lectures. I doodled. I wrote down fragments of thoughts when I felt moved or puzzled or annoyed. I grumbled when I needed to. Later, I dared to read some of the entries. Most were inane. Some were filled with unexpected memories of particular moments. I was surprised to see that a few threads have managed since then to find their way into now-published stories.
Now I have a fountain pen and a few colors of ink to choose from. And I take the notebooks with me whenever I travel. I write in them occasionally even during alternate semesters, when I don’t teach. There’s something satisfying about letting a thought go from brain to arm to fingers and then onto a page. Imperfect. Incomplete. But still, organic. Real.
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Oh, those beautiful blank notebooks! You’ve been more conscientious than me, Uma, and you’ve filled them up with thoughts and grumbles and puzzlings. My own thoughts are still drifting around in space! Time to get things written down – and with different colored ink, ah, wonderful!
It’s all about stuff in the end, right? Ink and a good nib–what could be better?