A very lovely weekend

The fact that this was a three-day weekend two weeks before the end of the semester certainly didn't hurt its quality. There was a great deal of grading, of course, but there was also a lot of cooking, two excellent meals out with friends, and baseball. Roy Halladay pitched another masterpiece today for the Phillies. Glorious.

One of the other things, though, that made this weekend so lovely was the amount of time I was able to spend engaged in making things. I finished knitting a baby sweater for a friend in the most perfectly delicious Malabrigo (Silky Merino) in a brilliantly cheerful creamsicle color. Just have to find some buttons for it and sew up the seams. That was mostly what I did between grading sessions over the past week, and it was comforting to have a knitting project that I really enjoyed again. (The last two times I knit something, it was with yarn that I really, really disliked. My next project is the same way, alas, but I'm hoping that large needles and such will speed it along.) More significantly, it was lovely to have something to do as a break between necessary professional tasks that felt both purposeful and relaxing.

That brings me to the other exciting part of this weekend.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I ordered some new journals and some pens. And some ink. I was particularly excited to finally get my paws on some Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses, and for good reason. I adore it in my Levenger True Writer stub nib. The ink behaves quite beautifully on all manner of paper (as I discovered while using it for grading--bright enough to see, not red-red enough to give things the Ink of the Damned feeling), and the slight shading qualities are enhanced by the stub. Inkwise, I also picked up some samples of Noodler's Kung Te-Cheng, Diamine Green-Black (currently in my True Writer Fine and currently lovely), and Diamine Syrah from the lovely Goulet Sample Shop. In the same Goulet order, I also picked up an Exacompta Basic Sketchbook. With which I am in love. In which I am trying not to write until it's time because that journal is going to have a specific purpose. I'm staving off my desire to use it by using a blank Clairefontaine journal, and that's been a pretty good fixer. (I got a blue cover. I am so pleased that my randomly-chosen cover was blue. It is, so much, my favorite.)

And then, because I was having a crisis over writing implements on my upcoming trans-Atlantic jaunt, I skittered over to JetPens for some non-fountainy options. I did get a few Uni-Ball Signo 207s (black, blue, green) and a Zebra Sarasa (0.3 mm brown) for my travel workhorses because both have gotten such positive reviews on PenAddict & OfficeSupplyGeek. I also had an artsy whim and got a Uni-Ball Pocket Brush Pen. I am, of course, quite pleased with all of them--they'll serve their purpose and give me some color options with very little fuss.

I also might have blacked out and ordered a lime green Pilot Prera with a fine nib.

The lime green Pilot Prera is not a pen I expected to be interested in. For one, it's lime green. You can tell by the color scheme on the blog and by the inks I mentioned above that I'm not really a lime person. (They're quite delicious fruits, and I may occasionally be limey, but I don't do much in the "bright color" spectrum.) It's also a glossy, single-color barrel. But I love it so much I actually woke up at 5:15 on Friday morning (the day that I had designated as my "sleep as long as you want" day) because I was excited about using it again. (I stayed up past midnight on Thursday--well, into Friday--doodling with it.)

And I think that's why I was so excited. I was actually drawing things with it. Before I graduated high school, I made certain to take an art class every year. I was, by no means, any kind of natural talent, and I don't have one of those spatial memories that can envision--with great clarity--the far sides of objects or what something might look like lying on its side and so on, but I did okay. Most importantly, I loved it. And because I had my life-goals set out in front of me (and they didn't involve visual arts), I could love it simply, easily, without pressure or expectation. I hadn't realized how much I missed that in the past few years.

In the past three days, I've doodled a lot of my favorite, recurring subjects: fruit, trees, branches with cherry blossoms, bamboo. I also tried drawing a few faces, based on some useful tutorials (proportions, and so on) that I stumbled across. I've never much liked drawing people, but I managed a few who actually look like people, and I really enjoyed it.

And I drew this bamboo. I really like drawing plants. They don't give me any lip.

I did this with the Prera, fine tip, with a Pilot/Namiki cartridge in blue/black. The color is really lovely, and I'm sad that it isn't waterproof because I'd love to do a watercolor-tinted sketch with this pen. (I don't get many options for FP-safe waterproof inks, do I?) I think what I love best about this pen is its ability to make soft, sketchy lines. I'm a big fan of my True Writer for writing because, despite its fine tip, as a Western fine, it makes a pretty assertive line, especially given my usual inks (Levenger Cocoa, Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo). When I write, I generally do feel assertive. Writing isn't always easy, but I feel like I know what I'm doing. I know my strengths, my weaknesses, how to play to one, how to challenge the other. When I'm drawing, I am much more tentative. I certainly feel rusty at this point, but even when I was drawing something in class, two or three times a week, I still made the same line, lightly, a dozen times over, before I would commit to a bold line. (And even then, I kind of resented it.) I should get into the habit of sketching in pencil and then doing cleaner lines in ink for that reason, but I also like instant gratification and can never find a pencil or a decent eraser when I want one.

The only problem is that now, I will want to have this pen and a blank journal (in addition to my lined "everything" notebook and all of my other pens) with me at all times. That runs counter to my (often futile) attempts at traveling light. Ah, well. Small price to pay for a rekindled love.

Recharge & Refresh

This is a strange post title for anything that happens in April for an English professor (as April & May, like November & December, are The Months of Interminable Grading), but this has been a good weekend for feeling a little more refreshed. One thing that has contributed to that is the stubbornness of greenery. It's cold here, still, in Wyoming. We haven't had lots of snow like certain parts of the Dakotas and Colorado, but it hasn't been very warm, either. There haven't been many overt signs of spring from the atmosphere. The ground, though, refuses to be contained: we have a few tulips sneaking up around the front porch, and folks lucky enough to have daffodil bulbs planted are seeing persistent knots of brilliant yellow ringing their steps. The grass is the kind of saturated green that I have missed from the east coast, the kind of color that doesn't last long here. We're not really getting leaves on trees, not beyond the limy fuzz of buds, but there's promise. I'm holding onto that.

There's been grading, too (there always is), but I also spent an hour this afternoon playing with some Derwent watercolor pencils and a thoroughly ancient set of Prang watercolors. (Yes, I know. We used the exact same sets in middle school. It's likely that this set came from middle school.) I didn't turn out anything that I was particularly excited about, particularly because I went into it without any kind of plan, and it's been so long since I've painted that I need some sort of visual reference. Which I didn't have. None of that is the point. The point is that I was inspired a few days ago by Lavinia Spalding's book Writing Away. We're using that book for the travel-writing component of a study-abroad class I'm co-teaching with some colleagues in a few weeks. Spalding talks a great deal about journaling (which I'm not very good at, in any kind of organized way), and she talks a lot about creating pictorial art of varying kinds. I got the itch. I'm now waiting for an Exacompta journal and some other shiny things from Goulet Pens & JetPens.

When those things come in, I'm going to try to have an organized journaling experience, at least in the context of this trip. We'll see how that turns out.

The other point of it is how excited I am about this trip, now, in this context. It's not that I wasn't looking forward to it before; it's that there's an anticipation associated with the creation of the artifact around the trip, too. (And it's not just the anticipation of new stationary fumes, of course, though that's certainly attractive.)

Hopefully I'll have some pictures of something sometime soon. Right now, there's The Fall of Sam Axe and more grading to fill my evening.

No Pelikans, So How About Pelicans?

So, as I am wont to do every time I go to some sort of major urban center, I checked out St. Petersburg for fountain pen stores. I didn't find any. (Granted, my search wasn't super-thorough, as I knew I'd be confined to the area near my conference, but I didn't get a sense of there being much choice in the matter.) Thus, instead of Pelikans, you get pelicans, and the pelicans are doing their thing at the St. Petersburg pier.

This pelican is a rock. He is an island.

Hail, hail, the gang's all here.

I spent a full day squeaking every time I saw an anole. Which was a lot of times. They are so cool. Almost as cool as stegosauruses.

And, because we went to a Tampa Bay Rays game, have some baseball players. None of them appeared to be using fountain pens at any point in the game. That's probably wise.

Vladimir Guerrero & Brian Roberts, warming up at the Rays vs. Orioles game.

Also, this seems like a fine time to show off some new pen gear I got for my birthday: an Aston pen case and a small, blank Rhodia Webbie. My delightful husband picked them up at GouletPens. Oh, I have a new appreciation for a blank journal. I don't use blank journals much, since I'm far more a writer than an artist (and I have an inability to write in a straight line), but getting this little blank journal made me want to sketch a few things. On the page spread that you can see below, I sketched one of the conference presenters' water glass. It's not by any means masterful, but I can tell it is, in fact, a little cup. The Rhodia paper is, of course, dreamy. It's a very pleasant cream color, which I didn't expect that I would like, but I do. Particularly for my sketchy little embarkations.

Closed journal & open pen case. True Writers, both of them. 

All of these things in action.

Because some of you may wish to know: the writing is done with a True Writer stub filled with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis, which is the black pen in this photo. The Waterlilies pen is filled with Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo. These are easily my two favorite inks thus far in my inky experimentations. Interesting thing about the Bleu Myosotis: it seems to mellow and lighten with age. By age, I mean a few hours. When it's newly dry on the page, it's a much more saturated and dark tone, nearly purple. After a few hours, it gentles to its highly shaded periwinkle. Mostly, I point this out because it's neat.

It's going to be a hard choice when I have to pick a journal to take with me to the UK this May. I purchased a slightly larger one (lined, not a Rhodia) for that purpose, but I really do like the blank paper in this Rhodia because of the urge to sketch things. And, well, the paper behaves gorgeously. It is a bit small, though, to do a whole lot of real writing in--I feel like I should write much smaller than I usually do in the small pad, and that slows me down a bit. 

Decisions, decisions.

A picture of that stegosaurus

This is the stegosaurus I was talking about yesterday. I thought you needed to see it. 

Stegosaurus = coolest dinosaur ever. Just sayin'.

Update on Florida: we are here and that's pretty glorious (humidity! heat!). Last night, we hit up the Red Mesa Cantina for dinner. That was pretty transcendent. I had a duck taco with red chili jam. And fried yucca, which I'd never had before. Deliciousness. And even through I didn't order a margarita (and our waiter was pretty disappointed in our choice of plain unsweetened iced tea), he showed us cell-phone videos of the Grand Prix race that had taken place in the city last weekend. (He was a great waiter. I wish he'd told us his name.)

Today, I spent a big chunk of my day learning about literary studies & American studies topics I didn't know about and hanging out with a former grad school colleague that I never really knew very well while we were in the same grad program. It was rather lovely. I'm inspired (doubly) to actually make my own peanut butter, and now I have a few South American authors to check out. (This is the magic of conversations with English majors: you learn about new writers and exciting things to read.)

Also, there were tornado warnings/watches all day, so plans to go exploring in St. Pete got considerably derailed. But baseball has begun, so we spent the evening watching the Cardinals/Padres & the Giants/Dodgers games. I just wish I hadn't run out of books to read: I read all of Kingsolver's The Bean Trees on the flight to Tampa. I'm now bookless (though I'm hoping to find something exciting at the conference book fair tomorrow for the way home).

Feeling like Georges Perec

Let me start this post by saying that I adore Georges Perec. (Look at him on this French postage stamp. How can you not love that face?) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is, for reasons that astound and befuddle me, one of the most important books that I've ever read. I encountered this book in my History of the Essay course at Ohio University where it was included on intense and fascinating reading reading list assembled by Dr. David Lazar. (This course was one of my favorites through six years of graduate work, but maybe more on that another time.) The amazing thing is that I don't particularly care for things like Perec's work. I'm one of those people who is all about the narrative--give me story, give me character, let me latch on and sink in. Perec's work--even his fiction, which I have not successfully read--resists all of those things that I usually love. Species of Spaces is playful, experimental, resistant. It uses footnotes and marginalia, but not in any way that clarifies. It puzzles and paces in the Oulipo manner. Each note, each point, spirals the reader off into another direction. The book, which is a collection of a number of Perec's writings, changes topic quickly, easily. It discourages immersion in any one direction, and yet, he asks, seriously, for the reader to consider teaspoons, the blank center of a page, staircases and airports and how we might live in them.

It's that last, of course, that rings in my brain today. And I'm wickedly vexed that I don't have my copy of Species of Spaces with me, that I have to do my quoting from memory (bound to be inaccurate) and without citations (blasphemy, horror, crisis), but I can't get it out of my mind. Because I am in an airport this morning, on this, my twenty-ninth birthday, due to spend most of the day flying. (It began with getting out of bed at 4:00 a.m. I am definitely calling a Mulligan on my birthday and re-celebrating sometime next week.) An early flight out of Casper has led me to a two-hour pause in Denver, early in the day, and I am thinking of Georges Perec, who was fascinated by airports, who asked, in Species of Spaces, how we might live more in them. Perec was writing well before 9/11, before the days of intense airport security and screenings, before only the people going somewhere had any business in the airport proper. I am "going somewhere," I belong here. I have the right to these small shops and all of these convenient (and overpriced) dining options. Here in Denver, I have the right to look at these tiled floors with their metallic dinosaur inlay. (Okay, that one I'm grateful for. How freaking cool is that? Stegosaurus--world's best dinosaur--hanging out on the floor.) In many airports, those "rights" include things like access to art displays that aren't anywhere else. (It includes the right to duty-free purchases of very expensive things like perfume and alcohol. Every time I'm in an airport, I think I should do all of my holiday shopping in one fell swoop, but how would I get everything home? When I'm in an airport, the last thing I want to do is add to the things I carry. This entry is feeling like a reference to everything. Hello, Tim O'Brien. Hello, Pico Ayer. Hello, hello, hello.)

On the whole, if it weren't for the strange alienation that is modern traveling--the immediate separation from whomever has dropped you off at the airport, the invasions of privacy (and I understand the precautions and I accept that, but I do feel a little twinge every time I toss that clear plastic bag on the scanner belt: yes, that's my astringent, yes, my skin has no idea how to cope with this dryness and this altitude; yes, that's my deodorant, yes, friendly agent, you now know what my underarms smell like)--airports would be amazing places to "live" in. I don't literally mean like that Tom Hanks movie from half a decade ago, but they are fascinating. There's such an intersection of humanity in these places, so many things to see and watch. It is all of life's experiences, gathered in one space.

And it isn't even just our species in these spaces. Here in Denver this morning, I have been watching, with a kind of ridiculous glee, the sparrows that have somehow found their way into the place. They seem fat and happy, picking up the crumbs of our terminal snacking, gathering in small groups of three or four to bounce into this corner or that for a stray French fry or the flakes of the passable pain au chocolat that I can never contain.

But I have seen a man towing a small rolling trunk as his luggage, strapped around with leather, clasped tight in brass. A woman does yoga--downward-facing dog to child's pose--at our nearly-empty gate. All around this place, complete strangers catch bits of sleep. Where else do we act at such an apparent level of comfort in the presence of people we have never met?

We do it, to a certain extent, in places like this, in blogs and on the internet more generally, but there's some sort of connection. In a blog post, we usually have a sense of who the audience is. A community rises up around such a thing, whether small or large. And information on the internet must still be sought out. In airports, we do not know who we're looking at. We do not know their history unless it's shared overtly, through dialog or through the trappings of their travel. (I like to try to piece together people's travel stories by watching, by looking at bags and the places their snacks have come from, by their shoes and their hats and their glasses.) But there's no way of confirming any of that. We can only see what we see--that these two business folk, with large rolling bags, have set themselves down beside the woman doing yoga, and now she is not doing it anymore. Now she has gotten up, gone off somewhere else. Is she discomfited by their presence? Is she off getting a coffee before the flight? This airport attendant, driving a cart, is singing an actual blues tune. This airport attendant, pushing an empty wheelchair, interrupts the song to borrow a radio.

We are so naked here, though we're often wearing coats and scarves and another layer in case the plane is cold. We are unarmored, even though we are clad with bags and backpacks and rolling suitcases that prevent anyone from crowding too close.

It's fascinating. I don't know what Perec would think of this new system, the way we cannot wait with family and friends, that we cannot eat in this cafe because it is past security, that we cannot carry our own cafe au lait into this foreign space. But I think I can say, with a fair amount of certainty, that he would look for a way to live in it.

In honor of that, I'm going to go take a photo of that stegosaurus on the floor. I'd put it in this post, but the DIA wifi set-up will not allow me to add an image to this post for some reason I cannot even begin to fathom.

Between Seasons

This post is certainly wishful thinking--spring in Wyoming generally has very little to do with the month of March. However, last week we had some properly warm days--I even opened a window or two once or twice--and it fooled at least one crocus per block into springing forth. We have some tulip greens inching their way up. But there will, certainly, be more snows on the way, and I'm not putting away my wool coat yet.

Still, everything feels strangely in-between right now. I know that winter is not over yet, that spring hasn't quite arrived, either, but the weather bounces from sixty to snow in the same afternoon. Spring break has come and it has gone (and it was lovely, lovely, lovely, by the way), so we're not headed toward any big breaks, but we're also a full six weeks from finals, so it's not yet time to put the sled on that slope. I'm grateful that I don't get seasonal migraines or other ailments connected to things like humidity and barometric pressure shifts--the way March and April yo-yo here, I'd be toast.

We're almost to the start of the professional baseball season (blessed be), but not quite. (Right now, mostly, I wish we could skip the rest of pre-season entirely because my Phillies keep getting injured.)

Both music and silence sound wrong on my ears. I listened to fifteen seconds of twelve songs in the last ten minutes, and then I turned off my iTunes. It's almost all I can do to keep from bouncing up and down at my desk, but I'd also very much like to go back to sleep this very second. (But what I'm going to do, in half an hour, is go talk about Rosetti's "Goblin Market" and Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens.)

And so, I'll leave you with a link to this phenomenal interview from The Paris Review with Anne Carson to get you through the in-betweens, if you're feeling them to. She's genius. Pure genius.

Reality Check

Last week was the lead-up to our Spring Break. The past two weeks have felt like a manic blur, but I didn't quite realize just how ridiculous it was until mid-week last week. This is what happened:

I have ten minutes between my classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Out of those ten minutes, I try, barring student emergencies/questions, to at least get back to my office for about six of them so that I can refill my mug with tea (or just plain hot water some days) and so that I can check my e-mail to be certain that any of my students in the upcoming sections who are trying desperately to get in touch with me on my teaching-barrage days can get some kind of response. On Wednesday of last week, I was in the middle of this process--one hand on the HotShot for my tea refill, standing in front of my desk, leaning over the keyboard to send a quick reply to an e-mail--when a colleague walked by my office. He saw me, stopped in my doorway, came into my office.

He said, "Leaning over your desk like that is going to kill your back when you get older." He grinned, but he had legitimate concern, as anyone who spends a lot of time at a desk knows. (And nevermind with any of that "when you get older" business. Two years ago, in the midst of dissertation madness, my back and neck crackled like cellophane every time I moved because of my bad desk--and lack of desk--habits.)

I said, half-laughing, that there just wasn't time to sit down. My colleague just shook his head and went on his way.

It wasn't until I was actually in the classroom a few minutes later that I realized that I'd meant what I said. And how ridiculous that was.

Making time to do things that are good for one's whole well-being--sensible, easy things, like having a seat before working at the computer (unless one is going to commit to an actual standing desk that is designed for a standing person)--shouldn't be a hard decision. I'm not talking about large life-changes or even the cultivation of significant helpful habits (like waking up earlier to read or meditate or write or spending twenty minutes a day tidying one's place to avoid Imminent Cleanliness Disasters in the future). There are lots and lots of blogs that address these types of habits and decisions. (Zen Habits is one that I rather like.) I'm talking about accepting that sitting down is worthwhile. That eating lunch with both hands (instead of having one hand on a keyboard) is a valid thing to do.

This is one of those times where my mother would point out that no amount of education can create common sense. This is one of those times where my mother would be ever-so-right.

So. Once Spring Break started properly (Sunday afternoon, really), I decided that I would work all Spring Break on things that made me feel accomplished, as opposed to busy. That's not to say that I won't be busy; I still have a to-do list and a number of work-related tasks that have to be completed. But my break work-load was specifically engineered to avoid a lot of imminent things (like grading masses of papers), so there's actually time to do things that add up to some sort of sense of pleasure and usefulness.

Yesterday, that manifested in putting together some packages for friends, which were mailed this morning. Today, I wrote, I am making granola, and tonight I'm actually going to cook something from my Moroccan cookbook (which I've had for five years but have only ever thought wistfully about). Creating and cooking are both useful and fulfilling to me. (I have tried--and may keep trying--to accept that sometimes it's okay not to be useful, but all that does is make me feel guilty. I try to find a happy medium in things like this, then, to steal from the Enlightenment: sweetness and light.)

What both refreshes you and staves off that feeling that you should be doing something else?

Discovering My First Fountain Pen (Not Where I Expected It)

I had been under the impression that my first fountain pen was a black plastic Manuscript pen that I bought at Hobby Lobby around the holidays last year. (I purchased it in the hopes that it would somehow stave off my coveting of the Levenger Waterlilies True Writer. It didn’t work.) Then, a few weeks ago, I was rummaging in my little drawer-unit of office supplies (a wretched mess of old ballpoints, metallic gel pens that don’t not-work enough to allow myself to toss them, 3.5” disks, and shop bags from special stores). And I found a pen I’d forgotten I’d had: a blue-plastic-barreled fountain pen with silver accents. I remembered: one of my uncles (the same one who loaned me The Lord of the Rings trilogy for my first read through the series) had gotten me a fountain pen—one that used cartridges—for a birthday. It might have been my sixteenth, even, or it was a gift for high school graduation—I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember what the real occasion was.

Pen photographed on a bit of Japanese cloth given to me by a coworker

And I don’t really remember using the pen. Even without having the accurate memory, though, I can tell you  why I don’t remember using the pen: the cartridge. It likely only came with one or two cartridges, and I grew up in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania (an honest hour to anything  like a Staples). This was before I could have ordered anything on the internet, too. And so I would have saved those cartridges, hoarded them until the perfect moment. Then, when I used the first one, I would have thought that the line was too bold, too dark, too certain or too arrogant or too permanent. Too wide. Too something. At sixteen, or eighteen, or whatever, I remember using pencil nearly exclusively, and if I forayed into pen-usage, it was with black Bic stick pens, the kind that left gossamer strands of that viscous ink between letters that smudged, faintly iridescent and sticky. (Those metallic gel pens? I really only used them for drawing on myself and for the occasional whimsical note—on black paper—to friends or my boyfriend, now husband.)

Ink was too permanent. I wrote—poetry, fiction, papers—in pencil. (Still, I didn’t erase much. I’d strike through something in graphite instead of erasing it, oddly enough.) My preference was for the disposable mechanical pencils, though if I could have gotten my hands on a gross of the fat, dark blue Ticonderoga pencils we used in kindergarten, I’d have used only those forever. (In a drawer, in my parents’ house, there’s a two-inch pencil stub with my name—on a tiny slip of paper—still taped to its barrel.) I don’t know if they still make those pencils, but the leads were so smooth, so yielding. I don’t think I’d call them soft, not exactly, because I don’t have much memory of that lead smudging, but they wrote so easily.

And so I wrote in pencil. Either out of ease (little pressure required), out of uncertainty (so much less assertive-looking on the page), or out of habit (very little work was done in pen during my pre-college days—just the final copies of papers). In college, I lost track of my blue fountain pen. It was probably always with me, in that messy drawer of writing utensils, but it certainly wasn’t on my radar.

Fast-forward through three degrees. I still wrote a lot of things in pencil (particularly while grading), though I’d switched to writing my fiction exclusively with the black Bic stick pens. (I learned that pencil-on-looseleaf, carried around on a clipboard shoved in a backpack, leaves one with smudged and often difficult-to-read results.) I wish I’d noticed during my Ph.D. years that the Bics were probably contributing to my massive wrist/hand pain because they require a good bit of pressure to work well, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until my move to Wyoming that fountain pens really hit my radar, completely due to the aesthetics of the pen itself. (I’ve never much cared for a bold line while writing. Growing up, I envied those wispy sketch-lines that come out of taking certain art classes.)

I thought I could stave off the (expensive) urge for a Levenger pen by getting any pen with the “fountain” quality. It didn’t work. My black plastic Manuscript served its purpose, though it also was prone to covering my hands in black ink at any given moment, of getting me used to a bold line. I discovered I liked that. I don’t know if it had to do with having my first “real” job—a full-time position as an instructor; if it had to do with accepting my writing as a legitimate, worthy thing; or if it was simply time. (Having that “real” job also made it possible to even consider a pen that cost more than all of my office supply budget for a four-year graduate degree. And now I know that the Levenger brand pens are on the gentler end of the fountain pen expense scale, for the most part—but that’s another thought for another day.)

The rest, of course, is the current history: fountain pens have become one of my enthusiasms, though the symptoms are relatively minor by comparison to others’. But let me bring this all back to that blue-plastic-barreled pen.

It is, as I have discovered, the most basic model of the Parker Vector, probably from about 1997. The nib is petite, and the point is quite rounded.

Nib very shiny. It says Parker across the base of the nib.

I’m sure there are terms for these features, but I don’t know them. It is extraordinarily light in the hand because the blue plastic is quite thin. It uses cartridges (which I can now get at the local OfficeMax, though they only have black in stock). My current evil plan is to use up at least one cartridge and then refill it with more interesting ink until I have a good reason to order a converter for it. (I much prefer converters to cartridges. I can’t even tell you how much more.) I may even consider making it an eye-dropper pen, though I’ve not done that before.

Have an ink-haiku!

The line it makes is fairly smooth, somewhere around the Western fine that my Levenger True Writer produces. It is a little bit dry-writing, though it cooperates more easily the longer I write with it. It also seems to like the Levenger annotation pad (with a slight bit more tooth to it than the Rhodia) more than other paper options.

Paper is Bloc Rhodia, no. 16

At current, I will likely not use it very often—just to have something inked in black when I need it, as my other three everyday writers are always done up with something a bit more colorful—but I am glad to have it. This pen came to me because my uncle recognized, more than a decade ago, that I was someone who took writing seriously. My uncle Dennis has always done this; from him and his wife, I received writing and reading tools (bookmarks, particularly, and the refillable planner I used from freshman year of college until I graduated with my Ph.D., the year that finally killed it) that were both beautiful and functional. Things that were serious business. More importantly, these gifts said that he took what I did seriously, and that interest goes a long way in bolstering the confidence of a young writer and academically-minded person.

Whirlwind of Writing: AWP Recap, Part 2

This is the post where I put together the oddments (and there is much that is gloriously odd about AWP).

Let's start with reunions. Now that I've moved 1,800 miles from anything that remotely resembled home for me, AWP events are very much reunions because the odds of bumping into anyone I know from all parts of life previous to August of 2009 out here in Wyoming are rather slim. As someone who has wanted to be a writer & an English teacher since the fifth grade, there are a lot of old friends and acquaintances that I stand to see at AWP. There are people from the poetry class at Susquehanna University when I was a high school student (and I have seen at least one person from that class at each AWP event I've been to since that semester in 1999). That one class (and freshman comp, also taken at SU, with the same professor) was incredibly instrumental to my development as a writer. It was with those classmates--including a very, very tall young man who wore an authentic Tom Baker Doctor Who scarf before I even knew what Doctor Who was--that I learned how to accept workshop criticism gracefully. How to do that is a difficult thing to learn, and I'm grateful to have had that opportunity when I was a young writer.

These classmates--from however brief a period, even when I was a high school student well aware of just how out of my depth I was in this class--are a reminder of all of the things that I learned from a really well-run writing classroom. That prepared me to go into my own B.A. program at Lycoming College. There are a lot of excellent people from that program with whom I am close friends, and seeing them becomes one of the major draws for the whole conference. 

And then there are the many writers who I've had the pleasure of hearing read, of meeting once or twice, who I don't know very well but whose presence I look forward to beyond simply enjoying their work. Seeing these many folks--once a year, once every other year, even longer in between--reminds me that distance is less material than I often think it is. There are so many ways to connect with the world, so many ways of knowing and interacting, of meeting new people, too. 

Having this reminder is an integral part negotiating these wide swathes of space that are part of the way our lives take us across the globe. The literary journals and artistic projects that arise from these connections, the way we gather threads from everywhere we've been and everywhere we're going. 

Whirlwind of Writing: AWP Recap, Part 1

So. I've been away a bit, and that was due to AWP and the resultant plague that not only laid me low but also a few friends as well. I had minor thoughts of blogging AWP, but my internet access was spotty and carrying my netbook around meant less room for potential AWP treasures. I did exercise restraint, though--I came home with one book of poetry and two issues of the remarkable Tuesday: An Art Project. More on that in a future post! (But don't worry--my bookquisitions were limited by the size and weight of my carry-on luggage; I did take copious notes for books to order.)

Little bits of AWP will filter through as time passes. This blog is certainly not on the cutting edge of anything.

I want to talk about AWP and some of the senses today.

The Associated Writing Programs annual conference is a surfeit of excess, and I mean that in every one of the best ways. It might not be so for other writers and readers who come from one metropolitan area to another, but for those of us who have always lived in smaller cities and yea, even in true towns and on dirt roads in Pennsylvania, it's something of an overwhelming thrill.

The process begins with travel. For me, it involved two flights that luckily arrived in glorious due time (I felt a bit guilty because there were many, many folks who couldn't get out of places like Chicago last Wednesday). The airport is a strange melange of stimulation and dullness, hurrying and waiting. I waited to board my flight and watched a man with hair dyed in an amazingly perfect replication of leopard spots. I guessed at whose carry-ons were filled with books already. I spied on knitting projects peeking from purse-edges. I tried not to smell the greasy weight of McDonalds food, which I haven't eaten in years but which always smells somehow good when I'm in an airport and know for certain that it's a terrible idea for so many reasons. I averted my face from clouds of perfume and cologne. Airports are, for me, such a furtive place, but that's likely because I'm nosy and because everyone's going into a story in my head. To the gentleman sitting beside me on the Denver to DC flight, I hope you had good fortune at the job interview you were preparing for. I didn't say anything to you about it because I didn't want to admit watching you add notes on your laptop.

As I exited that flight, I resolved to be more social at AWP. It is a gathering. Those are meant to be social, or so I have heard.

The Metro--my first real experience with public transportation in the United States--is a sonic bombardment. The slushy noise of the tracks mixes with the unintelligible gravel of stop-announcements, the gentle chatter of frequent rail companions, the less-gentle summations of the most recent Wizards' game. One platform made a shrill scree from some cause I couldn't identify, and it might have actually been the most awful non-language sound I've ever heard.

The Walt Whitman quote that rings the escalators into and out of the Dupont Circle Metro station was a fantastic welcome. I'm not sure why, but it felt so congenial to leave such a strange bit of underground, ringed by Whitman.

There was food and a reunion, several reunions, with friends. More on that in another post.

I want to go back to sound: specifically, I want to go to one particular panel. This was Thursday morning, a panel titled after the Emma Goldman quote, "If I can't dance, you can keep your revolution." This panel featured five poets, five fantastic poets, four of whom were brand new to me.

Leading the panel was Sean Thomas Dougherty, whose work, since I saw him at Writing By Degrees at Binghamton University, way back in 2005 or something like that, has been a constant source of happiness for me--and for my students. Sean's work is revolutionary and rhythmic, and in the segment below (not from AWP, but from a BOA Editions event), Sean reads his poem "X" (begins around 3:35): 



Also participating on the panel were Crystal Williams, Silvana Straw, Roger Bonair-Agard, and Dora McQuaid. All of these writers were new to me. Straw's poems in the voice of her mother--in the voice of her mother's voicemail messages, in fact--crackled with humor and political bite, and I don't know when I laughed so hard and felt such energy for serious change at the same time. Roger Bonair-Agard's "The Black Penguin Speaks" might have been the most badass poem about a penguin that ever happened. And yes, it is totally possible to have a badass poem about a penguin. Williams brought Detroit to life with startling beauty, steady clarity and music, and Williams's work made me think on a dear friend of mine who lived in the Detroit area for a long time, how that woman used her pedagogy to find, to make beauty in difficult classrooms where students' discoveries of their own voices brought their own revelations. McQuaid's poems covered the ground many writers cover--love, loss, family--but with passionate freshness.



This panel illustrated what is, for me, the best part of AWP: discovery. I went to the panel to see Dougherty read because I know I love his work, and I wanted the chance to at least give a personal wave, to say hello. What I took from the panel was an appreciation for four more writers, a renewed sense of hope, and ears full of song.