“LITTLE DID I KNOW …” such a charged statement. For instance, I had no inkling of the paths that writing with a fountain pen would take me.
I began in university. My family doctor had advised me during high school that a fountain pen is the fastest instrument for taking notes; my new Parker 75 served me well to where I could take a professor’s lecture almost word-for-word.
Later, working on weekly newspapers, rollerballs and ballpoints were fine when covering a rodeo or a hockey game. But when recording town council meeting quotes, I really needed the words to fly across the page — out came the Parker.
Around this time a friend who claimed to be a psychic told me about psychometry — a form of ESP whereby an object retains its origins and the characteristics of its users. Some office upheaval prompted me to give her the keys to the newspaper’s van, which she noted was blue and would soon need a new differential — both of which proved true.
Later, when I began collecting and handling aged, colourful pens, psychometry came back to me. I already had some fountain pen arcana: don’t let someone else write with your pen because their writing will be bad for the nib. Handwriting, typing, and speech — all take place in different parts of the brain. At one time, Treasury Department auditors were the only provincial employees allowed to use green ink.
But psychometry … what about previous pen owners? What words had flowed from a pen? Love letters? Threatening letters? Grocery lists? Or, perhaps, poetry?
I hadn’t written a poem in years when an artist friend asked me to write one for his first exhibition of Badlands paintings. Several years earlier, I’d suggested he paint the Badlands, and now, he suggested I write a poem for his show.
I set about with the Parker and wrote most of “And the Painter Laid Bare the Land — a poem for Jim Davies,” but completing — resolving — the work eluded me.
So, with the exhibition looming and feeling slightly desperate, I reached for a recent acquisition: a Waterman’s Red Ripple from the early 1920s.
The nib accommodated my handwriting. But the staple of fountain pens is ink, and while ink sacs crystallize, a modicum of ink usually remains in the nib section — a last vestige of the previous owner — all that’s needed is water.
I settled at my desk, poured distilled water into a small dish, and dipped the pen. Tendrils of emerald green ink streamed from the nib.
Lifting the pen from the green whorls, a tingling sensation gripped my fingers and guided my hand to the paper beside the dish — and the poem.
Cursive green letters flowed, forming words, connecting, scritching out lines:
Here, the spirit of the land
lurks beneath the surface
clutching secrets
coveting memories.
In the Badlands at night, the darkness stares back.
At which point, the ink ran out. Had some long-forgotten civil servant also been a poet?
Stuart is also a prose writer— Lukas and the Ice Dragon will be published this year, the third in the “Lukas Encounters” Young Adult novel series. The silver anniversary edition of 7 Sleeps Until Christmas was just launched as Apple and Google apps.
This article appears in the Jan/Feb 2024 issue of Edify
