June ☁️🍓🫧
"I gave up on the possibility without even trying. And now, being through the wringer so thoroughly, I know if I don't reclaim my writing I won't make it through." - My journal latelyHi, friend, I hitchhiked my way into a sixteen wheeler of careless creativity and I’ve got no regrets! This is figurative, of course —I have a lot of breakfasts and lunches to make that would face serious disruption if I was on a truck right now. But that’s what it feels like to ruthlessly indulge in drawing every day (see: pictures below) and mapping out some creative projects in the back of my mind when I’m watching my sons do tae kwon do or beating each other senseless on the sofa. In a way, the recent changes I've made of moving my office into the closet has give me a sense of tucked-away psychic safety. It feels like I hide from the world in this little cave… and that’s exactly what I’ve been missing. Feeling hidden, cozy, behind a braid of leaves and sticks like the beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. What was your childhood bedroom like? My childhood bedroom also had a little alcove like this where my desk went. I wonder if that’s what I’m tapping into. Links that renewed my faith in humanityLet's bring back a good old fashioned curated link roundup! Here are two songs I've been enjoying lately: The Analog PromptMy fountain pen friend Eric alerted me to the existence of something called The Analog Prompt. It’s a creative writing challenge where you pay $10 and write a letter in response to a prompt. I did it, and it was a creative windfall. Now, of course I hope I “win” the $100 prize and street cred at the end of the month (announced June 26th or so). But in my mind, I already won when I sat with a blank page and rejected reality and submerged myself into my brain to make up some emotionally tense, fictiony craziness. So, please find below the prompt they shared. (I emailed them and asked permission to share it, and they gave the thumbs up :).) Issue No. 1 · The Prompt
Dearest,
I hope this letter finds you well, or finds you at all. I find myself hoping my recent letters didn't reach you, as that might at least excuse some of your unresponsiveness.
It has been eleven months and sixteen days since your last letter. I suppose it's just another way I've failed as a parent, raising a child that can't be bothered to respond to your own mother. Your father says I'm being dramatic, although that's a bit rich coming from a man who hasn't spoken to his own brother in six years over a comment about a lawn.
I suppose since you're all grown up now that you no longer want your 'collection', whatever that nonsense is that you've been keeping in those boxes. After all this time, I simply cannot keep storing your belongings indefinitely. I need that space in the basement back, now that I've taken up Pilates. It's all the rage these days in the neighborhood, now that Janet down the street has been parading about in those skimpy outfits and claiming her figure's from Pilates and not lipo. Entirely inappropriate for a woman of her age, but you know how she's like.
I assume you haven't completely forgotten about the neighbors, off on your adventures. Still, you might like to know the Hendersons moved. Finally, after that whole mess two years ago. You never talked about it much, but I always thought it must have been harder on you than you let on. Their youngest is in Portland now, I think. Or Seattle. Somewhere rainy and expensive.
Maybe my life isn't the most exciting, but there's more to life than just exotic adventures and expensive cars. Write back, please. I'm still your mother, and I expect I raised you well enough to pretend you care.
Your mother, Eleanor
And here's the letter I wrote back! Here's the text, and then the photos of what I actually mailed in. I used images of plant and flora scientific literature to create my own version of the flower I'm talking about.... well, you gotta read it! Here's a preview of letter, written on Clairfontaine envelope and letter paper with my E95S hatchmark F nib and De Atramentis Document Black. I had this whole plan to use my flex nib and really ham it up on the calligraphy, but I bolted out of town for my vacation (more on that in the next section) and had to pick up some stationery at Jenny Bick and write it out at a picnic table at Offshore at the Jersey Shore with my friend Alyssa. It was perfect. Click here to see the letter in Google Drive And here's the whole thing if you don't want to read my handwriting:
There is a very curious plant called the Lamentationes Eleanorae that propagates in the Amazon, have you heard of it?
It’s beautiful —painfully white against a stark background of sharp, rich green-black foliage. Like star anise but made of soft, luminous petals that gather moisture and hold it on display for the thirsting plants in its proximity.
But it’s an insidious murderess. To the water it absorbs, it deposits a lethal dose of its unique and til now unstudied poison, so every plant that crowds around it —and there are many unfortunates drawn to it in the driest areas on the border of shade and sun— dies a slow painful death.
First building with excess water, which passes through the plant’s various defensive systems, the plants feel gorged and sated with much-needed hydration… then each square, monk-like cell of the plan disintegrates and bursts until it descends to the forest floor in a mess of warm, moist innards, still sparkling in one last photosynthetic grasp at the sun, how many light years away now? And the innards themselves to be grasped and absorbed again by Eleanor, the ivory victor.
You ask why I have not written mother, but I wrote you a love letter in the annals of scientific literature when the Lamentationes Eleanorae got its name.
I didn’t expect a thank you of course, but I thought b
y sending the publication you might understand the connection and the result of the work I’ve attended to these past — as you said — eleven months and sixteen days.
Though I and my father and my sister have not disintegrated — yet — I am confident we carry the means of a slow painful death, transmitted from your beautiful bloom, that will deliver a harrowing end any day now, if only of the mind and soul and all things that make connection and love between mortals possible.
As for my expensive cars — my tattered field Subaru — and exotic adventures — my studies in the Amazon — I can only say that I came here to study the origins of the world and to reach my hand out to grasp some understanding of how any creature could come to be who we are, who we were, to be as dangerous and cruel as the ruthless life here and yet so different and cultured and beautiful on the outside.
Take for example your casual reference to the Hendersons.
I expect it will be another century before jaguars teething into an unsuspecting wild boar gained the mental faculties enough and, spilling into verbalizations, could do something so torturous to the boar in its maw as what you do to me by uttering their name in ink.
I won’t dignify it with a response but to say that Regina deserves every happiness in whatever rainy, expensive and —I assure you—very far away paradise she’s been able to cobble together after the calamitous evening in which I was responsible for the irreparable damage of her foot, ankle joint, distal tibia, and fibula, and her subsequent transtibial amputation. It is my opinion that she earned her settlement.
There’s one thing we can, after all this time, agree upon — there is nothing for me left in my collections. I took all the notes I need and I can send an assistant to clear the room for your activities to bring the items to me to dispose of. It is almost enough to bring me a smile, imagining one last stroke of their wooden frames for myself and one last beautiful flight for the butterflies pinned in the glass, as they soar into the rubbish bin along with your other letters.
Sincerely,
Dr. Greesonbach, PhD
About the writingSo, if you'll humor me, I thought it'd be fun to share some of my process in designing this letter? I studied English and creative writing for my Enter: improv, the storytelling crash course! Getting involved in improv after the pandemic ended up being a Concorde-type experience for the raw materials and alchemy of storytelling. I'll never get it perfectly right, but a couple improv classes improved my writing and stories by about 1,000% and I always learn a ton every class. But what I pulled out for this exercise in particular is the idea of tension, response, and relationship. First up, I knew I could prompt AI for 15,000 interesting ideas in response. And I immediately decided "F$@% AI, I'm not doing that." And I took out my pen and paper. The first thing I did was brainstorm the actual response to the letter. There were two pathways: First, the assumption that the receiver of the letter hadn't written for a long, long time. I had a decision to make: was that on purpose? Or not on purpose? And I made a decision tree for those potential reasons, going as far up and down the spectrum of the emotion chart as possible: Reasons someone wouldn't write on purpose:
Reasons someone wouldn't write not on purpose:
Wild and crazy ideas:
And then I also noted the story points the prompt included that I knew would be good as callbacks, to close the loop that was opened when the prompt was written:
I wanted to be unconventional but not overly so, and surprising but not as kooky as aliens. My first impulse was having the letter writer be high up in the government, and having the government send a false letter to the parent saying they were dead, but then accidentally including the request to send it within the letter. But it started to feel like an excuse to get out of writing it and to be very clever. So I took a deep breath, decided to embrace the humiliation of writing from complete fantasy, and had the best time of my life doing it. From there—once I realized I wanted it to be on purpose, and I wanted it to be a complex emotional environment, of someone who was well-intentioned and smart and knows they should respect their parent but just had this pile of scorn and resentment built up... the words just flowed, as if I was on stage in an improv scene. The next prompt starts soon... maybe you should do it, too? Solo vacay to Princeton, NJI'd been to a wedding in New Jersey before, so I knew the state was more than a highway leading to NYC, but I'd never spent a significant amount of time in the woodsy areas. And I was blown away by the food, nature, and vibes of staying in Princeton for a week to visit my bff Alyssa! Pen update (New LE capless)Just one addition this month! I've been curating more gold trim pens, and since I almost always want a Decimo sized Vanishing Point with me, I was looking at a gold trim Decimo. There are not many of them to be had, and the ones that really struck me are out of my price range (Hello, Watarase!) So when I stumbled upon this beauty on eBay, I did some research to make sure it's a legit collaboration from 2017 with ITOYA, and it's on the way to me! I have two Decimos. One is gun metal grey with silver trim, and the other is a special lemon-lime color also with silver trim. I had two more, but I resold them when I decided not to do an experiment I was thinking of. I just love Capless (The Vanishing Point regular is larger in diameter and heftier, the Decimo is a thinner version of it) and it makes the largest # of my collection (Though Sailor 1911L is a near second, and E95S is the third). And here are a few pieces of art for this month. I want to start trying newer inks, but it's really hard to not pick up my favorites and do them over and over and over again :). Slowing down, stretching outFrom 2019-2025 I was really going at 250% with work. I had had a successful freelance writing business for 10+ years and I branched out into coaching other writers. It was a dream come true—all of my best strengths targeted to helping people with this huge personal thing that overlapped into business. I saw real freedom happening inside people's minds. The past year, I made the choice to let myself be pushed out by the effects of AI, and it's caused some whiplash. For the first time in a long time I have some restorative time, some true perspective and maturity and self-knowledge, and a window to just be a "civilian" in life. I just do my job and I'm done. The hamster wheel of self-improvement, production, get an edge, just try that next one thing to unlock the next level.... just gone, creating a vaccuum. I'd even say —gasp— the kids are getting slightly easier the closer both of them get to age 10. It's still a trying time what with my health and all, but I used to cry at least 2-3x a week, and now it's been a while. I think I was really maxed out on every level. Parts of my personality loved that and felt really engaged, but it was doing something inside that wasn't good, I think. I accomplished some things I'm very proud of, but I sit back now, with the day winding down at 8:30PM and I yawn and realize there's nothing else I "urgently have to do" for the night... and I really like this. I think I am finally becoming Mr. Bennet, the dad from Pride and Prejudice. And honestly that was always my aspiration. Thank you for being here with me, and please send me pictures of your pens if you have got anything interesting going on this month! Sarah G. P.S. if you like the emotional atmosphere here, invite a friend to join us. Here's to more time chilling and resting among friends. |
tiny doodles with sarag
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