In which one attempts to prove herself an author

6.57 pm
Kyle Cassidy is doing a fountain pen give-away to would be writers. In order to show that one is a) a would be writer and b) the type of person who would actually make use of fountain pens, he's asked that people post pictures of their handwritten journals as well as a writing sample. It's rather like the college admissions process, but one actually has the chance of getting something useful at the end of it.

And since I have been ruminating on how it might not be a bad thing and let slip to any fellow lawyers and would-be lawyers who know me that I write for fun...

And since I have been ruminating on how slowly killing all those parts of yourself that are human in the cause of professionalism might be a rather strange way to go about living...

And since I have been ruminating on exactly what sort of lawyer I wish to be when I grow up...

I am posting here my "entry" to the fountain pen contest.

First, we have the journals.  I've been keeping a journal since August 22, 1997.  I had just come home from overnight camp, and there were so many things that I wanted to hold on to in my memory forever, and I knew that if I didn't write them down they would slowly start to fade away.  

The open pages are bits of poetry, some of it still unfinished.

A page from one of the journals.  I took another photo after I realized this one had blurred, but I rather liked the blurred edges better.  Since you can't read it, I'll tell you that it's a timeline for a short story/novella that I wrote as my senior thesis in college.  It is, by the way, a great story.  One that I really should take out of the drawer, dust off, and finish one of these days.

Here's that writing sample part.  The left page is me trying to work out the poem.  The right page is the pretty much completed poem. I wrote it in the Berkshires, while I was on a vacation with my family, about a boy I knew in Florida.  There were things that I wanted to get into the poem but didn't quite fit in.  Like how he called me "beautiful," as in "Hi, beautiful," causing me to wonder if he was being complimentary or covering up the fact that he never knew my name.

6.57 pm
I tend not to write stories long hand, although there are a few pieces in the backs of my journals, some from airplane rides when I didn't yet have my laptop, some because the story needed to be written instead of typed to continue telling itself to me, and some simply because I had a pen in my hand and the notebook was there.  Mostly, though, I write out poetry.

Stories flow through and from my fingertips, the words appearing without much directed thought on my part.  Occasionally I will delete an adjective, insert a verb, wipe out an entire paragraph that refuses to cooperate.  More often, I will simply keep typing, knowing that I write best when I don't think about it.

Poetry is different.  It demands that each word be weighed, be rolled around the mouth and tongue before committing it to the page.  I find that the simple act of writing the words helps me better understand their relationship to one another, the meter of the whole piece.

A fountain pen would make lovely poetry.