He Just Smiled, Said Hello, and Went On His Way • Lora Ackermann
BY LORA ACKERMANN
While searching for any of the many examples of handwritten cards and notes from my family, I came across a journal of mine. This is an incredibly special journal, entirely handwritten, spanning from my first of what would eventually be four ovarian surgeries (over the course of many years) in August of 1992, through the death of my maternal grandmother in March of 1995, her husband, my grandfather in May of 1995, and ending with my soon-to-be wedding in October of 1995. These pages hold such a roller coaster of euphoria and pain. So many entries that touch my heart, soul, and spirit, drawing memories from places long forgotten to the routines of daily life. So many memories bringing new pains of loss and journeyed paths now closed.
There truly is something to say about the handwritten page. There’s a certain comfort, a warmth, as though the lines are reaching forward, surrounding me in a hug, and drawing me in. As I re-read some of these entries, I can detect, in the formation of the letters, the slant of the words, the stains on the pages, changes in mood, emotion, stress level, time management, and so many other delicate strands that make up these layered memories; delicacies that would be but lost in simplified print. The handwriting, like the musical score of a movie, tells its very own story; separate from the worded memories they so eagerly record.
Even after reading these pieces of my life from those years, pieces that now seem centuries away from reality, the entry on those first pages still strikes me the most. I had only been home from my first major surgery at age 20 for a day or two. Having received the good news that what was thought to be ovarian cancer wasn’t, I was free to heal and live my life in gratitude. I had a renewed sense of awe and appreciation for the little things life tended to toss haphazardly in my path and it showed in this entry.
August 29, 1992
…..I just returned from a walk around the block—oh what memories lie in some of the houses around here—not just my own. I can look at Elizabeth’s house, or Suzy’s house, or LouAnne’s, and still see inside, 12-13 years ago….’youngins’ they’d call us. I see Liz and myself in her room, making stickers w/ double-sided tape—we made them out of just about anything—wrapping paper, pictures, things we’d colored, etc.
I see Suzy and I in her room—so pink—pink carpet, bedspread, walls, bright pink, light pink—if ever there was a pink room it was Suzy’s. I see the laundry chute and the poster of ‘Frank Poncherello’ from the TV show, “CHIPS” above her bed. (We had a crush on him, though I liked his partner better.) I see Suzy & I sitting on the floor in her ‘play room’ eating Fruitloops from the box and watching “Emergency 911” (or something like that)—she always said that one of the men was her daddy—They did look alike and for a while I believed her, too!
I see LouAnne & I in her room playing w/Barbie dolls—she had a loft bed with a yellow carpet underneath.
I also see inside another house down the street; a brown house next to the Woolsey’s and an elderly woman who used to live there alone. Unfortunately, I don’t remember her name—I wish I did. She used to read to me and she helped teach me to read so that when I was old enough—so to speak, I often read books to her. She was a very kind woman. I wonder how she faired after she moved. I was too young to remember why she moved—family reasons I suppose. I missed her for quite some time. I think sometimes I still do. Perhaps.
I find that at times I even miss ‘Joe.’ ‘Joe’ was a man who ever since I could remember walked every day. Twice a day he passed our house. ‘Joe’ wasn’t his real name. I don’t know what it is actually. ‘Joe’ was a friendly man who always had a wonderful smile to give any passerby—anyone at all. I think he had a stroke or heart attack. I think he may still be alive, but he doesn’t walk around here anymore. Perhaps he moved; perhaps he just doesn’t walk anymore. ‘Joe’ never corrected us in regard to his name—he just smiled, said hello, & went on his way—leaving smiles on our faces for a long time after. I really did think his name was ‘Joe’ until I was about 15 or 16 when Mom told us differently. She told us his real name, but I still call him ‘Joe.’ Perhaps it’s ‘Joe’ that I owe, in part, my smiling fetish to. Perhaps.
Even typing up these words—such layered memories; memories of people who touched my life, beneath memories of writing the entry itself, beneath those of healing, speaking volumes in the spaces between the letters, the lines between the lines; you know the ones—the ones that speak to our hearts, pulling in our soul’s deepest comforts, the ones that can dry a dampened spirit or bring light to the darkest corners. Yes, so many layers that can only be fully appreciated to the depths they desire in their original, handwritten form.
Today, I journal, too. Sometimes I type. Other times I dictate. But many a time, I pick up my pen, one of the many paper journals my amazing friends have gifted me recently, find a quiet space all my own, and, even for just a few blessed moments, I disappear into the notes of the score, the layers of the letters, the spaces between the words and lines, and the hidden pleasures and soul-soothing rhythms found only when pen, from hand to page, journeys forth.
The Everyday Mind • Chad Frisk
BY CHAD FRISK
I’d never before considered handwriting to be an art form.
For me, handwriting was always a tool. I used it to build thoughts on a page, or just to fill out forms. It was slow. It was blunt. It was annoying. That’s how I had always thought of handwriting in English, and for a long time I thought of handwriting in Japanese in the same way. That is, until I met Takemoto Sensei.
“Make sure you use an extra soft pencil,” Takemoto said.
I went to the college bookstore and bought one. Slouching in a hard wooden chair, I pressed the gray tip to the off-white page of the worksheet he had given me. I could hear his voice. "Trace the lines," he said. It came with a smile that was mildly irritating.
The work was both boring and a little bit humiliating. I had written those characters for four years as a high school student, but there I was, tracing lines like a fourth-grader. The connection was appropriate, however, because I actually spent the first week of fourth grade crying over my handwriting. Ms. Ramcke had given me back a writing assignment covered with red pen. “This isn’t fourth grade writing,” the comment read. My letters still used the kindergarten stencil, filling three lines. Ms. Ramcke wanted me to shrink them down to fourth-grade size. That night I told my mom I didn't want to go to school anymore. I was curled into a lump in the corner of my bed. She did what most parents would do. She said she was sorry and rubbed my back. But then she did something else. "Maybe Ms. Ramcke is right," she said. And before I could wipe my nose, she was poking me in the back with a notebook. "Let's practice."
*
English letters aren’t very complicated. There are twenty-six of them (a few more if you include capitals). They don’t require you to make very many strokes. You don’t even have to take your pencil off the paper most of the time.
Japanese letters aren’t like that. There are three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Two of them – hiragana and katakana - are relatively compact, with about 46 characters each. There are thousands of kanji characters, however. And neither hiragana, katakana, nor kanji are easy to write – at least, not if you want to write them well. In high school, I didn’t stand a chance. But in college, Takemoto gave me one.
I heard voices as I tried to control my soft pencil: "Trace the lines," Takemoto said. "Let's practice," my mom added.
I sighed and continued to trace. Slowly, something strange started to happen. As I sat there, moving the pencil from top to bottom and right to left across the page, I found myself enjoying it. I stopped to look at my handiwork.
“That’s not bad,” I thought.
I kept writing. Before long, all of my notebooks were covered with Japanese. Hiragana, katakana, progressively less misshaped kanji. I was hooked.
*
Takemoto Sensei's approach to handwriting was totally new to me. For me, handwriting had always been an annoyance; for him, it was a craft. There were ways to apply pressure to the pencil. There were proper paths to follow, angles to be aware of, particular compositions that looked better than others. I came to love writing because there were ways to do it better.
That was almost ten years ago. Since those days, I’ve occasionally exchanged the pencil for a brush. The game changes entirely. Kanji are fun to write with a pencil. Writing them with ink, however, is a trial. If you stop the brush, you will end up with blobs. If you press too softly, your lines will be weak. If you press too hard, your lines will blend into black mush. If art is about degree of difficulty, then the brush is the tool of a master.
I am not a master. In a normal calligraphy session, I write the same kanji character fifteen to twenty times before I feel satisfied. It’s hard! With a brush, every mistake compounds. One small mistake gets me thinking about what I’ll do better the next time which causes me to make another mistake which causes me to drown the rice-paper in ink.
For me, it’s about maintaining focus from the beginning of the first stroke to the end of the last one. If I do fifteen to twenty attempts, I’m usually able to maintain that level of focus one time. I used to think that there was nothing I could do about it. But now I’m not so sure. Obsessive reading in cognitive science and a semi-regular meditation routine have made me think that focus is something I can train. I thought maybe I could use kanji to do so.
So I decided to try an experiment. I chose to write one kanji compound every morning, selecting a word that I thought would put me in a constructive frame of mind for the day. Furthermore, I only gave myself one shot.
Fumei, Uncertainty
Sitting at the table, the stars still shining in a dark, winter sky, I stared at the blank piece of paper. I tried to map the coming kanji onto it. 不明. Fumei. “Uncertainty.” I looked at the brush, sitting in the black inkwell. “You only get one shot,” I thought. Then I picked up the brush and started to write.
Ideally, the lines would have flowed out of me. Ideally, the brush would have regulated itself, increasing and decreasing pressure on its own, flicking between strokes, pausing, trailing away as I held it. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. I caught myself thinking of something else when I would have liked to be thinking of nothing but the tip of the brush. “Too bad,” I told myself, and, after scribbling some English in the margins, went to the sink to clean out the inkwell.
I came back the next day. “What word do I want today?” I asked myself, and waited for a response. I didn’t have to wait for long. 挑戦. Chōsen. A hard word to translate, but one that is often rendered as “to try”, or “to challenge”. I wrote it quickly, hoping that speed would equal elegance. It turned out alright.
Again, the white space at the corners of the page caught my eye. “Life is a challenge,” I felt myself writing. “It’s better when you accept.”
The word echoed in my mind throughout the morning. Chōsen. Did it make me act differently than I otherwise would have? It’s hard to say for sure. But even months later, the word still pops into my mind. I think it gives me a jolt of strength.
The next day I chose – again – the first thing that came to mind. Kansha. “Gratitude”. I felt a little bit nervous because I had been posting the calligraphy to Instagram. “Will people think I’m posting this just to look good?” I worried. The next thought was even more worrisome: “Am I actually posting this just to look good?”
I thought about it for a second. "Maybe not just to look good,” I reasoned. Then I paused. “But at least a little."
Then I posted it.
For three weeks, I didn’t run out of words. I found that every day I had something in my life to work on, and I was eventually able to find a word to express it. Here are some of the words that came to mind as I thought about what I wanted to bring to the day.
Nobiru. To grow. I’ve found that holding the intention to grow is enough to transform what would otherwise be the meaningless detritus of the everyday into (what at least feel like) important lessons.
Shuchu. Focus. Sometimes focus happens naturally, but usually I have to maintain it in the face of distraction. Intending to do so (and continually reaffirming that intention) is the first step.
Junan: flexible. Hansei: reflection. Norikiru: to get by.
It was an interesting experiment. It lasted three weeks. It changed from a morning ritual to an evening one. It ended not because I ran out ink, but eventually, the drive. I also ran out of words. Once or twice, my first attempt was so bad that I had to allow myself a second. But more often than not I waited out the impulse.
What made one day better than another? What conditions allowed the brush take over one day, and prevented it from doing so on another? It’s hard to say. Sleep quality, maybe. My mood, definitely. To tell the truth, there were some, or maybe many, days that I really didn’t want to write anything.
“Let’s skip it today,” a voice often said. "Do you really want to take all that gear out just to write on kanji?"
“I know,” I always forced myself to reply. “It’s kind of annoying.
“But we’re doing it anyway.”
*
Handwriting has taught me that I don’t always want to do what is good for me. It started in fourth-grade. I didn't want to shrink my letters to fit in one line. My letters fit perfectly fine into three lines. But I needed to grow up; I would be in trouble today if my letters were still six-inches high. Ten years later, I didn’t want to change my Japanese handwriting either; however, if I hadn’t, I would have missed out on a chance to participate in what I now consider to be a very meaningful art form.
The lesson I took from the calligraphy experiment is the same: writing the characters took effort. I had to expend the energy to set up the equipment; I had to think of a word, either to jump-start my day or to encapsulate it; I had to submit myself to the pressure of having only one shot; and I had to live with whatever I came up with, though sometimes I failed at that.
But the effort was worth it. Takemoto gave me a seemingly remedial homework assignment that lead to a craft. In a lot of ways, life is also a craft – one that I’d like to master. Sadly, without conscious effort I tend to produce a scrawl, both in handwriting and life.
Happily, I think I know what to do about that. Now the challenge is to actually do it.
The One Who Wrote Back • Jim Landwehr
BY JIM LANDWEHR
It was writing that brought us together.
In 1986, I moved from my hometown of St. Paul Minnesota to Waukesha, Wisconsin just outside of Milwaukee for a new job. My brother Rob was also living away from home as a student in upstate New York. He and I wrote for a period of time and in one of his letters to me, he included letters from three of his female friends on his dorm floor. He’d told them I had just moved to Waukesha and didn’t really know anyone and that he thought it would brighten my spirits to receive some letters from them.
I don't remember exactly what each of the three had to say. Most of the letters were introductory in nature and seemed like honest attempts to be nice and cure me of my homesick loneliness. They were all away from their families as well, and we were all close in age, so had music, books and college life in common to talk about.
I was, of course, flattered that 3 women would take the time to write, so I wrote each of them individual letters back. Only one wrote back.
For a year and a half.
Donna and I became 20th century pen pals of sorts. This was before the age of e-mail, faxes, texting and Skype. Long distance calls were expensive. Postage for a letter was about a quarter.
So we wrote, and we wrote, and we wrote. Short letters, long letters, letters about the trials of college and a new job, and roommates, and philosophy and religion, family, music, and books. We shared joys, concerns, doubts, beliefs and bad jokes. I sometimes took my writing to silly mediums like writing on napkins or the back of maps, just to keep it interesting. One of the things I recall her liking was my "Random Observations" which covered most subjects under the sun. Near the end of our writing things got a little spicier and flirtatious, neither of us knowing what the other would think, but daring to "go there" nonetheless.
Someone once said that writing is not a bad way to get to know someone – to become friends through writing before pursuing a relationship. I know it was true for me as it was sometimes easier to write things from the heart than it was to say them to someone I hardly knew.
Then one day she called. She said she was thinking about paying a visit and wondered what I'd think? I, of course, said I would love to see her. Both of us knew it would likely change our relationship forever.
And, man, did it ever.
I greeted her at the airport with a single red rose. We went to dinner at the Chancery and out to see the movie "Light Years" at the coolest theatre in Milwaukee, the Oriental. On the way home, "our song" came on the radio in the car, oddly enough, because it wasn't a big top 40 hit. When we got home we stayed up late and talked, and talked.
During the summer of 1989 she did an internship in Brookfield Wisconsin, which enabled us to try dating without five states between us. We were engaged that summer and married on June 16th, 1990. This past year we celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary.
Looking back, it’s hard to say how this courtship would have played out in these modern times. Email, Skype and texting seem so impersonal compared to the anticipation of a letter from across the country. My wife saved every letter I sent her. In a fit of cleaning I threw most of hers out just before we were married. I managed to find a number from her that are post-engagement, but everything else is lost in the physical sense. What remains, are the memories and feelings of that time. I still cherish a handwritten letter from anyone. It is a lost art, one that we pursued with a passion so long ago. It’s my feeling that the emotional outpouring that goes into a letter is felt on the other end in a mystical way that is lost in an electronic medium.
I do know that it worked something special for us. To this day she says that my words were what attracted her to me. There must have been something in hers that drew me to her, as well.
It’s amazing what one simple letter can become.
You Show Me Hard Work Like No One Else • Andres, 4th Grader
When we brought the story and letters from Deh'Subz, Afghanistan into 4th grade classrooms in Brooklyn, a magnetic chamber of energy opened, and we walked away that day thinking this: perhaps we should all be a little bit more child-like, and less child-ish. These 4th grade students are role models for the future, making us here at Handwritten think that perhaps we should be leading letter-writing sessions for the politicians.
Below are forty-one of the letters written, which we will be showcased at Pen + Brush on Saturday, March 5th, for our Handwriting Gala.
Do you want us to come visit your classroom and teach a letter-writing lesson? Get in touch. We customize the curriculum to your needs. Email us at info@handwrittenwork.com.
The Distance Between our Public and Private Selves • Aine Greaney
In this essay on deleted pasts and new beginnings, Aine Greaney takes us around the world in an old composition notebook: the only one she brought with her when she emigrated to America. With the start of the new year just behind us, we find this piece more timely than ever, as we revisit filled pages from the past, and look toward the blank ones of the future.
BY AINE GREANEY
December 21, 2015
This morning, I ate some oatmeal, drank some coffee and penned the last page of my personal journal. I flip back to the first page: June 30, 2015. Inside this bound book are almost eight months' worth of thoughts, uncertainties, musings and arguments.
I don't write in my journal every day, but on those weekday mornings when I do, when I set the alarm to get up extra early, reflective writing makes the rest of my working day happier. On the weekends, journaling acts as my transition from working me to creative me—and believe me when I tell you that the latter is the more authentic version. In fact, journaling has taught me this: The shorter the distance between our public and private selves, the happier we are. Stephen King may have been referring to an entirely different type or genre of writing, but he was really on to something when he declared that writing is about “getting happy.”
I started keeping a journal in my teenage years while I was attending a small-town convent day school in my native Ireland. Some days, I can still shut my eyes and see myself back there, still dressed in my navy-blue school uniform, sitting inside my bedroom window, my geography and math texts pushed aside as I scribbled in an old composition notebook.
We were the first generation to benefit from a 1967 law that granted free, secondary-level (high school) education to every child in the Irish nation. So I was supposed to be grateful for that school uniform and those textbooks that had been denied my mother and my grandmother. I was grateful. Still, I recall those school days and nights as being full of square-peg-round-hole malaise and anxiety. In public, I sang with the choir in the school assembly room. In private, I wanted, desperately, to raise my own, individual voice. Journaling was the only place where this was possible.
However, when I emigrated to America at age twenty-four, I abandoned all but one of those notebooks. I think I believed that, in my bright, new country, in a nation founded on the notion of deleted pasts and new beginnings, that that melancholy, soul-searching me was best left behind, left where it belonged.
I did bring one hard-cover notebook into which I had transcribed some of those writings from my late teens and early 20s. In the flyleaf of this little red notebook, I grandly wrote, “Collected poems, rhymes and thoughts.” Now, when I re-read those hand-written pages, I see just how wrong I was to believe that our past has ever really passed. I am shocked at how well those “assorted rhymes” still describe the middle-aged me.
For example, here’s one of those entries that I remember writing as I sat propped against the pillows in my twin bed in my parents' house:
My books stand orderly on the shelf
Masks for that hidden self
Hoping they can quench the flame
Of numberless passions with no name.
I talk and talk; I make my stance
‘You’re such good company,’ he said.
But what would he say if, perchance
He saw me sobbing in my bed?
I find it comforting to read this unchanged part of me, this struggle between the private and public self. I like that we have certain personality traits that are in-born or immutable, and that there is, at all of our cores, a perpetual and lifelong mystery.
In the basement of my house in Massachusetts, I keep boxes of my completed journals, each one chronicling six to twelve months over the course of my twenty-nine years living here. My arrival day at JFK Airport, New York. That hot, AugustSunday when my American husband and I said, “I do” before a town judge. The day an editor wrote to say she was going to publish my first short story. I remember these. But, if it weren't for those journals, many or most of the less auspicious occasions, the ordinary mornings or afternoons, would be gone from memory recall. For example, in the journal I just completed, on August 18, 2015, I wrote that “I am here alone, finally, and the internet has made me vain and distracted, and these two things (vain and distracted) are very connected.” I cannot remember feeling that—not without re-reading my own handwriting on that page.
Without all of these hand-written journal pages, how much of the past two seasons would I actually remember? How well could I evoke the sounds or feelings or atmosphere of one ordinary hour or afternoon in July or August or September? What summertime walks did I take? When did the cherry blossoms drop their pink? When did the marsh grasses near my house turn dry and brown with summer heat? Now that our garden is under snow, I find it hard to close my eyes and re-see that garden when it was lush and colorful with summer perennials.
Some days, I feel as if I am on a Japanese bullet train ride through a fast-disappearing landscape, where, by the time I sit up and look out the window, everything is already gliding out of eye view.
Then there are those days when I’m driving home from work, my head still buzzing with deadlines or with snippets of workplace conversations, and I look out my car windshield at the roadside pine trees, a flock of geese flying south through the paling sky and I think, This evening, this moment in time will never come again. So I’d better shush my mind to look---really look--around me. How many of these afternoons are left in my life? I don’t know. None of us do. Morbid? I don’t think so. These moments of mindfulness are how we hit the pause button, how we behold our own joy. When we write down those moments, when we record them in a journal, we are creating the narrative—the only half-way reliable narrative—of our precious and finite days.
Henry David Thoreau said that he traded his comfortable town home for a rustic woodland cabin because he wished to live deliberately.
At least in the abstract, some of us covet this concept of unplugging and retreating from our hectic and digitized lives. Who wouldn't like to slow down time so we can feel the heft and length of each passing hour?
But nowadays, how many of us would adapt this as a permanent and year-round lifestyle choice? The woodland WiFi and cell phone connections would be spotty at best. And, as someone who grew up in a thatch-roof farmhouse without indoor plumbing or central heating, the discomforts and inconveniences of that bare-bones cabin life would, sooner or later, override the joy or mindfulness.
So in my cozy and well-heated writing studio I keep a set of ballpoint pens and write in my notebooks to record the ephemera of my life. Without these journals, without this writing, most of the past seven months would be gone.
This morning I closed my completed journal and crossed to my studio bookshelves to stash it there until, during one of my sudden and always overdue clean-outs, it will end up with all the others in those basement boxes.
I know there will come a future day when I will go to the basement to search through the shelves for an old photo or a lost gadget and the journal box will call to me, as it has before. I will open today’s completed journal at a random page and sit there under the basement’s Florescent strip light in the company of my previous self, reliving a day from 2015. In all my past journals, I see recurring themes: the yearning for solitude; the immigrant’s search for an existential home; and my almost lifelong struggle and vacillation between my public and private personae (as in the 1983 piece above).
When I read them, I’m also struck by how prophetic some of my past writings turn out to be. It seems, in retrospect, that the writing knew much more than I did. Too often, I see that I should have listened to or acted upon my own observations.
Today, I select a new book to set on my desk underneath the east-facing window of my writer’s studio. The new blank journal sits here, empty and waiting for tomorrow.
Some People Live a Whole Lifetime, and They Never Learn to Love the Rain • Adrienne Pieroth
BY ADRIENNE PIEROTH
I received this letter towards the end of my freshman year in college. I was away from my hometown of Denver, Colorado, attending Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. It had been a year of adjustments for me — some good, some challenging — like most 18 year-olds spending their first long period of time away from home. My mother had always been the center of my life, the touchstone I would return to over and over again for comfort, love, a hug, a laugh, or a cup of tea and a much-needed chat. My mother was British and had me late in life the at 39 years old.
Perhaps it was her older, wiser years that made her such a solid and grounded figure in my life. If you asked me what defined the word “home” for me, I would say without hesitation, my Mum. While being away from the comforting home and life she had created for me was difficult at first — her care packages and letters she sent each week made all the difference. Most of the letters were about daily stuff — what was happening at home, with my Dad, or how the cats were doing. But towards the end of the year, this letter arrived. I knew it was special from the minute I opened it. I had no way of knowing that less than five years later, I would be sharing the words in this letter as part of the eulogy I gave at her funeral.
Throughout my high school years my mother battled a rare form of cancer. During those years, I lost track of the number of surgeries, and the radiation and chemotherapy treatments. But all the while, I never once remember her complaining, or asking “why me?” Perhaps the fact that my mother grew up in England during World War II, where nights spent in bomb shelters, rations and stories of sacrifice and bravery defined her youth. All I knew was that my mother had incredible strength, optimism, and not for one minute did she ever believe she wouldn’t survive her battle with cancer.
When I first read it, the part of the letter that struck me most was that she was proud of me. My mother always told me she loved me and how proud she was of me, but it was something different to see it in words, written on a page, in her beautiful handwriting — handwriting, by the way, I couldn’t read until I was nearly ten. My mother had been a secretary and knew shorthand, so her writing was a combination of cursive and shorthand in a style all it’s own.
Years later, at her funeral, it was her last words that spoke to me most, and the ones I shared with family and friends gathered to say goodbye. They were:
...we have to have some grey days in our lives in order to appreciate the bright sunny ones, and we have to make the best of them. I can’t help thinking how wonderful it is that at your young age you seemed to have learned this. Some people live a whole lifetime, Adrienne, and they never learn to love the rain.
If I learned to love the rain, I learned from my mother’s example. Looking back, I wonder which of her grey days she was remembering as she wrote those words. The day I read those words as part of her eulogy was the greyest day of my life to date, even 26 years later, but the brightness of her love and the memories of my time with her outshine the rain. Whenever I want to remember this, I need only to open the envelope that contains my mother’s beautiful words of love and support to be reminded.
April 29th, 1985
My Dear Adrienne,
I am looking forward so much to having you home for the summer. To hear the front door open & to hear you say, “Hi it’s me.” Your dad & I have missed your very much since you went off to college but we know this is the first stage of our daughter’s independence. We love you very much & we are so very proud of you. We know you have worked long & hard in all of your classes & it’s been a struggle, so many times wanting to go out & have fun, or go to a party, but knowing that you have homework to do and that the studies come first.
You have always been able to appreciate the small things in life, Adrienne – a diamond ring – a new 28oz – a trip around the world! So just kidding, I really mean the small & important things in life. When we talked on the phone last week I remember your comment on the weather. It was raining & you said when you were passing a couple of students they were complaining about the rain; how wet & miserable it was. You told me you were smiling inside because it brought back memories of England back to you & the air smelt so sweet & fresh.
Life is a little like that – we have to have some grey days in our lives in order to appreciate the bright sunny ones, & we have to make the best of them. I can’t help thinking how wonderful it is that at your young age you seemed to have learned that. Some people live a whole lifetime Adrienne & they never learn to love the rain.
From your ever loving,
Mum
A photo of Adrienne and Mum
Artistic Expression is as Essential as Breathing • Mary Fratesi
In this micro-reflection, Mary Fratesi finds delicate words for the most difficult of experiences: watching a loved one in pain. While this piece began as a pairing of two images, which has a fluency of its own, Mary takes us beneath the tree, and between the lines.
BY MARY FRATESI
Expressing my own thoughts pushes me outside my comfort zone. This is a good thing. Looking at these two pictures, you might understand something of the essence, but the context would be necessary to connect the thread for the lived experience.
The building is Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where my daughter is in ICU. I have watched epilepsy nearly rob her of her entire life. The emotions are raw and consuming. I have difficulty pulling cohesive thought together and onto paper.
But I was drawn to their togetherness—the image and these words—as I love the act of writing, for lack of better words. These words are my normal every day writing. I studied calligraphy when in High School. I tremendously enjoyed it and practiced daily for hours. I am often told I am a good writer and seem to produce written bodies of work that often surprise myself. Without question, and speaking for myself, writing and photography are a passion through which I share myself. I tend to keep everything inside, preferring to focus on the needs of others, to help others realize their own gifts and to be their best.
When it comes to expressing the great deal of sadness I have come to accept, I'm flooded with so many thoughts, that I find it tremendously difficult to find the words, in any semblance of cohesiveness. Artistic expression is as essential as breathing.
Mary Fratesi recently uncovered this photograph the other day, which is a picture of her practicing calligraphy when she was near 15-16 years of age. In the image, she is in her high school art classroom.
Neat, Cursive, Normal, Lefty • Chelsea Florio
BY CHELSEA FLORIO
For as long as I can remember, I have loved language. Whether it's studying foreign languages (from Arabic to Elvish) or learning the rules of my native tongue (English) and playfully finding new ways to break them, I am completely enthralled with learning about the ways people communicate.
Above and below are journal entries spanning the last several years in which I played around with writing in new ways. Many of them are my attempts to learn how to write left-handed because I've always seen ambidexterity as one of the neatest skills on the planet. Interspersed are my attempts at learning Morse code, which I find to be a delightfully mysterious and pretty much forgotten form of clandestine communication. Neither of the skills I've been trying to acquire when very bored are really that practical, but it's a fun way to pass the time.
This Diary is Worth So Much More than the Paper it is Written On • Melissa Dundas-Paine
BY MELISSA DUNDAS-PAINE
Our mom was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1989. It was a highly emotional time for our family, as Papa (our Dad's Dad) had just passed in a tragic car crash. Our Mom had surgery and underwent treatment shortly after the diagnosis, but being so close to our Papa, I can only imagine she immediately felt faced with her own mortality. I remember her saying that Papa visited her in a dream and told her it wasn't her time to go yet. She decided sometime between then and her death five years later that she needed to write down the story of how she met our dad, Papa's son, as well as when and why they decided to have children.
But we didn't know this back then. Our dad gave us this handwritten story after her passing. She had also taken the time to type it out, but as you can imagine, the handwritten account tugs so much more at our heartstrings. There is just something special about seeing our mother's penmanship. It evokes so many sweet memories.
She passed while we were all young, before any of us had started dating. But to have this account written by her of how she met our father and how she felt upon becoming pregnant with each of us and about the days we were born is just priceless. These are her thoughts and feelings written for us by her hand. What she must have been thinking as she penned this is just unfathomable. I'm sure she hoped we would be older and that the journal would have been full of more stories, but tragically, it sits less than a quarter full of her handwriting, as her life was cut short at the age of thirty-nine.
This diary, or mini memoir, is a treasure to my sisters and myself, and is worth so much more than the paper it is written on.
Chris & I got engaged on June 10th, 1975. He was so romantic. We went parking by the lake, he asked me if I would be his wife and then slid the ring on my finger. (What a love). One time, maybe a year before this, we were at a hockey game (Flyers). Chris asked me “why do you want to marry me?” I said, “because I want you in my life forever.” He said, “well if I marry you it will be forever.
I remember the night Chris said to me, “I’d like to start to try having a baby, what about you?” I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. It was in March. It took 3 months it seemed like forever. Chris enjoyed the pregnancy so much. We would lay on the couch at night and wait for the baby to kick. All my babies were very lazy, maybe 10-15 kicks a day.
The United States Postal Service Squares off with a Squirrel, and Loses Hard.
BY BRETT RAWSON
On January 20th, a mailman tried to deliver a piece of mail to an ordinary home. It was the XFINITY envelope you see above. Urgent, we can only imagine. But when the mailman reached the property, he approached a problem: the house was guarded by squirrels. How many, we'll never know, but there were enough. That much is clear. The mailman left the premises promptly, likely by sprint, and much later, he penned the reason for, and date of, undelivery: Squirrels, 1/20. Days later, the mailman returned, the squirrels were gone, and the bill was delivered.
The story could end there, but thankfully, it doesn't. The envelope was addressed to Glenn Tachiyama, an (ultra marathon) trail runner and (adventure) photographer. Glenn's images combine these passions with symmetry, capturing bodies in motion. But he also takes tons of pictures of squirrels.
It's a hobby of his: snapping photos of these shadow-seeking, nut-lovers. We've liked every single one we've seen on Instagram: those little concrete-colored cuties frolicking through meadows, the quasi-confused fuzzy rats nibbling on round shards of asphalt, and the small puff-balls plumping up before winter. You could be thinking that all of this was just some freak accident: that a mailman who just happened to be afraid of small furry things arrived to a residence with more than a normal amount of them. But plot-twist: January 21st just so happened to be Squirrel Appreciation Day. So now, like The Usual Suspects, your mind is going back through the clues.
It was all there: the day the mail was delivered, hundreds of squirrels darting around the lawn, unable to contain their appreciation for each other, gathered together for the annual celebration around none other than the home of Glenn Tachiyama, famous photographer and lover, or should we say leader, of squirrels. Is it that far-fetched to wonder whether the squirrels were just prepping for the photo-shoot of their lifetime?
Obviously, we here at Handwritten lost our marbles. We reached out to Glenn. "Glenn, that squirrel picture is hilarious," we wrote. "What if," we said cutting to the chase, "you sent us 4 - 5 of your fave squirrel images, and we put that in the context of this story?" Glenn replied. "As long as I don't have to write much," he wrote. "Not at all," we responded, "it'll be a visual story."
And so, with permission to use Glenn's images, but without his permission to tell a completely fictional tale, we present to you, on this pseudo-gloomy Monday, the untrue story of the mailman and the squirrel, handwritten by us, of course.
THE HANGRY SQUIRREL
handwritten by Handwritten
illustrations by Glenn Tachiyama
Seventy Years Ago Today
By Carly Butler
It was while moving my grandfather into a retirement home that we stumbled upon 110 love letters written from my grandmother to my grandfather just after WWII. They were dated January to July of 1946, and they were tucked away in the back of a cupboard next to a slew of VHS tapes of recorded British sitcoms. My Grama had been gone for over 10 years at this point. She died when I was 13.
When we first found the letters, they were simply a precious family memento — an heirloom that we’d keep in a drawer the few years that followed their discovery. It wasn’t until 2012 that I found myself in front of the RMS Queen Mary docked in Long Beach, California, the ship that my Grama sailed on in 1946 towards her new life, that an idea started to form. I would move to England from January to July of 2013 to retrace my Grama's steps. I would knock on the door of the house she wrote the letters from, I would visit the places she visited and I would write home to my love, just as she did.
The journey of retracing my Grama’s letters 67 years later changed my life. It has led me to this exact moment, drafting up my first entry for this column on Handwritten. If someone were to have told me that a bundle of love letters would change the course of my life, bring incredible people into my path, be the foundation of a love that I have with the perfect man for me, and create a connection to my Grama, someone who left this world almost 20 years ago, I’m not sure I would have believed it.
What I've come to realize is that my gratitude for having these letters is far beyond the grand gesture or epic journey. The most meaningful part of having found my Grama’s letters is that they give me a window into a life-story of an incredible woman who walked before me. Her handwritten words allow me to get to know her as a 26 year-old women embarking on a major life decision, leaving behind everything she knew, putting her faith in love and living life the way it’s meant to be lived. Her words bring me strength when I feel weak, courage when I feel scared, belief when I am in doubt, and chutzpah to live the life of my dream, seventy years later.
Her first letter, shared below for the first time, is dated January 17, 1946, just over seventy years ago today.
TRANSCRIPTION:
January 17, 1946
My Darling,
I haven't written before because I knew it wouldn't be any use as the letter would get there before you. Darling, I miss you terribly, much more than I ever did before, now I am only living for the day when I get my papers to sail. Right until I got your telegram Tuesday morning, I thought and lived in the hope that you would walk in once more for a few stolen hours, but after I got the telegram I knew you had gone. Thanks for sending it, darling, it was sweet of you, if I hadn't of got it I might still be thinking you would come.
I hope you had a good sailing darling and it wasn't too rough (or does that make you laugh) anyway the main important thing is that you got there safely. P.G. Everything back here is very much the same, I started work back again today at Samuel’s, I couldn't stay at home doing nothing any longer the time just seem to drag.
I wrote and asked for the address of the Canadian wives club and I've got it now, they meet every first Monday in the month and the next meeting is on Feb 4th so I'm going to go and learn some more about Canada and Canadian cooking (Ha! Ha! That's not funny).
It's a funny thing darling but you know all the time you were here we never heard our song once, well both last night and the night before I heard someone singing it on the AFN, they must know just how I feel. Every time I go in our room, I nearly start crying and it's worse when I go to bed, the moon is still shining on our bed just like it was that last night you were here.
On Tuesday night I went to the Odeon and saw "Love Letters" it was a lovely film and reminded me so much of how letters brought us together. I'm going to Oxford on Saturday for the weekend to take Vera back her things, anyway it will make a change for me, I'm going to take my camera and take some snaps to send to you. That reminds me I bought a smashing photo album the other day and I've put in all my snaps but there is still a lot of room, so I'm ready for all the snaps you are going to send me. Now all I want is a scrapbook.
One of the women in the shop today asked me what I would like for a wedding present so I guess we are still collecting 'em. While I am writing this Dixie is walking all over the room, so you can just imagine. mmmm. I have an answer Danny's letter yet but I will soon, I have written to everybody else. Well darling I guess that's about all for now except that I love you and I won't feel like a whole person again until we are together for good. P.G.
Half of me is with you, well cheerio darling, God Bless You and All the Luck in the world to you, Au revoir. All my love forever your ever loving wife,
Rene
I love you – in x’s
P.S. Give my love to the family. Love Rene.
I Saw in My Mind a Vision of them Sparkling with Joy • Adrienne Harvitz
This micro-insight from Adrienne Harvitz reminds us of an important tradition: to create brand new ones. Ignoring the standard "To" and "From," Adrienne created gifts out of the paper wrapped around the presents for her children. Did most end up in the recycling bin? Sure, but one didn't.
By Adrienne Harvitz
This Hannukah, when I got to wrapping gifts for my kids, a sort of sinking feeling settled into chest when I reflected on what I was teaching and feeding them through the process of honoring a sacred ceremony of gratitude and reverence with consumerism, AKA "presents."
The receiving of objects feeds an egoic entity — a little green-eyed gremlin — that lives deep within the belly of every child. The gremlin has with an insatiable appetite for ownership, stuff and covetousness, and grows hungrier and more snarly, shouting words like "mine!" and "don't touch my stuff!" and "mom, can't I open another one?" to family members and siblings with more vigor and chutzpah per every present opened.
This is the process whereby the giving of presents takes precedence over the act of being present and defeats the true goal of holiday season: to share love, gratitude, joy, story, and meaning with our families. So this year, when I got that feeling that I was feeding the green-eyed gremlin, I stopped, took a breath, and asked myself what I really wanted to feed and how to do so. I realized I wanted to feed my children positive beliefs about themselves, and the intention of love and appreciation for life that was behind each gift I bought for them. When I imagined them playing with or using each gift I bought them, I saw in my mind a vision of them sparkling with joy, or shining the light of their unique talents, abilities, and delights out into the world. So I decided to give my children the gift of meaning and conscious words with their gifts, writing on the plain foil and recycled newspaper wrapping paper messages to them about just how I love them, wishes, and dreams I have for them, how I hoped they would enjoy their gift or use it to share their inner gifts and joy with the world, or some positive affirmation about them each as an individual.
In the end, most of my words ended up in the recycling, but my son did pin up one of the wrapping paper messages on his wall, and I know that they heard the words from their mama's heart, and not just the sound of shredding gift-wrap echoing in their minds after the candles burned down each night of Hannukah.
Permanent Ink For Self-Love’s Sake • Mickie Meinhardt
BY MICKIE MEINHARDT
“So what do your tattoos mean?”
I get this a lot. Anyone with ink does. People love to ascribe meaning to tattoos; as if to say that to make such a decision, to put permanent markings on your skin, has to have gravitas. But often it does not. Some even seem offended when I answer that, well, most of them don’t “mean” anything. The anchor on my left bicep? Just really wanted one. The mermaid on my right? A beautiful work of art from an artist I admire. It’s a lot like buying a painting, except instead of hanging it on a wall, it’s on my body. Forever.
But some do have symbolism. Like the smattering of line drawing on my wrists: the Deathly Hallows, an octagon for my math-teacher grandma, and wave for my beach hometown dappling my wrists. Of these small but significant ones, there are two I’m particularly fond of, both hand-drawn by me: A heart on my upper right thigh, and the words “NO TIME” on the inside of my right ring finger. Both represent the culminations of periods of extreme personal, emotional, and mental turmoil, and have become symbolic mantras to a better self. In the absence of religion — I’ve been agnostic since I learned what the term meant, though hold beliefs in various universal phenomena that one could, I suppose, call spiritual — they and the feelings they represent have become like small visible prayers to myself, without which I would certainly have been OK, but perhaps not so quickly.
The heart was my first tattoo. I got it in tandem with the small bicycle on my ribs, never seen, the summer before my senior year of college, to celebrate the end of what was and remains one of the worst period of my life.
I was living in the Bronx, commuting nearly an hour to Manhattan to intern at a fashion news website for no money and waitress after at a midtown beer bar for barely-decent money; days frequently began at 8am and ended around 2am with maybe $150 bucks in my pocket, if I was lucky. After rent and bills, there wasn’t much left over, and I was often unable to feed myself anything other than cheap college staples — bananas, beans, booze — or whatever I could scrounge from the restaurant. My apartment life was in turmoil; one of my roommates was experiencing a terrible, life-altering personal situation that, for no fault of hers, oozed into everyone’s life around her and caused a rift in our friendship. Home was not a safe or happy place for me when I very much needed it to be.
That summer, I was in the throes of battling my way out of years-long eating disorders. Three years of on-and-off anorexia and bulimia had caused deep personal revulsion and body image issues. And at that point, whatever reasons the disorders began and were perpetuated were long gone. I felt terrible all the time. Constantly tired, sore, sick of looking at myself in bathroom mirrors with hatred-filled, watery eyes. I was repulsed by what I was doing to myself. So, as low a point this was for me — over-worked, under-paid, stressed, and feeling completely alone — there was a twisted silver lining: Under the pressure of those months, I finally cracked. I resented myself for what I was doing to my body, and my mind, so much that I vowed to kick it all for good.
In hindsight, I wish I had told someone, anyone. But admitting how incredibly fucked up I was to another person was impossible, unfathomable, at the time. It would mean admitting what a serious problem I had. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone watching me when I ate, looking for signs of deep-seated issues. So I told no one. I was isolated, depressed, and a mess. I drank a lot to forget my anxieties, or try to quiet them. If school hadn’t started when it did, giving me a distraction and getting me out of my own head, I probably would have lost it. Years later, a doctor would ask me, incredulous, how I managed to get over the disorders without therapy or serious treatment.
In truth, it would be years more before the aftershocks of those psychological earthquakes would finally die down, but at the time I was determined to quell the actions of the disorders as best I could on my own. I remember this decisive moment of “You will learn to get better” mostly because of an unconsciously-drawn doodle. It was on the late train ride home after a long shift at the bar. As a writer, I was always scribbling, even when bone-tired. With one of the black pens I always carried, I drew a tiny heart on my right inner thigh just below the hem of my denim miniskirt. I stared at it for a bit, willing myself to love my body more.
“This would make a good tattoo,” I thought.
A week before classes began, I took a few days to visit my hometown, Ocean City, Maryland, for beach relaxation and decompression. On the last day, I accompanied my brother to get a tattoo and decided I would, too.
I sketched the heart over and over in my journal. I’d doodled absentminded hearts into margins my whole life, but this wasn’t a college-ruled notebook. It was important that it was imperfect; not symmetrical, not too clean. I drew quickly, rapidly, trying to conjure “the one” with literal stokes of brilliance. Some came out longer, swoopy, with a flick to the point. Some were plump and short, like Sweetheart candies. The ideal was something in the middle: Curvy and cute but not comically plump.
It finally materialized, and I triumphantly circled the nickel-sized symbol and handed the notebook to the tattoo artist to scan. I sat down on the padded chair, jean shorts hiked and leg splayed, and watched. I remember how the ink welled up and sank into my skin, how I did not bleed, how surprised I was at easily enduring the pain, having always been afraid of needles. When it was over, I had a permanent reminder to be a better person to myself that would be seen, as I once told a friend, every time I sat down to pee. This was important — as any recovered disordered eater knows, the bathroom is where your indiscretions manifest. So several times a day, there it was: Love me. Love yourself. Love.
I can’t pretend it was an instant elixir, but it helped a lot. When I became an avid yoga practitioner, it took on a new form.
“Look how strong you are! You’re amazing! I love you!” It seemed to say, as it warrior-ed and stretched and danced through the poses. I came to think of it as a friend who never leaves, and always has the same good advice.
The second meaningful tattoo is relatively recent, inked impromptu on my 25th birthday this past summer, though I’d been contemplating it for some time. I swore I’d never get a words tattoo — I felt out-of-context quotes were cliché, and I’d seen some bad ones — but finding my own handmade mantras changed my mind.
As a creative, self-doubt is a constant companion. Internal body image issues aside, I've always been a confident, outgoing, and capable person, especially in my work as a writer. And, fortunately, depression has never been a clinical or recurring battle for me, like it is for many creatives. But your early twenties are a tumultuous time, and in them the melancholy demon can creep and make itself at home, often to paralyzing effect.
In the later part of 2014, I went through a messy breakup. It felt easy to actually do at the time, to say “we’re done” and walk away, but there were devastating aftereffects in the following months. The relatively short relationship was my first legitimate one as an adult, and, unprepared for the feelings that follow after you lose a love, its dissolution rocked me in unexpected ways. A lot of my body dysmorphia issues came rearing back, and while I was long past the actual disorders themselves, my image of myself was shattered. The breakup had also occurred right before Thanksgiving, meaning I had to trudge through the holidays as if they weren’t making me feel worse about being alone. And finally, I was in the terrible purgatory of waiting to hear back from graduate schools, having finished applications to various MFA programs at the end of the year. I had nothing to do except wait, wait to get better, wait to be accepted—and nothing good comes from an idle mind. Not usually one to wallow, I found myself unwilling to leave my apartment, pathetically curling up in bed with a laptop most nights, or getting wine-drunk and watching the ceiling fan while listening to sad girl music. I knew I was not OK. I saw it, and didn’t like it. But even then, I wasn’t sure how to fix myself. A go-getter who rarely sat still, I’d never been in this situation before. I’d never felt so deflated, like my will to be a person had leaked out of my pores and evaporated. There was a lot of denial, a lot of “I’m fine,” until my roommate finally sat me down and said, “No, you’re not.”
It took a while. But by spring, I’d eased out of the hole. I got into my top school, took on new projects, and started to feel like myself again, in part from the cheesy recitation of several mantras. Say what you will about “quotes” (I did), but they can help more than expected.
One is a poem, “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski, which begins: “Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.” I printed it and hung on my bedroom wall, and on moments when the gray cloud loomed I would remind myself: This is your life, and it is bright and full and amazing, if you let it be. It ends “You are marvelous. The Gods wait to delight in you.” That is true. For everyone.
Another is an aphorism that I found on the source for all aphorisms, Tumblr. It is a photo of a piece of paper that the feminist teen blogger Tavi Gevinson had taped to the back of her door. It read: “There is not enough time for hating yourself. Too many things to make. Go.”
I remember seeing it and feeling like someone had just clubbed me with a reality stick. I can’t tell you how many times I repeated those lines to myself through this past year.
“No time for hating yourself,” in front of my mirror on my way out for the night, when perhaps I didn’t feel like I looked my best. “Too many things to make,” on the mat after weekend yoga, getting psyched to go write something. “Go.” On good days, on bad days. Almost every day. I also liked the way it synced with the meme phrase, “Ain’t nobody got time for that,” which had become something of a tagline for my “no fucks given” attitude — adopted as a way to keep my positive, yes-to-life perspective high and distracting negativity low.
These three combined served as driving forces to betterment. If I wanted to be a successful writer with a great life, if I wanted to pursue more creative projects, if I wanted to be the best version of myself, if I wanted to be GREAT and MARVELOUS, then I did not have time for things that could hold me back: sitting and being sad, worrying about what anyone else thought of me or my choices or my work, stressing about how I looked underneath my clothes, thinking about insignificant, small-minded men — or anyone, really — who did not appreciate me. It all went out the window.
Thus, the “NO TIME” tattoo was on my mind for a few months by the time I got it; I had been waiting for something, but I didn’t know what. A little buzzed in a taxi on my way home from birthday day drinks, I decided that was the moment. I redirected the cab, walked into a trusted shop, and scribbled the words a few times in crooked uppercase chicken scratch. I’d never liked my uppercase handwriting — it’s a block-y, barely-held-together sans serif. My lowercase is loopy, a half-print half-cursive hybrid that I’ve always found interesting and pretty. But uppercase it had to be, a stressed point, a shout, a directive.
It hurt worse than any tattoo I’d gotten — fuck the foot or ribs, FINGERS are some serious pain, right on the bone, close to millions of nerve endings. But it was the best one yet, and so worth it. I walked out as the sun was setting over North Brooklyn in that spectacular summer pink-orange array, head clear, feeling maybe one year older but definitely years wiser thanks to those changes in life and attitude in recent months.
Now, the black ink has softened — fading slightly, as finger tattoo tend to do — and it feels more like a firm but gentle reminder, rather than an “or else” angry shout.
Despite not ever believing in mantras or prayer, or at least not the ones I’d seen so far, I unknowingly unwittingly created my own in times when I needed them the most. Two little shout-outs to the universe, establishing my voice in it as one that often wavered but came back stronger, wiser, each time. And written in my own hand, they feel immensely powerful. Like I composed an unbreakable contract to my body to be a better person and signed it to, and on, myself. I don’t think I would feel the same if they were in a pretty font or pre-packaged shape.
I see both these tattoos quite a lot — when I type, when I pee, when I put on rings, when I change my jeans — and when I remember to look at them, I smile.
Because I know, now: I got no time for anything, except a lot of love.
Mickie Meinhardt is a multidiscplinary writer of fiction, essays, and (for her Brooklyn rent) copy, currently working towards an MFA in fiction at The New School. She has a weekly cultural longform newsletter, The Interwebs Weekly. She tweets sometimes but Instragrams often.
No Writer Should Live in Fear • Justin Sherwood
The instagram does not exist. In it, a patch of white-gray sidewalk frames a loose circle of dead leaves. In the top left corner, the curb of the road. At the center, yellow graffiti. The graffiti is a crooked arrow pointing into open space, and next to it the words FAG PARKING. You can tell from the way that FAG is scrawled the graffiti first marked something else, that when the text was painted it wasn’t graffiti at all. There are other signs nearby: a pink flag, some white tubing. But there it is, revised: FAG PARKING.
I came across the parking space on a run. On shorter runs, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, I perform the same loop. I run from my apartment on Ditmars Boulevard to the northernmost avenue in Astoria, then west to Astoria Park, around the park, back to the avenue, and home. I’ve run the avenue hundreds of times. And then this drab, fall day, as I near the top of the hill that marks its middle, I find the inscription. I must have been sensitive that day. The sky was clear and pale, the wind was calm; I’m full of pride, I’m well adjusted. And yet. FAG PARKING. I feel that hot and unmistakable pang: shame.
And then I think, let this be funny. I’ll capture the image and say, “If you’ve ever tried to find parking in Astoria, you know how considerate this is.” The day passes and I go for another run. As I crest the hill, I keep my eyes peeled for the graffiti. I must have missed it—I’ve passed the place I know it to be. I’m nearly in the park and there’s no sign. I make a small circle, run back up the hill, nothing. I stop at the top to catch my breath. Another sideways glance, then down.
Justin Sherwood's poems and essays have appeared in Women's Studies Quarterly (WSQ), New Criticals, H_NGM_N, and The Poetry Project Newsletter, among other places. He's also a contributor to Scout: Poetry in Review. He teaches at The New School, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing. Find him on Twitter @JustinSherwood.
I Wanted to Build a Universe • Tonianne Bellomo
What happens when it's not just you, the writer, who struggles with the screen, but your characters? In this lyric essay, Tonianne Bellomo walks us through the negotiations she makes with her characters. What does she do to bring them to life? She builds them paper homes.
By Tonianne Bellomo
I wanted to build a universe.
I wanted to write stories like the ones that made me forget reality. I wanted to build worlds from letters. I wanted to draw in the margins and give readers a glimpse of the realms that rested behind my eyes.
I can’t do that on a computer, at least not at first. There’s no highlighting, scribbling, pasting, scratching out, ripping. There are just clean white backgrounds, perfect font, and the tapping of keys.
That is not world-building; that is a job.
The novel I’m editing is rough, probably in every sense of the word. It sometimes gets so dark that I forget which way is the way home, and I find myself suffocating.
It makes it hard to write.
The computer makes it worse. I feel like I’m cheating. My characters hate it, too. It’s like they refuse to be slighted, refuse to be clinically typed in perfect Times New Roman onto my computer rather than scrawled in a bastardization of Catholic school cursive. They’ll just stand at my mind’s door, arms crossed, heads turned away like I’ve insulted their mothers.
So, I give the characters what they want.
I give them paper homes.
The characters grow in those spaces, whether I realize they’re characters or not. They are lines from a poem, a feeling evoked from a song, lyrics, ticket stubs, a Polaroid. The characters are a lot of things that would have never come together if I didn’t handwrite first.
Handwriting makes it feel like art.
I know by definition writing is an art. I just never feel like I’m making art. Handwriting my stories, though, and putting in all those extras makes me feel like I’m creating worlds for them, like the little girl with a dollhouse that she’s putting together.
Tristan, the protagonist of my novel, even has a journal that is featured on his blog. It originally just started out as a Tumblr blog, but I couldn’t “feel” him in that blue screen. I went out, bought a Moleskin (because he would totally have one) and started drawing and writing in his voice.
It made me feel like I could breathe again. Like the darkness wasn’t so suffocating because I could understand his thought process — I could follow his thoughts home.
He’s real now. The moment I handwrote his first entry, he became real. The fourth wall broke, and he fell into reality. I can see him sitting in O Café sipping his Americano while sketching in his journal or pasting photos of Richey Edwards or Ian McCulloch onto the pages.
Handwriting and plotting my stories in my journal — it all helps me make worlds. It helps me create the universes that I want my readers to inhabit. And it helps me remember that before all the workshops and degrees and frustrations, there was just me, my journal, and the universes I wanted to build.
Tonianne Bellomo is a graduate of The New School MFA program and an adjunct lecturer at Baruch College where she teaches writing. She is currently editing a novel and blogging from her protagonist's POV at http://wax-and-wings.tumblr.com.
I Won a Twenty Pound Bag of Detergent • Livia Meneghin
BY LIVIA MENEGHIN
A few years ago, I heard about a Brooklyn thrift store opportunity that I couldn't pass up: $25 for a large shopping bag of goodies. "If you can fit it, you can buy it!" said handwritten signs alongside the walls of the dilapidated building. When I saw their piles of books, I knew the clothing sections of the store would have to wait. My hands quickly skimmed across countless novels until finally halting on a book by Thomas A. Harris, called I'm OK—You're OK. I was taking a psychology class at the time, and interested in how mental health affected relationships, so I happily placed it in my bag. On the train home, I opened up the cover and found a note.
On New Year's Eve in 1973, a mother gave this book to her daughter (Sue). But why did Sue’s mother have the book? We know she read it, but what made her give it to Sue? Did she now hope it could provide answers for her daughter in the New Year?
I thought back to the times I’ve been gifted books. Just this past summer, a close friend gave me her childhood copy of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry for my birthday. It was incredibly worn, probably providing her with years of adventure and happiness. Holding that book in my hands, with its broken spine and her favorite lines highlighted, made me feel like we were reading together. A book as a gift is so much more than something to read. Chosen with care and thoughtfulness, a book is an outstretched hand, welcoming another into a new world of new ideas.
On the train ride home, I flipped through the tattered pages when I came across a lump. Sitting between pages 138 and 139 was an unsealed letter from Mrs. Mary Lehman from Monmouth, Illinois to Mrs. Ruth Robertson from Marion, Kansas, dated three years after the inscription (September 16, 1976). I wondered now about the four women. Did they all know each other? Did Sue gift it after reading? Mrs. Lehman's handwriting reminded me of my grandmother's—very elegant and careful. I could hear a humorous attitude with the first line, "Guess its about time I answered your letter." I felt like I knew them—had been given access into their personalities, their voices. This letter was not much different from the ones I write with my friends. We share daily news, things that seem unimportant, but it can mean wonders to someone far away when we ask if they are OK.
This leaves me wondering: what if I put a letter of my own into the book and donated it to a used bookstore, to keep the chain going? Whether intentionally placed or not, I picked up extra inspiration that day in Brooklyn, a mystery of sorts. I walked away with more than just a book, but possibilities for more stories. There's something incredibly human about imagining these women, especially through the same book they all shared. It makes the world feel smaller, more meaningful, even without actually knowing them or being in the same physical space. By continuing the chain, I can add to the story.
The letter is transcribed below.
Dear Ruth:
Sept 16, '76
Guess its about time I answer your letter, now that the Fall Festival is over with, it lasted 4 days. The senior citizens all went out there for breakfast one morning, we ate at the Lutheran tent, then went out that evening with Gene and Janice as Dan was working at one tent, the little boys were in the chicken scramble, Cory who is six, he caught a chicken and got a silver Dollar, but Tye was too slow, he didn’t get any, then the kids were in the Pet Parade on Sat. morning. Cory got first prize in his class, with a unusual [ ] got 2 silver dollars for that, so he thought he did real well, I won a 20 lb bag of detergent at one of the stands, so I will be clean for a while, been having nice weather, had a rain last wed night, has been cool ever since, had the furnace on a couple times, so makes one think that winter is just around the corner, we had a nice visit with Mary + Marvin, they were here for 3 days, seemed happy, hope everything turns out all right for them, they were on their way home. Ralph were here one evening, they had a letter from Lillian, they wanted me to read, sure too bad about Dick, hope he will soon be better.
Jacks are getting ready to pick seed corn, they hope to start next week, some of the fellows have all ready started. Just talked to Phyllis she was making pepper relish, she always makes a lot and gives most of it away, as her men don’t like it, she brought me some nice tomatoes yesterday and dozen eggs, her pullets are laying already.
I cleaned my garage yesterday, so today I am not doing much, made some bread pudding this morning, going to have goulash for dinner, have some hamburgers to use. Our Book Club went out for breakfast at the Restaurant yesterday morning.
Hope you are feeling OK. Are you taking the Divine flu shot that the gov is giving. I will if they ever get the serum in here or else I will take my regular shot that I have always taken.
Gene just called, said to tell you “Hello”
Mary
Livia Meneghin is a poet, non-fiction writer, and recent graduate from Franklin & Marshall College with a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing. She was a contributing writer and photographer for F&M’s College Reporter, and earned the William Uhler Hensel Senior Prize in Research Writing for her essay, “Priest, Clerk, and Pitiable King: The Portrayal of Richard II in Recent Production History.” Her work is published in literary journals Dispatch and Plume. After a month-long poetry workshop in Greece, she is working on her first full-length collection and applying to MFA programs. You can follow her writing here: liviameneghin.wordpress.com.
Better Smut by Hand • Wednesday Black
Publishing under a nom de plume, this rising novelist reflects on how writing the first draft of her erotic novella by hand led to all kinds of unforgettable feelings.
BY WEDNESDAY BLACK
I wrote the smutty little novella, How to Train Your Virgin, in the fall of 2014. Badlands Unlimited, a publishing company founded by artist and activist Paul Chan, had put out a call for erotic fiction the spring before, and I took a chance and entered a chapter. I thought there might be a little money in anonymous smut-making. The result was a somewhat bittersweet novella of feminist, fabulist fiction — oh, yeah, and fucking.
The real surprise for me was the enormous flow I experienced while writing it. I’d never written anything like it before, and it felt…good. It was as if my Inner Critic was so mortified she had no choice but to take a vacation. After all, I was working in cliché, striving to boost every scene over the top, and doing it all in a fantasy playground populated by evil bog women and clockwork sex carousels. Let’s not even get into the title! I mean, what could Inner Critic say that I didn’t know already? So I ran with the story — or maybe it ran with me.
I wrote most of HTTYV by hand — in bed, on the subway, hunched over in any number of coffee shops throughout Amagansett and Manhattan. I scrawled over multiple notebooks, post-its, scraps of napkin, the backs of receipts, and along the way I lost as much as I wrote.
Sometimes I like to imagine someone picking up one of those lost scraps of prose. What might they make of the scribbled words about Minotaur fellatio, great, tiered foundries for sexual smelting (okay, that one didn’t make into the book), or numbered directions for seducing hipsters? This is one of the dangers and pleasures of writing with pen and paper. Such words have a way of fluttering away on mysterious wings and leading lives independent of those we imagined for them.
Looking back at these first-draft jottings more than a year later, I can see a childish exuberance in my pen strokes and slashes. In many cases the finished product was very different, of course, and I’ve included examples here and there where it is relevant.
What is it about writing by hand? I like seeing what I scribbled out, having it still there even though I’ve consigned it to ballpoint obscurity. I love the act of scrawling ideas, scenes, shreds of dialogue — when I do, it seems to come from my hand and not my brain.
Looking at it now, I can see by the physical state of my writing how I was feeling then: frustrated, ashamed, enthusiastic, bored. I can relive my process as it developed, see where my creativity tripped and fell, and the moment it brushed itself off to allow the show to go on. Here is the raw version of The Ruin Carnival scene and the published version:
Sure, the paragraph that made it into the published novella is clearer, contains more — but would not have existed at all without the notes. One was the organic, physical product of handwriting. The raw material. The other was processed until it became more effective and organized. That it was processed and finished with the rather sterile act of tapping away on a plastic and metal contraption is significant. A keyboard and a screen have a disciplining effect. Remember my Inner Critic? She was allowed to come home again during this part. Another example:
Often I didn’t feel certain necessary content deserved to be written by hand—why waste the ink and finger joints? Instead, I wrote a note to my future self to get on with it as in this note. Love scene is a euphemism for SEXSEXSEX. In fact, I wrote most of the actual sex scenes on the prudent keys of my Mac.
As for the passion, the obsession, the pain and heartache—all of those things I found were best rendered by hand. There is something about writing these human intrigues that required, for me at least, a body-word collaboration best engaged by planting elbows on table and pressing down with pen.
In the end, after all that scribbling and wild fun, it was a trip to get the published version. Rigid margins, clearly printed large-type, a cover…wow. That’s classy smut, I thought. But the most human part, the communication between individuals — that was handwritten.
Leia Menlove is Wednesday Black is Leia Menlove. Her writing has been published in Monkey Bicycle, Joyland, Joyland Retro Volume 2, The Artificial Selection Project and more. Her novella, How to Train Your Virgin, was released by arts publisher Badlands Unlimited in March 2015, and was featured at the The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Series, "Conversations with Artists and Writers.” She is a graduate of The New School MFA program for creative writing, and splits her time living and working in New Orleans and New York City. If anyone finds a notebook containing scribbled notes for a dirty novel about women who are attracted to deconstructivist architecture, please email her immediately: mswednesdayblack@gmail.com.
So You Are Now an Invalid with Beautiful Nurses • Lauren Miller
A letter from mother to son during World War II illustrates the tense and tender sides of war, and long-distance correspondence.
BY LAUREN MILLER
I consider my grandfather the living Hemingway — he is tough, he has sought out adventures, and he prefers his alcohol to burn on the way down. So when we pulled out his box of WWII letters, I was hoping to discover another layer to this man who now stands at my own height. What I discovered was a voice from a teenager who was braver than hell and who referred to himself as Junie.
Herschel A. Cox Jr. wrote somewhere north of 75 letters to his mother and father while he was serving as a Marine in WWII. That afternoon, we read each letter out loud; skipping over the words we couldn't decipher and pausing for history lessons along the way. I had braced myself for tears, excitement, and laughter, but it wasn't until we read the one letter from his mother that I discovered the layer I was hoping for:
This letter was written to my grandfather from my great grandmother after she had learned her only son had been wounded. The envelope alone tells a story of how hard it was to locate him once the bullet entered and exited his arm. Her words portray her as a stoic, thoughtful, caring, and witty woman who I consider the bravest of them all. Holding that letter and seeing her handwriting was a heartfelt moment when I connected to the Marine who is my grandfather.
I must apologize in advance to my grandfather. This entry is not a historical representation of the months you spent serving. It is about how one letter encapsulates your experience as a Marine and reveals so many layers.
Lauren Miller is a handwriter in Seattle. True to her native roots, any goodness she hand writes usually starts after consuming a cup of coffee. Her first memory of writing was at her family cabin on Vashon Island. With legal pad placed squarely on her great grandfather's table and a number two pencil tightly gripped, she described the seagulls soaring above the Puget Sound. Today she enjoys the simple pleasures, her ability to follow her passion, and the musings of her nephews.
I Have Come to a Conclusion • Ali Osworth
In this micro-ritual, Ali Osworth lays out the key ingredients to safeguarding ink's elegance, and her daily quest for grace. For those of you looking to slow down your mornings, taking a look at what's on your desk is a good place to start.
BY ALI OSWORTH
I have come to the conclusion that I'm a better, saner person when I slow down in the morning. I light a candle (the holder for which a dear friend gave me long ago), brew some tea (Lady Grey) and get out my tarot cards. The card in this photo is the two of pentacles — taking on new roles and balancing them, all with grace. It's the quest for grace that brings me to handwriting in my journal (most of the time, with a fountain pen that used to be my father's). Without the half-hour of journaling, of connecting my thoughts to my body as I use my fingers to move the pen across the page, I lose the grace. My movements become less refined. I lose ink's elegance. I become as fragmented as Tweets — 140 character, byte-sized.
Once A Writer, Now A Handwriter • Demetri Raftopoulos
A writer reflects on his first experience with a journal, which happened to coincide with living away for the first time as well, at the age of 26.
BY DEMETRI RAFTOPOULOS
I forgot my notebook.
It’s 5:30 in the morning and most of Thassos is still sleeping. The sun is hidden behind a couple moon colored clouds, just like the rest of the writing cohort behind their closed bedroom doors at Archodissa. I walk back past the kitchen and up the stairs towards the courtyard where the basil and oregano that is sprinkled into our dishes grows. A group of off-white stray cats lay spread out next to the garden. Their eyes are closed too.
I walk up to the balcony and reach my room. Clothes hanging to dry snap softly on a line extending the length of the balcony. I barge in and retrieve the small beige felt journal resting on my nightstand. My feet crunch against the sand I drag in from the beach every day, and close the door behind me, now ready to open my notebook on a boat that will sail through the Aegean.
Spending a month in Greece, that same notebook was next to me as much as bread was with tzatziki. With me at all times like uncertainty throughout the Greek government. Simple chance brought us together. A good friend gave it to me before leaving and if it wasn’t for him, I would have never clicked down on a pen. I would have never built another relationship alongside all the others formed around me with the clanking of glasses that month.
The notebook became my traveling companion. In a new environment, with new people, I felt safe with it. But I was also in constant need to protect it. So much so that instead of spending my last morning in Thassos on the beach, I sat at the restaurant and transcribed everything I had filled it with onto my laptop, in case something unfortunate occurred. I needed to know where it was always, the few times it wasn’t tucked into my back pocket or open in my hands. It was a friend that always gave, no matter how much I took and took and took.
I wasn’t a hand-writer. But in Greece, I became one.
The water looks dark, like the tip of a sharpened pencil. I grip the blue siding of the boat the way I grip my notebook. We move slowly, a pattern of tiny ripples follow us to the fishing trap Stamatis set last night, but the boat still rocks with the unsteadiness of the water. Stamatis is a fisherman, captain of the Evanthoula, and owner of Archodissa. He stands behind me clutching onto a small metallic wheel that sticks out from above the compartment like his worn-out overalls do over his blue polo. Greek music plays from a speaker next to the wheel and we pick up speed.
“S’Agapo pou eisai oreia,” Stamatis shouts, adjusting a strap falling off his shoulder. “I love you because you’re beautiful,” I repeat to myself, taking a seat on the ledge in front of him.
I wonder if he is singing to the sea, I write in my notebook. The swaying of the boat darts my pen upward and downward. Or if he is singing to his wife, Eva. The word ‘singing’ comes out the sloppiest but I can still read it. I use my thigh as a desk and rest the notebook right above my knee AKIMBO. It’s chilly this morning and the Aegean breeze whispers across my exposed head. I pull my hood up and continue writing.
This is his life: setting traps at night to pick them up in the morning. Sleep irrelevant. And whatever the sea offers him this morning, he will still be singing. Whatever the headlines say about his home’s economy, he will still be fishing.
I flip back to earlier pages in my notebook and admire how much I have already written only into the second week of this month-long writing residency. The pages are filled with sloppily written words as if I wrote them descending King Da Ka at Six Flags but my words are there, nonetheless, engraved into each sheet.
Light begins to creep out from behind the mountain to our left, as if rising like beer poured slowly into a mug.
Stamatis is still singing. His words hit me like the morning wind but stay and land on my page instead.
The captain continues to serenade his home, his sea. He knows these waters better than the fish that swim in them. The boat moves with ease and the music blasts louder. Stamatis is Thassos’ alarm clock. The snake charmer for the sun. The dry entertainment above for those living below. He could be trying to mask the harsh sound of the Evanthoula’s engine. Provide the sea with comfort instead of impending potential capture. Or he could just love the music his favorite singers produce. It could be his constant cheery nature. That he wishes to celebrate his life instead of worry about it.
I click the end of the pen and place it in my notebook’s crease so I can stand for the sunrise. I leave the notebook closed on the ledge and face the mountain, watching it give birth to the sun. The curved arc appears first and the morning already begins to warm. I remove my hood and look back toward the notebook, tempted, but keep my eyes focused on the slowly rising sun.
This will sound a bit silly but my notebook isn’t demanding or needy. Yes, I may write in it constantly but the notebook has also allowed me to live my life separately, away from it’s pages and soft jacket cover. To admire what’s around me alone, and then share the moment with it afterward. To truly capture a moment before putting my head down. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy sharing. But I enjoy being able to experience something on my own first and then sharing it with others. With my notebook.
The sun is halfway through its entrance and I return to my ledge. I watch the day brighten a little more before opening the notebook again.
“Ti graphis?” Stamatis asks loudly, touching the brim of his blue hat, and then resumes his song. "What are you writing?"
I turn to face him. “Kati yia sena,” I tell him. He smiles and his graying goatie does too. "Something about you."
An orange buoy appears, softly twirling in the water like the final spins of a quarter. The engine and speaker both soften and the boat inches towards its marker.
Stamatis’ beard resembles my father’s, as does his work ethic. I’ve been to Greece before but it’s been seven years since I’ve experienced that sunrise from the blue of the Aegean. With someone like Stamatis, a patriotic man, doing all he can to keep his business and world afloat. The water doesn’t have a rank smell attached to it, like the beaches on Long Island. If anything, it smells like promise. Greece is constantly on display, shackled in the courtyard of Europe for everyone to poke at. It isn’t hidden like that which swims beneath us. Hopefully Stamati will reveal some of his hard work when he pulls up the trap.
In the past, I don’t know how I would have recorded all this. With my phone? Hope to remember as much of it with my fleeting memory? Fleeting, like my presence in Greece. It’s impossible to remember every detail but with this notebook at my side, I’ve been attempting to. Whatever I don’t remember or don’t see, I’ll write into my notebook the next time I’m here. And whatever I forget will be kept alive.
The orange buoy is now at arms reach and the boat slows even more. A couple of seagulls are awake now too, circling the boat for whatever we throw back, if anything. The sun is now completely over the mountain and shines on the rest of the waking Thassos. This is when Stamati will begin to reel in his trap and wait to see what he has caught.
“Re Demetri,” Stamatis says, turning the wheel slightly, “pigene na to piasis para kalo pedaki mou.”
The captain asks me to go pick up the buoy. An honor. He is asking me for assistance, someone who is simply learning in the presence of a master. Stamatis could do all this with one hand covering his eyes and the other flicking worry beads over his fingers. My assistance isn’t paramount to his trip because surely he does this alone. However, he has entrusted me in carrying out a duty that affects the well-being of his family.
I’m still tempted to stay seated and write. To witness something invaluable I could never see elsewhere and fill more pages. Write this scene of him picking up the traps. Write with detail the way each fish looks, how they move, and sound. Describe the definition of Stamatis' aging yet tone muscles flexing with each pull of the trap. How his blue shirt matches the water he’s pulling fish out of. How the mechanized pulley reeling in the trap sounds alongside the rest of the emptiness we are surrounded by.
Instead, I leave the next page blank. I close my notebook, stand, walk to the front of the boat, and reach for the buoy.