Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

This year my quest for writing tools turned to fountain pens. Or should I say return to fountain pens? I hadn’t used fountain pens since I was a kid, and I was forced to fumble with a cheap Shaeffer ink-cartridge fountain pen. The ink was blue, and all over my fingers. Using that Shaeffer pen never gave me any satisfaction. So much so, I was greatly relieved when I reached high school where Bic pens were allowed. You know those skinny, yellow pens, don’t you? The ink still got on my fingers.

Pens are of a very personal preference for writers. Unless, of course, you’re a writer who doesn’t use pens, and I’m sure you stopped reading some time ago. My friend, MBH, says his favorite pen is a year old Bic. He buys a box of ‘em, stashes them in a drawer, and cracks the box open a year later.

An element of my quest has been for a pen that inks lightly on the planet…

Myself, I have tried in my later years to stear clear of disposable pens. Difficult task as some part of a pen always seems to be disposable and in need of replacement. An element of my quest has been for a pen that inks lightly on the planet, and so I used refillable rollerballs and ball points. Finally, the nagging voice at the back of my head wondered if not all fountain pens were doomed to failure like my old scratchy Schaeffer.

I read more than once about the Jinhao, an inexpensive smooth as butter fountain pen. I found one for under $10. To my surprise, it wasn’t scratchy at all. The ink, however, would stop flowing whenever I took a writing break, and it was a lot of work to get the ink moving again. Plus the pen was huge and weighty by my small hand’s standards. Thus, the pen was, uh, hand fatiguing. Not good.

Next, I got a PaperMate fountain pen. It reminded me of my Dad, who always had a PaperMate ballpoint pen in his pocket. He gave me one once, and I cherished it because, well, my Dad gave it to me. Gifts were a rare event in my family. Especially from Dad. I suspect he pinched it from his office. Anyway, the PaperMate fountain pen was lighter than the Jinhao. Slightly scratchy on the paper, yet not intolerably so.

Someone suggested to me that vintage pens could be inexpensive, and fun to use. And so, I ended up with an Esterbrook SJ to try. The Esterbrook made the PaperMate feel like a PaperWeight. And then I had three more SJs in different colors, because Esterbrooks are like potato chips. You end up craving more than one. I spent quite a bit of time on pen sacs, renew points, restoral tools, and talking Esterbrooks. I stopped when I realized the pen had become something other than a tool for writing. Freeing myself from the Esterbrooks was a NOS Reform 1745 fountain pen.

Left to right: Jinhao 450, PaperMate, Esterbrook SJ, Reform 1745

The Reform 1745 was made in the 1980′s. Like the Jinhao, the Reform cost me $8. It wrote much more smoothly than the inexplicably addictive Esterbrooks in my possession.

The Jinhao and PaperMate fountain pens used converters in place of ink cartridges. The Esterbrook had a lever mechanism to fill the pen with ink. So far so good on my treading lightly scale. The Reform pen, however, had a feature I’d never imagined before in my fountain pen ignorant state: a piston filler. While all four of these pens allowed me to use bottled ink, the piston filler changed my life. I relaxed, and stopped thinking about pen sacs, how to get the lever up (it was always awkward for me), or taking pens apart to get at a converter. The Reform became something I used, and didn’t think about.

Until I began typing up what I’d hand-written with the Reform. It was then I noticed how much the ink skipped on the page, and left the words malformed.

There’s more… just taking a breath.