A Year of Curiosities
It’s been a full year since I started this blog. I published 26 essays during this period, and this one is the twenty-seventh. That’s a lot of writing for a small audience. I'm happy :)
May-August 2024 in Stationery
A retrospective of my stationery use and discoveries, May-August of 2024.
January - April 2024: Four Months in Stationery
A retrospective of my stationery use and discoveries of the first four months of 2024.
What are we looking for?
What are we looking for? I am infinitely curious about what collecting reveals about the humans we are, what makes us feel deeply the way nothing else can. For this post, I discuss some broad categories of experience that lead us to collect writing instruments.
Year in Review: What happened with my 2023 Stationery Resolutions?
I’m taking a look at the pen plan I made for 2023 — it’s time to find out what happened.
The Gathering and the Menagerie
Over the years, I have gathered quite a few animal figurines; and just as my fountain pens are the Gathering, the animal figurines are the Menagerie.
Whimsy is healing
Academia is not the only field where one is expected to perform seriousness. Whimsy gets a bad rap in quite a few industries. But my stationery habit does not make me bad at my job, and I am prepared to stick a sticker on that hill.
Pen frustration, pen magic
Our fountain pens and other stationery items are not just tools. They are artifacts, talismans against an overwhelming and cruel world. Pens can represent self-care and purpose, pens can bring delight and wonder. Pens are magic. That magic can come as a freebie gift, or in shape of a cheap, incredible, damaged antique-store pen.
How pens leave and enter the gathering
It’s easy to see how a person who spends years collecting pens ends up owning many of them - even if you only buy a few a year, the numbers begin to add up. For those of us who own under 20 pens, and yet spend time in the hobby, I’m always curious how this happens. For me personally, it’s some combination of restraint, considering exactly what pens I want to add to the gathering, and letting go of pens that do not rhyme with the collection.
The Soft Long Story
I care about story and intricacy, and the pleasure of using an older technology. Writing itself is a very old technology, but it, too, is new in the grand scheme of things.