The Pen II Club

Or, how I became a Real Writer.

By Zach Hively

I’ve struggled for years with figuring out when, exactly, I can call myself a writer.

Sure, I’ve been published, sometimes in actual publications, and I have written actual books, which have been enthusiastically accepted by more than one Little Free Library. I was once introduced at a social function as a writer.

My father worries about my career choices.

But these things seldom feel like Enough. Even writing doesn’t feel like Enough.
There’s something more to earning the title of Writer. Something the French call je ne sais quoi and I call “elbow patches.”

I tried those. I did! I have a jacket—a tweed one, even!—with elbow patches. But sometimes wearing tweed is just too hot. And I have to take the jacket to the dry cleaner. That’s just more busy work that detracts from the real work of trying to appear like an official writer.

The ideas were running out. I’ve set myself up in coffee shops so people can witness me in the act of writing. I’ve used a typewriter for the audibility factor. I’ve gone to grad school. Nothing stuck.

But I finally hit on what I needed, what had always been missing from my repertoire, when I was gifted my very first fountain pen.

Oh, this pen is magic! You really feel like a writer when you get ink on your fingers! I clip this pen to my breast pocket every chance I get so everyone can understand my specific flavor of pretension. And I now have an inkwell on my desk. I don’t write at my desk. It’s more of a paper storage unit. But I have these physical objects now that make it look like inspiration could strike at any moment. Or, that ink could spill out of this pen and ruin a perfectly serviceable shirt.

But who cares! I’m a writer now! I’m writing this very piece with one of my fountain pens and only twice so far have I lost the cap in the couch cushions!
That’s right: I said one of my fountain pens, plural.

The first one came from a dear friend and fellow writer—let’s call her Jona because that is her name. She is very good at making me realize that I didn’t even think to get her a gift.

This iridescent teal pen came from her in a little gray pen-box, so I therefore estimate it to be worth in the ballpark of ten thousand U.S. dollars. It is a Pelican. I generally despise identifying with brand names, but the names of these fountain pen companies evoke for me a time when all a man had to do to become a writer was to publish in the New Yorker and all a woman had to do was pretend to be a man.

So I, as a writer, am now writing with a Pelican. Please respect me accordingly.
Jona showed me how to draw ink up from the well through the nib in my Pelican, thus filling both my pen and a significant void in my public school education. She then welcomed me to the Pen Club, a club that also includes another mutual dear friend and mentor, a man we will simply call B because he is ours and we’d rather not share him.

B and I had a writers’ breakfast—another thing we writers do—and I, of course, made certain to take notes with my Pelican where he could see it and admire it. Which he did! So much so, in fact, that after breakfast he took me to his writer’s den and his own fountain pen collection, amassed over decades of being, quite frankly, too good for the likes of the New Yorker.

I crumpled into an armchair in awe. For a newly minted writer, this—this assembly of pens was akin to Wonka’s chocolate factory, or Smaug’s bed of gold in the Lonely Mountain, or any other literary reference you care to make for something you cherished your whole entire life once you learned about it for the first time.

“Would you like to have one?” B asked me.

Of course, I had to deflect my eagerness and enthusiasm with a muted “Yes! Yes! Holy inkwell of eternal glory, yes!” But in the end, B wore me down, and he graced my writerliness with an elegant blue Esterbrook with a silver nib and this pump-action ink-filling lever in the shaft.

​He will hardly miss it, one pen among untold thousands. But I—I am now an Esterbrook man, seeing as the Pelican ran out of ink two paragraphs ago.
And now I am temporarily a Bic man again, seeing as the Esterbrook appears to have popped a leak in the previous sentence. Doesn’t bother me! I probably didn’t screw the nib on tightly enough or some such simple thing. What do you expect? I’m new to being a writer.

Speaking of which, I must go. I have to be seen in public before washing this fresh ink spill off my fingers.