“My Magic Pen” by Jo Anne Wilson

Today writing is difficult 

Words will not come

Ideas blocked

I can feel the effort in my brain

Thoughts crash against each other

Or hit a wall and die

I doodle on my page

My pen making marks

But none turn into words

I wish for the perfect pen

One that could pull the raw beginnings of a story from my brain

Down through my arm where muscle and sinews

shape them with their strength

Blood filled veins give them warmth and feeling

Through the delicate bones of my wrist and hand

that finely sculpt them

Until they flow from the nib of my magic pen

Onto the page in beautifully crafted words

That sing of life and tell great tales. …

In the morning when the world is quiet, I sit at a small table that looks out my sliding glass windows to the river and the gardens on its bank. Most mornings start like this. It’s my sacred time.  A time in the day without demands. I share it only with other waking creatures and the slowly lightening sky. The harshness of our demanding modern world hasn’t reached me yet. Some days, I can open the door to the river and listen to its quiet flow, smell the earth, hear the rustle of leaves on the trees and listen to the birds tuning up their voices. I can sip my morning coffee and let my mind drift from sleep to quiet contemplation, a slow drifting like the river, steady and organic.

Some days are for quiet reflection only. On others, I write what my pen wants to write. My magic pen that takes the images surfacing in my mind, pulls them down through the blood, flesh and sinew of my arm and hand and like an alchemist turns them into words, small swirls, dots, lines that appear on a snowy page, gathering together to form sentences. 

Some days there’s a torrent of words spilling from my pen. They help me untangle small kinks that have formed in my thinking, straightening out ideas so I can move more easily through the world, find words to tell my stories. 

Other days, there’s a mere trickle. The whiteness of the page is barely broken by black markings that seemingly have no meaning. My pen is not so magic then – my brain filled with knots, not kinks, that stick in my head and grow ever bigger, a block to answers, a dam to creativity. Knots too big to make the journey through arm and hand. Complex questions I seek answers to as I see a world I understand less and less. That is happening today.

I take the few words that appear this morning and I try to use them as picks to push into the knots in my head and loosen them, or as blades to cut the stubborn threads of these knotted images, cut them down to size.  I want the flow, but the weak words that appeared today do nothing. No answers to troubling questions today, no dams breached.

My wizard pen has failed me and I must face the ever encroaching, demanding day as I am right this moment, knotty brain and all. Or have I failed my pen? Been afraid to delve deeper, face troubling truths and persevere in the search for answers? Is it me that hasn’t cut those knots down to size? Tomorrow morning, I’ll return to my table, with faith in my pen, in my sacred quiet time, in my determination to dissolve the knots, trusting that the words will flow again helping me find answers, so I can sing of life and tell great tales. 

***

Jo Anne Wilson was Director of Marketing for Tourism for three years in the early 1990s, working for the Government of The Northwest Territories (at the time, Nunavut had not been established as a separate territory). She and her staff promoted tourism to the NWT throughout North America, Europe and Japan and assisted local tourism businesses with their marketing. She is now a retired college professor who enjoys theatre, art exhibits, travel and writing. 

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