When I was a girl, I discovered an impossibly slender, mother-of-pearl fountain pen among my grandmother’s treasured belonging in an enormous cedar chest.

“That was my mother’s writing instrument,” she told me, her voice ringing with reverence.

This curious nineteenth-century artifact intrigued me—the writer had to dip it in real ink, for Pete’s sake! Wide-eyed, I gazed at the letters my great-grandmother had written with this pen; they were pure art, with lacy handwriting curling across still-perfumed pages. As I held them in my nine-year-old hands, the crinkly paper became a magical time machine—joyful recollections, thoughtful advice, and heartfelt love swirled from the page and took root in my mind.

If I could only write, too, I thought, yearning to reach across the boundaries of time and unleash stories to entertain and inspire. This idea was enchanting, and to this day, it has never left me.

“Let me tell you a story,” I often say aloud, smoothing my fingers over the ancient mother-of-pearl pen in my drawer before I fire up my laptop. Then, I slide into a world of intrigue and calamity, of beauty and triumph, a world where, despite tragedy, despite the odds, a soul can somehow make sense of it all.

So come with me now, my friend, and let me tell you a story…

http://www.janmoran.com/

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