Two thousand years ago
ink was crafted from
gall nuts
and crystals
of gum arabic
ground to powder
stirred into water
with iron oxide powder.
Ink that bound words to paper
so they clung there for millennia,
tangled in the fibres,
still legible.
Today, I ground and stirred and bottled;
now I wonder,
do I have words worth preserving
for millennia?
.
.
Today I did a workshop with Ted Bishop at the Word on the Lake Writers’ Conference. His book The Social Life of Ink was nominated for the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. It was very cool to make the ink, and especially to write with it. I dipped the pen, wrote, and then watched as the pale brown words turned black as the ink oxidized. So cool. Here are Ted and I. He’s holding a fountain pen, of course. 🙂
Shawn L. Bird 
Loved this.
Thanks, Melissa! It was a very cool experience.
Well, I Like what you did with your ink. Thought I’d tell you today, since I won’t be around millennia hence.
lol. Thanks, Melody.
This recipe will last for millennia, if nothing else does. 🙂
It was used to write the Dead Sea Scrolls and the first Koran apparently. It binds chemically with the paper/vellum/leather, Ted said, which is what makes it last so long.
Please don’t post any more pictures of yourself, you are far too beautiful for these mere mortal eyes to endure.
Love the words, you sure do have words that ought to endure.
A friend of mine made an ink from walnut husks. it’s amazing how these different inks handle. The same, but different. Like when a novice woodworker first turns away from pine, to riven oak or cherry…
Oh Eric, you are a flatterer, aren’t you?
One of the participants at the workshop brought some black walnut ink she’d made, and wrote on the same page we signed with it identified as such. It was quite a different colour, though still very dark.
Ted was intrigued with our ink, though, saying it too was different from others. Apparently even the same recipe yields slightly different results each time.
https://erbiage.wordpress.com/2016/05/24/bones-of-words/ wrote this while thinking about inks…
Thanks for sharing, Eric!
Can you believe that in this day and age people have the audacity to call my nuts gall!
lol
This is just too cool!
It really was!
[…] this was my inspiration for this […]
…then you make the paper and the kids run round outside trying to find pigeon feathers to sharpen and do it just like Shakespeare did miss.. One gave up and shoved a biro refill down the shaft instead…the trend was apparently not good for H&S reasons…
Ha. Part of Ted’s book looks at the Biro. He had some adventures chasing down the story of its inventor. 🙂
(We’d probably find it easier around here to find some Canada Goose feathers)