December 10, 1999

When the Pen Met the Blank Page: a Writer's Farewell to the 20th Century

By BONNIE J. MORRIS

As a writer as well as an academic (those identities are not the same), I watch the approach of the coming century with a kind of bubbling dread. For I am one of the belligerent Luddites still writing by hand with a Sheaffer fountain pen in my journal every night. That organic feel of nib on paper, ink on callused middle finger, spiral notebook flopped open on warm knees -- that intimacy of creation has been replaced, for most of my students and colleagues, with