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I am rarely the jealous type of writer. Back in 1996 I was fully green when I bought Radio Times and found they were starting a website that I thought I should be working on<\/a>. A few months later, I was.<\/p>\n Apart from that, there\u2019s only been one case where I wished I\u2019d done something. Well, no, okay, you could have any limb of mine you want if I could\u2019ve written Arrival<\/a> and actually I\u2019d be out of limbs in seconds if I thought about writing I wish I\u2019d written.<\/p>\n But apart from that. A couple of years ago, the writing partners Iain Grant and Heidi Goody<\/a> became the official, legitimate and authorised writers-in-residence at \u2013 wait for this \u2013 a phone box.<\/p>\n Oh, I admired that. I still admire it. I don\u2019t plan on stopping admiring it. For it\u2019s one of those ideas that seems obvious once someone has thought of it but never before. Clever, funny, fresh, new and apparently next door to a pub. Even as I took my hat off to them, I was plotting to steal.<\/p>\n Well, steal in a writer\u2019s sense in that I did set out to become writer in residence of something equally appealingly daft.<\/p>\n I have not succeeded.<\/p>\n But from daft beginnings come serious endings.<\/p>\n For over the past couple of months I\u2019ve been Blogger in Residence at The Pen Museum in Birmingham<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now, I could\u2019ve mentioned this before. Especially as I\u2019m about to finish. And most especially because I adore the Pen Museum: when I got a chance to do this for a Museum, my first sentence was \u201cHello, can it be the Pen Museum, I\u2019m William\u201d.<\/p>\n If you can possibly go, do. Right in the heart of Birmingham\u2019s Jewellery Quarter there is this glorious place. It\u2019s where World Calligraphy Day is based, it\u2019s where poetry events and rotating exhibitions visit. But on an ordinary, damp day with nothing going on, it\u2019ll still absorb you for a couple of hours.<\/p>\n It\u2019ll possibly leave you with ink-stained hands if you have a go with the calligraphy exhibits. It\u2019ll make you want a fountain pen after you\u2019ve made a pen nib \u2013 under supervision, this stuff is really deliciously tricky to get right. <\/p>\n And I guarantee you this: you will tell people about how at the peak of pen manufacture around the late 1800s, 75% of all pens in use in the entire world were made in this small part of Birmingham. Later on, Walt Disney animation artists continually ordered pens from here so, yes, Bambi was probably sketched with a Birmingham pen.<\/p>\n I love all this stuff and I haven\u2019t even got to their typewriter collection. But I\u2019ve not written about it here before because I\u2019ve been working to figure out what in the hell I should do.<\/p>\n Because it sounded so clear. Fun but clear. Write them some blogs. Easy. You know me, I can barely shut up. And actually, yes, I\u2019ve done that: if you visit the Pen Museum website over the next year or so you\u2019ll see blogs of mine popping up at appropriate moments.<\/p>\n But this was a case where the staff and volunteers of the Pen Museum didn\u2019t really need me for that. They\u2019re already writing and blogging and tweeting. They already have events \u2013 I\u2019m an event producer and I recognised early on that there wasn\u2019t space in the schedule for me to contrive another one.<\/p>\n It turned out, though, that it was my producer head that was needed. Lots of people want to volunteer at the museum so you get a great turnover of staff and also a great variety of them. Appropriately, I didn\u2019t met a single one who couldn\u2019t write well, but of course you know that some are already blogging, others wouldn\u2019t go near Facebook if you begged them.<\/p>\n My own blogging writing became incidental \u2013\u00a0I think we just quietly agreed that I couldn\u2019t stop writing so we might as well use me \u2013 and what became important was producing a process.<\/p>\n We\u2019re still working on it but I think what we\u2019ve started will make the Pen Museum website feel as much of a place to visit by itself as the actual museum always has been. So many people visit from around the world but you know many more would want to so over time that site\u2019s blog will grow.<\/p>\n There is just something right about a Pen Museum having a vibrant blog. There\u2019s this one quite small exhibit in there, for instance, which lines up writing tools from pen through typewriter to iPad. You can use all of it and get a sense of how the past forms the present and I think that\u2019s fitting for the blog too.<\/p>\n Being Blogger in Residence at the Pen Museum isn\u2019t as gorgeously daft as being a writer in a phone box but I adore that I got the chance to do it. Thank you to Writing West Midlands<\/a> and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust<\/a>. Without them, I might have been reduced to being writer in residence of my mobile phone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am rarely the jealous type of writer. Back in 1996 I was fully green when I bought Radio Times … Continue reading