“There was an evening in what you said.” —Nayyirah Waheed
I first met Jason Logan a few years ago, when a mutual friend, the writer Claudia Dey, introduced me to him in a sort of Henry James way, by sending me some examples of ink he had made in his kitchen out of torched peach stones, blackened Manila clam shells, and hand-harvested kerosene.
Being a writer who still uses ink to write out, and then cross out, each early draft of a manuscript, even into this twenty-first century, I had to meet him. We sat down in his kitchen and it felt like being introduced to someone with the skills of some lost medieval craft. What he did seemed a blend of alchemy with foraging and some possibly illegal art of cooking. Whenever we met, our conversations began over a delicious homemade soup, and then, on the very same table, he would begin to show me unknown inks of great subtlety and boundless colors that he had recently concocted and invented. Inks made out of lichen, wild grapes, rusty nails, drywall dust harvested from an overpass, and, most recently, an ink derived from gunpowder. Often in that small kitchen, while soups and these other ingredients were being heated up in saucepans to make those new inks, the border between food and ink tended to be porous. In fact, at one time he did say that he always felt I was a bit careful around his soups.
—Michael Ondaatje