I grew up in Vietnam, where writing by hand was simply part of everyday life. From first grade until I graduated from college, I wrote with pen on paper every day. Friends often complimented my handwriting, and for several years my notebooks were selected for Vở Sạch Chữ Đẹp — a school tradition recognizing beautiful handwriting and carefully kept notebooks.
I knew I had good handwriting.
Still, there was something about it that never completely satisfied me. I couldn’t have explained what was missing. I only knew that I was looking for something more.
After college, I worked for several years before moving to the United States. Somewhere along the way, my husband gave me a calligraphy set. I began practicing and enjoying the movement of the pen, but I still hadn’t found what I had been searching for.
Then, in 2016, I attended the DC Pen Show.
I signed up for an Italic workshop taught by Deborah Basel. During the class, she mentioned Michael R. Sull’s book on American Cursive Handwriting (ACH) and told us about a program being held later that year in Denver. Marie Hornback had developed an American Cursive Handwriting curriculum under Michael’s supervision, and applicants had to submit samples of their handwriting to be accepted into the instructor certification course.
I submitted mine.
I was accepted.
Then I got Michael’s book and began to practice.
Something happened.
American Cursive Handwriting made sense to me — the slant, the shapes of the letters, the connections, the rhythm. It felt natural in a way I had never experienced before. I practiced every day — three hours, four hours, sometimes five. No matter how long I practiced, it never seemed like enough. I wanted to devour the entire book.
Looking back, I think that was the moment I found what I had been searching for.
In October 2016, I traveled to the Denver Pen Show for a three-day American Cursive Handwriting instructor certification course.
That was the first time I met Michael R. Sull.
When I saw him, my heart pounded.
There was something about the way Michael talked about handwriting, and something almost mesmerizing about watching him write. I could easily have spent hours simply sitting there, watching his pen move across the paper.
But I wasn’t only watching his hand.
When Michael taught, his love of penmanship was impossible to miss. His eyes sparkled when he spoke about his mentor, Master Penman Paul H. O’Hara; about Lake Erie; about Spencerian and the history of America’s Golden Age of Penmanship.
At the end of those three days, I earned my certification to teach American Cursive Handwriting.
I went home and began teaching.
In 2017, I started teaching an ACH after-school program at an elementary school. I loved watching children discover that handwriting could be more than something they were required to do for school. It could be something they enjoyed.
• Denver, Colorado — October 7, 2016.
Over the years, I would see Michael again and again at pen shows.
At the Dallas Pen Show in September 2017, I couldn’t wait to tell him some news. Earlier that year, I had entered the World Handwriting Contest and received second place in the Adults: Cursive Division.
I was so excited to show him my entry. My heart was pounding, and my hands were shaking.
Michael looked at it, then told me that I had first place in his heart.
Then he took the “Handwriting Police” cap from his own head and put it on mine.
It was such a Michael thing to do — encouraging me, but always with a little humor.
• World Handwriting Contest.
• 2017 Ohio Pen Show
One of my first students was a shy, charming young girl named Charlotte Bell Tierney.
She began taking my class in 2017, shortly after I received my ACH instructor certificate, and she returned whenever I offered the class at her school. Sometimes, when I wasn’t able to offer one, her mother would text me to ask when I might teach again because Charlotte missed my class.
In 2020, Charlotte submitted her handwriting to the World Handwriting Contest and received second place in the Preteen Cursive Division.
I was so proud of her.
• Shared with Charlotte and her mother’s permission
Perhaps without realizing it then, I was beginning to understand something Michael had been teaching me all along: what we learn doesn’t end with us. We pass it on.
Two months later, I saw Michael again at the 2017 Ohio Pen Show.
That time, my daughter was with me. She sat beside Michael as he wrote her name.
Watching the two of them together remains one of my favorite memories. Michael had a wonderful way of making handwriting feel important without making it feel serious. He could sit at a pen show surrounded by noise and people, pick up a pen, and suddenly the small piece of paper in front of him seemed to become the center of the room.
Learning Beyond the Letters
Over the years, whenever I attended a pen show where Michael was teaching, I often found myself back in his classes.
Sometimes I had already taken the class before.
That didn’t matter to me.
There was always something else to learn — not necessarily another letter or another technique, but something in the way Michael worked, the way he explained things, or the way he looked at a piece of writing.
Eventually, after seeing me in his classes so many times, Michael would tell me, “You don’t have to be here. You could be up here teaching.”
But I wanted to be there.
I loved watching him teach almost as much as I loved watching him write.
When I brought Michael my work, most of the time I already knew where something wasn’t quite right. He never needed to make a big criticism of it. He would look at the piece and simply say:
“I would do this…”
Then he would take the pen and show me.
Those small moments taught me a great deal. Michael wasn’t teaching me simply how to make beautiful letters. He was teaching me how to see.
— one demonstration, one detail at a time.
• IAMPETH Convention, Omaha, Nebraska, 2021
Learning to See
Flourishing was where some of those lessons became especially clear.
I loved flourishing. Sometimes, perhaps, a little too much.
I could become so absorbed in adding another curve, another loop, another movement, that Michael would have to remind me when enough was enough.
But what he taught me was not simply how to make a beautiful flourish. He taught me to see where the pen was going before it got there.
I didn’t have the whole picture planned in my head. I planned as I went. But before my pen landed on a space, I could see a little ahead — perhaps an inch — where the line might travel next.
See where you are going before your pen touches the paper.
That became part of the way I worked.
The flourish could grow as I made it. One curve suggested another. A space on the page might invite a movement I hadn’t planned a moment before. But my pen wasn’t moving blindly. My eye was always just a little ahead of my hand.
Over time, I began to understand that this was part of what Michael was teaching me: not to know everything before beginning, but to see before making the next stroke.
Those lessons accumulated quietly over the years.
I kept practicing. I kept teaching. And whenever I had the opportunity, I returned to Michael — to his classes, his demonstrations, and those small moments when a few words or a single stroke could teach me something I hadn’t seen before.
I didn’t know where all of it was leading.
I only knew that I wanted to keep learning.
Five Years Later
Five years passed between that first American Cursive Handwriting course in Denver and the day Michael certified me as a Master Penman.
Those five years were filled with practice.
A lot of practice.
I wrote for hours at a time. I studied letterforms, spacing, movement, flourishing, and composition. I taught. I made mistakes. I brought work to Michael. I watched. I listened. And then I went home and practiced some more.
I never began this journey thinking, I want to become a Master Penman.
In the beginning, I simply wanted to learn how to write the way I knew writing could look.
But sometime during those years, Michael began to see something in my work — and perhaps in me — that I had not yet completely seen myself.
In 2021, at the Ohio Pen Show, Michael R. Sull certified me as a Master Penman.
• Ohio Pen Show, 2021.
Not the End
Being certified as a Master Penman didn’t feel like the end of anything.
If anything, it felt like a new beginning.
More inquiries began to come in — more opportunities to teach, more commissioned work. At the same time, I gradually slowed down from traveling to pen shows. These days, I mostly attend the ones close enough for me to drive to.
But Michael and I kept talking.
I still sent him pieces and asked what he thought. Sometimes, I wanted his critique. Sometimes, I simply wanted to show him something new I had been working on. And sometimes, I just wanted to check on him and see how he was doing.
He would show me his work, too. Even though his health keeps him from traveling to pen shows, he continues to make his handcrafted penholders and share his work through his Etsy shop.
In some ways, very little had changed. I was a Master Penman, but I was still learning.
Then one day, Michael contacted me and asked if he could include one of my pieces in his new book, Sull’s Manual of Advanced Penmanship.
I was deeply honored.
This was the man whose book I had once wanted to devour. The man whose hand I could have watched move across a piece of paper for hours.
And now, one of my pieces was going to be in his book.
• Sull’s Manual of Advanced Penmanship, p. 222.
When I received my copy, Michael had written something inside that moved me deeply.
“My dear and accomplished student and friend.”
Perhaps those words tell the story better than I can.
Finding My Way Back
For over a year, I had slowly lost some of my interest in pens and penmanship.
I wasn’t going to many pen shows anymore. Without those shows, I wasn’t surrounded by the people, conversations, and energy that had been such a large part of this journey. Somewhere along the way, I simply slowed down.
I still wrote. Penmanship never completely left my life. But something was different.
Then, almost unexpectedly, I decided to work on my website.
At first, I thought I was simply building a place for my work. Instead, it helped me look back.
I went through old photographs. I found pieces I had almost forgotten. I remembered the classes I had taught, the people I had met, and the many hours I had spent sitting at a desk with a pen in my hand.
And slowly, I began to fall in love with writing again.
But this time, it felt a little different.
For years, much of what I made would appear briefly on social media and then disappear beneath whatever came next. Now I had a place of my own — a place where I could gather my work, tell the stories behind it, and share the people and experiences that had shaped me.
Around that time, I had also been trying to reach Michael.
I called several times. I sent emails. When I didn’t hear back from him, I began to worry.
Then one day, he returned my call.
Hearing his voice brought more relief than I expected.
We talked as we always had — about writing, about what we had been doing, about the events that had happened since we last spoke.
And somewhere in that conversation, something in me seemed to settle back into place.
I had spent the past weeks looking backward while building this website — at old photographs, old pieces, old memories. Then suddenly, there was Michael’s voice on the other end of the phone, connecting all of those years to the present.
It reminded me that this part of my life wasn’t over.
I had simply stepped away from it for a while.
And perhaps I was ready to come back.
That was when I knew I wanted to write about him.
This year marks ten years since I first met Michael.
I could have waited for the perfect anniversary, the perfect occasion, or the perfect words.
But some things are better said while we still have the chance to say them.
I don’t want to wait another ten years.
What Remains
There are things a teacher shows you that you practice until you no longer have to think about them. A letterform. A movement. The way the pen is held.
And then there are things that become part of the way you see.
Michael taught me both.
When I sit down with a piece of paper now, I still look at the words. I look at the space around them. And when the pen begins to move, my eyes go just a little ahead of my hand.
Sometimes, perhaps only an inch.
Enough to see where the next stroke might go.
Ten years after I first sat in his classroom, I understand that perhaps the most important things a teacher gives us are not the things we can point to on a page.
They are the things we carry with us.
And sometimes, after we have wandered away for a while, they are the things that show us the way back.
