Typewriter Dreams

Mary Emerick is a monthly columnist for Cheek Teeth. She blogs at Inside the Mountain's Skin.

Hunter S Thompson shooting a typewriter. 

I know this dates me, but when I first started writing it was on a typewriter. Imagine this for a minute, if you are not old enough to remember. First there was the crank of paper being rolled into the machine, the crisp white sheet waiting for the punch of keys. You had to be careful to keep the paper in alignment or else your whole story would slant, the mark of an amateur. Then there were the inevitable errors, not as easy as hitting a delete button. Instead you hauled out a small bottle of syrupy white fluid and dabbed it on the errant word, waited for it to dry and then hoped for the best as you typed over it. Usually I never waited long enough and a telltale smear remained. I remember being delirious with excitement over a new typewriter that had a button on it that would backspace and type over a mistake.

In junior high school I took Typing I with Mr. Smith, whom we called Chicken Man behind his back because of his spindly legs. He roamed the aisles, administering the dreaded typing tests, a pencil tucked behind one ear.  Instead of passing notes (no texting back then) we industriously pounded the keys, typing being the key to success if we landed office jobs. The room resounded with the clattering of a dozen typewriters. We waited impatiently for the bell to release us from the torture. Typing was just another one of those things we had to learn to reluctantly enter the grown-up world. There wasn’t anything fun about it.

The words had finality to them once they were typed.  You couldn’t take them back. Instead, you could hold up the paper and look through it from the back side, seeing the firm black outlines of each sentence. A sheaf of paper, readied carefully for submission, was a heavy and ponderous thing. It was something to hold on to, something substantial.

Using a typewriter to write stories almost always dictated either a longhand version first or careful consideration of each word. Typing paper was expensive, saved for final thoughts. It is so easy now to erase, start over, and leap in. You can scroll back, search, cut and paste, things we could never do on a typewriter.

Naturally there was no Internet, with its endless opportunities and support. I often wonder if I had graduated with my optimistic writing degree ten years later, would I have stayed with it to make a living as a writer? It seemed nearly impossible back then. You ordered a Writer's Market and hoped for the best, but you knew that writing would always be a hobby. There were other writers out there, I knew, but the gulf between them and me was too wide to cross. I had no idea where to begin.

I wonder how many aspiring writers’ dreams began and ended with the typewriter? Mine very nearly did. It was just such a solitary pursuit that I did give up for a few years. Then with blazing speed things changed. I could look up agents and publishers online. I could even send submissions electronically. I could take tutorials on anything from turning out a good query letter to formatting a manuscript. I could visit writers’ forums. I could journal in a blog and get real comments back, just like that.

One could argue that with progress comes problems, and no doubt it is harder to stand out from the crowd now. Anyone can punch a button, anyone can start a blog. Anyone can publish their own books on e-readers. Back in the old days, your typed submission was breathlessly slid over the post office counter and it disappeared. Weeks later a letter of regret or acceptance arrived. There was always the possibility of your package becoming lost, your typing paper glued together by Florida humidity, or plain running out of white-out, thirty miles from the nearest store.

I wonder what Mr. Smith did, replaced by computers. Did he retire? I left the classroom and never looked back. Now eight-year-old use iPads. No typing class for them, no quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs. I’m like one of those old-timers sitting on the porch of the general store, telling all the young writers that they don’t know real adversity. Not until they try to type a 300-page manuscript on a typewriter, at least.

Beats, Bards, and Barbarians: It's a Group Thing

Cam Scott is Contributing Editor for Cheek Teeth. Learn more about his work here.

It is strange to think that something as personally generative and craft-oriented as writing, might require that the writer belong to a group or movement. Or that poetry, in particular, might require it. But over and over, of all the strange demands I’ve intuited as a writer and poet, the pull to group up, group out, and find community is the strangest. The truth is I don’t really like to write in a group or with a group. A crowded bus ride to work? Sure. The library? Yep. Ye old watering hole? The darker the beer and the darker the hole the better. But with a group of prompt-riffing ruffians? Eh. And I sometimes wonder which is stranger, the fact that I feel this way about writing groups, or the fact that I also feel like I can’t live without them and am a flare-wearing member, i.e. buttons of the pin-on variety, that say things like “Magical Metaphor Tour 08’,” “My Pen is My Sword,” and “Howl Like You Mean It.”

Poetry, U.S.A.

Damon McLaughlin is a poet and musician from Tucson, AZ. His chapbook Olduvai Theory won the 2011 Toad Hall Press Chapbook Contest; Exchanging Lives (Backwaters Press, 2008) is his first full-length collection. He blogs at Present Everywhere, Visible Nowhere. 

Someone actually had the nerve to say to me once “Poetry comes from a place: if you want to write poetry, go there.” This “Poet” was well-written, respected, and (more significantly) responsible for my grade, so I drove halfway across the States and back looking for “Poetry,” searching for it in the deep canyons of Utah, sacrificing my Celica for it with a deer in the Sierras, reading the deer hair stuck in my Celica’s grill for signs of a new direction. I drank forties of Mickey’s malt liquor on Mission Beach, hoping for a vision. Considering the advice of the “Poet” was metaphorical, I searched inward via Buddhist mysticism, solitude, veganism—each method as fruitless as the last. But all the while I was searching, I was writing and reading poems like my life depended on it, just as it depends on sex and breathing.

“Poetry comes from a place” sounds nice, but it’s the worst writing advice I’ve ever been given. Once past its alliterative tricks, its meretricious depth, I find it nothing less than an indictment of poetry for exclusivity, for Eldorado-like impossibility. And I mean—besides—isn’t it the journey not the destination? I’m fairly certain my prof—the “Poet”—didn’t want me to find poetry in the first place.

Bare Bones: In Praise of Bulletin Boards

Bulletin boards in Katey's studio at VCCA, Fall 2011.

Katey Schultz is Associate Editor of TRACHODON Magazine. She blogs at The Writing Life and is currently in residence at Prairie Center of the Arts. This column was originally published in Issue 4 and can be read in digital format along with 2 additional essays, 3 short stories, and 1 artist portfolio for just 99 cents using code GV78X.

One thing I enjoy most about writing is its compact nature. I can bring a notebook and pen anywhere. A single seat in a coffeehouse, a corner of a couch, or even a tight airplane seat—each of these works equally well when I’m in a generative writing mood. Even most laptops will slide into a purse nowadays, making it easy to access entire manuscripts or countless drafts no matter where I am, with just a few keystrokes.

Needless to say, the first time I attended Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as a writing fellow, I was startled when I walked into my studio: two large walls were plastered with gigantic bulletin boards. These weren’t your basic Office Max foot-wide corkboards that run a narrow strip around the room. No, these were heavy-duty, framed, painted boards as much as five tall and eight feet long. What could a writer, I wondered, possibly need so much wall space for? Over the course of my two-week stay, I posted only a few photos and quotes on the board, more for decorative purposes than anything else.

Artisan Culture: Made By Hand

Artisans at work

Ester Bloom is a columnist for Cheek Teeth. She blogs at Full of Pith and Vinegar. 

What does it mean for things to be made by hand anymore? Mike Daisey, in his now somewhat-discredited but still fascinating monologue for This American Life about visiting the factories that produce Apple products in China, raises the point that all of our high-tech electronics are made by hand these days. By lots of hands, in fact. Machines alone can't churn out the iPhones and iPads we have come to rely on with the precision we have come to expect; and besides, labor is cheap.