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Street Poetry at the Arkansas Literary Festival

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Despite the spitting rain, the Arkansas Literary Festival was in full swing today at the River Market in Little Rock, and the Great Bear Writing Project was there. We manned (womanned) a booth under the tents to greet visiting teachers from all over and to spread the National Writing Project gospel. It’s our site’s tenth anniversary, so we had cake and giveaway drawings and books. Oh my.

More importantly, we had a typewriter and two reams of manifold paper. Anyone with a hankering to make poetry could sashay by, type a bit, and leave with a finished bit of writing. We strung a little clothesline and hung each poet’s copy with a few clothespins. The storm neared, the winded whipped, and the poetry flowed.

Even poet and fractal artist Terry Wright took a break from hawking copies of The Exquisite Corpse to slam out a poem. It’s been a while since he’s composed on a machine, but I think he awakened the hunger for an old manual machine. Terry says he used to be an Underwood man, so I’ll dig under the bed and find one he can use.

The storm we expected at noon failed to materialize, and bought the street poets a couple of hours. Who were our best customers? Young kids and college students. They couldn’t keep their hands off the Royal. There’s just something about poetry on a typewriter – no laptop can replicate the aesthetic.

My favorite poet of the day was a fifth grader who, bless her heart, went into a semi-zen state while typing her poem. There’s nothing quite like watching the birth of a writer. When her moment was done, she whipped the paper out and asked to read aloud to all of us.
These are the moments writing teachers live for. The child read triumphantly and had us all in the palm of her hand. After our ovation, she watched us pin one of the copies to the clothesline, hanging on to the original like a sacred object. Her eyes went back and forth from the poem in her hand to the clothes pinned poem flapping in the pre-storm winds. If she forgets that moment it won’t matter, because we’ll never forget.

A couple of hours and a celebratory sheet cake later, the bottom fell out of the sky there at the River Market. Every author and book seller under the tents scrambled to save copies from the downpour and themselves from the lightning. The Great Bear Writing Project loaded up in a hurry because down here, we don’t fool around with the weather and second-guess a storm.
Besides, everyone knows typewriters and water are a bad combination.

Speaking of Fabulous Journals…

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Nearly done! from UPPERCASE gallery on Vimeo.

Journals are popping out everywhere. Strikethru is taking submissions for a new retrotech journal that should be required reading for anyone who even wishes they owned an old typewriter. Visit and sign up to submit immediately – you’ll want to be a part of this project.

By Tuesday, the Vortex Magazine of Literature and Art will release its 200-page, full color glory on every undergraduate at the University of Central Arkansas. As the faculty adviser to the publication I have to say this is the most stunning issue ever, so get ready for the bragging. This staff headed by editor Abby Wolf is going to redefine undergraduate literary magazines. And more.

The GORGEOUS magazine in the video should be ready to send almost any day now. I’ll be watching my mailbox and tapping my good foot in anticipation, because UPPERCASE looks like a visual vacation, dessert, and sweet dream all rolled into one. Here’s the description:

We’re inquisitive: learning from other artists, illustrators, designers,
photographers, filmmakers and musicians, whether they’re upstarts or icons,
famous or shy, verbal or visual.

We’re inspired: enchanted by great ideas and strange inventions; by colour and pattern; things fancy and frugal; the charm of vintage in a modern life; the ridiculous and the sublime.

We’re adventurous: traveling to destinations both real and imagined, peeking into creative spaces and discovering magnificent people and memorable places.

We’re eclectic: curating souvenirs, collecting treasures and celebrating the extraordinary in the everyday.

We’re playful: delighting in visual amusements, intelligent distraction, entertaining wordplay and sweet indulgences.

We’re UPPERCASE: a magazine for the creative and curious!

Color me completely charmed. How can any of you resist?

If there’s a journal or magazine out there that no one should do without, please let us know. This is the Season of Fresh Publications – better than Christmas, twice as good as Thanksgiving, and you don’t have to eat mysterious casseroles.

The Iron Whim: Recuperative Reading

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A very good friend gifted me this afternoon with a little something to read while I recover from knee surgery this weekend. Because it’s likely I’ll be ridiculous from pain meds, I’ve already peeked a bit inside The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriters by Darren Wershler-Henry.

I promised myself I’d only read the first chapter or so and save the rest for later, but so much for that. How could I help it? The intro is a haunted machine and hashish-motivated writing jag. Chapter 1 is the infamous Royal Road Test. I finally put the thing down after Chapter 2’s nostalgia as religion – pages dedicated to those crazy folks who haunt Ebay (can you imagine?) to snag a bit of mechanical history.

I’m stopping right here. I swear. Not another page until after Friday’s surgery.

Thanks, Steph!

Moleskine and Etsy and the Seven Stages of Cahier Grief

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I’ve been a little put out ever since Moleskine discontinued production of my beloved black, extra large, ruled cahiers. A friend who went to the AWP conference gifted me with Moleskine’s 2009 catalog and – adding insult to injury – now there’s a glorious, deep red XL cahier – in blank and gridded paper only. No! Moleskine also added an 8×11 hardbound ruled “folio” notebook, but I can’t find this one online anywhere. There’s the barest mention of it here, but no picture or price.

I need to make peace with this loss. There’s a reason people make fun of Moleskine addicts. There are seven stages of grief, you know, and I’m floating somewhere between #4 and #5. It’s not a pretty place.

So off to Etsy. I figure if Big Business isn’t interested in me, I can send my couch-cushion change to someone who cares. I love supporting artists and they love making art. It’s a match made in heaven.

There are so many gorgeous choices. It’s taking me too long to figure out how to link the pictures to each site, so I’ve included the links below each one. (A little help, techies?)

Neilsonhandmade has a stunning How to Win Boys “upcycled” book. I may need to rob more than just my couch-cushions to get it, but it’s a contender. The Trouble book is another, but there just aren’t enough couches to bankroll that one. When I win the lottery, this will be one of my first stops.

Allibell has handmade journals are a little closer to my price range. Thirty pages of mulberry paper and all that vintage ephemera for only $9.00.

Ah, Afiori. This jewel is only 4″x6″, but it has a hundred pages (x2 of you write on both sides) of mixed papers. The cover is one of Afiori’s prints on frosted plastic, so it doesn’t have to be so preciously guarded against coffee spills and such. Only $12. Lovely.

There are literally hundreds more upcycled, recycled, hand sewn, vintage, breathtaking journals on Etsy. I even found quite a few artistically enhanced Moleskines there. Sadly, none of them are extra large, ruled cahiers. When I’ve moved ahead a bit in the grieving process, I’ll give them more attention. Right now it hurts too much.

Recession-Fabulous Free Typewriter Fonts

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I’ve got quite a few (fairly) harmless addictions. Collecting old manual typewriters, for example, will not land me a stint in some lock-down rehab. I don’t think. I guess dropping a Hermes 3000 on my foot might buy a little time in the ER, although I’m sure I’d be more worried about the typewriter than the foot. At any rate, it’s a harmless addiction as long as I don’t need government bailout money to keep me in fresh ribbon.

One of my other addictions is collecting computer fonts. It’s true. I have thousands and can justify every last one because I’m the faculty adviser for an undergrad literary magazine. The magazine requires layout and layout requires nifty fonts now and then. I might as well share a few fabulous free font sites, because at this point it’s starting to feel like hoarding.

You know, like those people who turn their houses into a maze of newspaper stacks and olive jars. If you opened up my hard drive, I’m afraid that’s what it would look like.

Urban Fonts has a nice collection of the usual typewriter font suspects, as well as some of the more down-and-dirty broken fonts. Some of the classics are Adler, Love Letter, Metalic Avacodo (that’s the spelling), Royal Pain, Traveling Typewriter (cleaner than the others), and Uncle Typewriter. There’s a nice one called My Old Remington that’s a good blend of the clean and dirty – much like typing with a fresh ribbon on a machine that hasn’t been cleaned in, say, sixty years.

Font Parade is a great site for some of the standards Urban Fonts carries, with a few more. Take a look at Dislexi, Fox Script, Hammer Keys (a favorite right now), Junko’s Typewriter, Maszyna, and Type-Ra. Those of you who have special love for that blocky, sci-fi look some Hermes 3000s have can download Typewriter a6o2. Not my thing, really, but it might be yours.

One of my favorite font sites right now is Misprinted Type. Some of these are typewriter fonts and some are just plain art, but you simply must stop by and take a look at the free offerings as well as the buy-only fonts. The picture above is Dirty Ego, but you should also check out Astonished, Print Error, and Horse Puke. That’s right, Horse Puke.

Just because you may or may not have a functioning manual typewriter is no reason not to have typewriter font-love. God knows you miss out on the overall aesthetic clank and zing delight of the old beauties, but you can be forgiven. The real thing can be pricey. During WWII my grandmother painted eyebrow pencil lines down the backs of her legs to mimic stockings. It’s the same principle.

By the time this recession is over, I figure jewelry maker key choppers will have “recycled” too many old typewriters. Collecting whole machines will be iffy at best. It’s good to have the fonts as a backup should – God forbid – we have to typecast in eyebrow pencil.

Procrastination and the Keyboarding Arts

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Christmas break is a lazy time and its getting lazier. My momentum is shot and in no time at all I’ll have to reawaken the working beast and throw myself into the post-holiday pace – which looks an awful lot like my pre-holiday pace. I love the lolling and moseying, though, so I’m not going to think about the other just yet.

I’m finding all sorts of nothing in particular to do – mainly time-wasting Ebay grazing – but I’ve definitely not resorted to skimming hours making typewriter art. I might, you know, but not just yet. It’s not that there’s nothing for me to do, I’ve just decided to put it all off until Monday. Procrastination has to be an all or nothing project, really. Either you put things off entirely or you dive in athletically and flail around. At least I’ve set a deadline.

This morning I decided to cruise some sites that didn’t require me to pay with Paypal, and found a nice piece about writing and old typewriters and a little about procrastination on The Munchkin Wrangler’s blog. Nice Olympia, as well.

Word Counts and Plot Twists and Whiners…oh my

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I put this graph in because it simultaneously irritates and encourages me. I can be proud of my NaNoWriMo word count, and at the same time completely aware that I’m a tad behind.

All word count aside, writing this novel at breakneck speed has been a fascinating writing experience. There are Those Who Scoff at all these furiously typing novelists as rank amateurs who have no right to call themselves anything but typists. As a creative writing professor I have very little to say to such people, because I know their pathology. When you’ve spent your life kneeling before the Gatekeepers of Academia and kissing their asses for a lousy publication in some university literary mag no one’s ever heard of, it can make you a little cranky. Fine.

I’m not including links to such unhappy writers for a couple of reasons. First, because they want us to. Throwing an elitist and edgy bomb out into the the blogosphere and then turning off the comments forces others to respond by writing on their own blogs and LINKING. It’s a nice way to manipulate the old Technorati count and fluff one’s overinflated ego. Second, these writers clearly haven’t been reading contemporary creative writing pedagogy. Separating the acts of invention and revision is standard operating procedure. And academia has been throwing cold water on the fiery hoops of The Graduate Workshop Model for years now. When Those Who Scoff do a little more research and turn their comments back on, I might consider linking. The blogosphere is not a fiefdom. If the serfs don’t want to fill your larder, they don’t have to.

In the interim, I’m having a very good time with this National Novel Writing Month business and so are my students. We are all learning a lot about how the creative process works under the stress of meeting word count deadlines and the pure magic of letting the story BE. I’m even looking forward to rewriting this bad-boy in December when there’s “world enough and time.”

I began with a character and nothing else. The story twists and blooms right in front of me every time I sit down to write. My students are blooming as well. They’re writing Shitty First Drafts. They’re woefully behind or stunningly ahead of everyone else. They’re sitting down every single day with the words.

They don’t have to write the Next Great American Novel. The NaNo provides writing community so there’s no need for the tortured-novelist-in-a-garret scenario. That’s just a myth anyway. I’m proud of their fortitude and epiphanies and what they’re learning about the work and craft of noveling. The real lessons in craft, of course, always come in rewrite anyway.

So those of you out there frantically slamming out your novels, keep writing. Those of you out there scoffing, keep on telling those damned kids to get out of your yard, I guess. I won’t be reading your crankiness or linking up so others can, but it’s a free blogosphere and you have every right to say what you want. Knock yourselves out.