My own history and a celebration of vintage typewriters.

Ok, a confession. For writing on vintage writing machines , I’ve been called impractical.

Fortunately, I am not a writer for a living. Well, I've made money as a writer. I have a few books available on Amazon, in the vein of my healing works... and a nolvel.

However, I'm not driven to practicality. I write for the sheer joy of it.

And the most joyous states of writing, for me, have been on a vintage typewriter. A 1939 Smith Corona Silent.

I was sitting out in the forest of Cazadero, where I lived in a cabin. Redwood needles kept falling into the writing machine. Pages kept blowing into the creek. I didn't care. In fact, these little 'inconveniences' made the writing more visceral... more real.

This work is alive in a box, by the way. I have not translated it to digital yet.

I found out that I was going to have a daughter, and I was just compelled, driven, to write everything about the process, everything about my life, everything.

It seems that there was something unresolved in me about my artist friend that had committed suicide some years earlier. He'd walked into the ocean. We'd attended SFAI for our MFAs in 2004 or so.

So I needed to write in a way that was very conscious and deliberate, while at the same time, allowing the rhythmic thunder of the stream-of-consciousness.

That's what this is.

Now, if you ask me who my favorite writers are, I'll tell you, and they all used a typewriter. I believe that it has to do with this unique trait of the machine. It lulls you into a semi-hypnotic state.

The redwood needles pierced into consciousness, entered the story, and I simply let them.

There was another component though... embodiment.

Most writers on little laptops were hunched over, pale, sickly. That was me, a long time ago, and I'd resolved to upgrade my DNA. And I was reminded of old Ernest Hemingway. The LIFE LIVER who also wrote. As opposed to someone like James Joyce, the writer who sort of lived, and only lived so that they'd have something to write.

This idea of living and writing secondarily, instead of vice versa, had always haunted me.

Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell are two of my favorite writers, by the way. In the sense that I could touch the pages and it would be scintillating. Ouch. Fingers burned by the sheer aliveness.

These men could stagger into a room and the room would come alive on all accounts. Both were courageous in some situations, cowardly in others. Ah, mere mortals!

Still, they accessed something of the freedom made available in the creative work. That semi autobiographical tone. The Jungian analysis of one's own life.

Later, I saw someone like Thomas Pynchon (also still writes on a manual typewriter by the way) taking this to another level, this prose stylist, however waxing cerebral again.

Where was I going with this? Ah yes. Embodiment.

Legend had it that Hemingway would put the typewriter on a bookshelf, and write standing up. Exactly. That's what I do, when I can. Write with the whole body. And that is a gift of the typewriter. You need to exert effort to type. And the faster you get, the more effort. Even focus, to keep the fingers working on the right keys, while the speed escalates, and the ideas come flooding in.

Lose focus, more errors.

So my crash course into embodiment was literally that. I'd practiced Zen Buddhism, and loved it's purity. No 'somatic' nonsense. Just the crystal clarity of the mental work.

Ok, what happens when you live entirely in your head for a decade? Crash course reminder to enter the body. Can come through disease or a cataclysm or a trauma. Sometimes a broken heart, and I mean a shattered heart, and here I mean, a brayed-into-powder heart.

For me, it was a broken yeart, yeah, and on top of a broken neck.

So as I healed that, I learned everything I could about embodiment, even training in Cranial Sacral, all kinds of somatic work (flowhealingarts.org) and spent 10 years in apprenticeship with this process, with life, with breaks. To the point tht I could walk into a room with someone, and they would walk out healed, if not in one three hour session, in one of the next ones.

Vipassana helped that as well. And fasting. And Gurdjieff.

So, I'd been wrong. Wrong in writing. Wrong in thinking. Wrong in prayer.

In retrospect, when I went back to writing, I saw that I needed some way to write embodied.

You can imagine Hemingway coming off of a Safari, and then sitting at a typewriter, trying to constrain his body into this unnatural position (I don't think that the true ergonomic keyboard has been designed, though they were closer years ago, think 1912 Hammond round keyboard and the Lenovo keyboards from the 1990's).

No. I believe that can't capture the killing of a massive beast (or whatever your heresy) in that contained way. One needs to expand.

So a typewriter is a embodied writing tool. At least, a manual is. And this is why, in my opinion, perhaps, the best writing in history comes out of this certain era, the golden age of typwwriters. With an electric, for instance, you come out of the embodied piece, and less and less effort are needed.

My breakthrough was as an abstract painter in graduate school. I was dragging nearly dry pigment across the sprawling ache of unprimed linen, and it was excruciatingly slow. And some professors were saying, genius, you've slowed down painting again after Frank Stella nearly killed it. And others were saying, speed up man, you're wasting your life, where's your American Pragmatism).

Where would I rather be, I thought? What would I rather be doing? They WANT you to relegate your art to commodity status: to crank it out, to hang a price tag on it, to sell it. Etc.

No. For now, I am a writer for the sheer joy of it, and I write on typewriters for the sheer joy of it.

And sometimes I rediscover an old page, coffee stained, tattered, and revel in it. It's so much more exultant than rediscovering an old digital file. Oh, yeah. Heh. There it is. I vaguely recall that.

So that was a little rant.

In graduate school, I started using a typewriter, just for little ideas and such, and in terrible scripts (before I had the vaguest inkling of story arc). I just knew I needed to be off of a screen, and writing at the same time. I don't know how a typewriter came into the picture. I just was assailed with the sudden and desperate need for one.

I got this 1939 Silent, and I thought it was great, and then I got a host of other ones, at various price points, just to make sure that one was useable. An Olympia SM9, for instance.

Really, in retrospect, I would have just gotten the one, and written until my fingers fell off.

We're consumers. Trained from birth. So even with typewriters, we just keep buying them. I mean, a little curiosity is ok. However, just get one and keep honing your craft. You'll fuse with the machine over time.

If you keep switching machines, you'll never get fast. You'll keep having to think about where the speical keys are. The backspace moves around. Etc. Get those until they're automatic. Until you can almost smell a burning from the friction, you're so fast.

Sometimes, in consulting, and work with healing, I help people write books. Honest, searing accounts. Plumbing the depths of the soul.

I want nothing less from you. Is there anything more?

So I guess I just sat down to say hello, and this turned out to be another celebration of the vintage writing machine.

Thank you for your ear and heart.

Write on,

Steven

PS. I also service and refurbish vintage writing machines for now. I do a lot of things. I started doing it more full time during the pandemic, as I was locked in, and the healing work paused.

Do you know, when we were pregnant with my daugther, I lugged a Groma Kolibri all over France and Spain. And I thought it was so that I could write this masterpiece. Really, I think it was this totem uthat buuilt a sort of charge in the archetype of the writing machine. Meaning, the machines would literally support my daughter, financially and spiritually, by keeping the father figure sane.