I found a typewriter in a secondhand shop north of Seattle somewhere. It wasn't anything special—just a 60s-era Smith-Corona. I irrationally sort of wanted it, but I didn't buy it because I knew that having a typewriter was dumb, and also I was poor and it was $15. So I looked at it for a while, typed a few words, waited for my girlfriend to be done looking at every book, and went back home to the city. A couple of days later she called and said she'd be late from work; around nine, she finally showed up carrying that typewriter. She was pretty impoverished then too; it was incredibly generous of her. She said, "maybe you'll write something."

The story behind that statement is important. I've always had trouble with writing. I'm not a bad writer, but the actual sentence-by-sentence or line-by-line process of writing is agonizingly difficult and time-consuming for me. I've spent literally days writing things that should have taken an hour or two at most. Part of it is an inability to leave anything alone; I start editing as soon as I start writing, and the only time something feels "done" is when I'm satisfied that it's perfect. This only happens when I am too exhausted to tell anymore. So what my girlfriend was saying was, "maybe this will fix it so that you can write."

It kind of did. Not perfectly, but some. I can type much faster than I can write by hand, and unlike on a computer, it's impractical to edit until I've finished at least a page. It keeps my worst tendencies as a writer in check. I'm aware that it's a little ridiculous, and it makes a lot of noise, but it helps.

I wrote this poem after having the typewriter for a day or so. I had some notion from the start that it was a conceptually different way to write. Here is another one from a bit later. They aren't brilliant, but they have a directness to them.

There are, evidently, other people that feel this way about typewriters. I'm not really interested in being part of some kind of movement. This isn't about fetishistic retro-worship on my part; what is really important to me is not the typewriter as an object but the function it affords. Maher, Olson, Best, Sours, and Rutherford define technology thusly: "Technology is the knowledge that allows us to further our proficiency with and understanding of the world around us." We think that the technology of the typewriter is the knowledge of a particular way to put marks on paper, but that's really only part of it. It turns out that it's also a way to think about writing.

There is one more chapter to this story. Things get complicated, and I use another ludicrously out-dated device to compensate.