Love Letter #76 to my life: Typewriter Interviews
Creativity in Action: Austin Kleon hops over an impossible interview
I love creativity and am humbled by the thimble-full that seems to have drifted my way since I never expected it and never heard the word applied to me as I was growing up. It seems like one of its gifts has been to acutely recognize it when I see it spilling out of others …such as Austin Kleon for example.
Typewriter Interviews?
Kleon tickles me with his creative feathers which often makes me sneeze curiosity. Like his typewriter interviews … what, pray tell, are typewriter interviews? Sometimes you can’t not sneeze so I’ve spent a pie-sized slice of the rest of my life scrambling down his typewriter interviews rabbit hole.
Some of us might still have a Luddite friend who refuses to bow to email, text, social media or any other non analog fancies. Communicating with these disconnected fries is a challenge … I actually had to dig up a stamp this week for one of those delightful, digital holdouts. Kleon, though, took this barrier in stride and just hopped over it.
Pondering the poet Mary Ruefle and her response to the pandemic, he wanted to interview her but knew that she didn’t do Zoom interviews or use a computer. He explains his leap here:
“I typed a bunch of questions on individual pieces of yellow paper and mailed them to her home in Bennington, Vermont. She typed her answers underneath and mailed them back to me.”
His first question touched on something I’ve been thinking about for some time … how to create a “family tree of teachers” (what I’ve been calling an Influence Map) so here’s what that part of his interview looked like:
Question: does this typed Q&A feel different than if it had been an email conversations?
Also, don’t miss what Ruefle learned during the pandemic. Also, what he says about his wife’s “aphantasia” made me laugh. I’ve just recently self-diagnosed myself with this condition which I had never heard of, but now it’s everywhere. And, if you think of a thesaurus as just a place to find synonyms (as I did), check out this post.
Kleon is very generous with sharing his finds so here’s the link he shares to Tom Phillips’ family tree. I’m still chewing on the nuggets of that page but particularly liked (and added to my quote collection) this thought:
“The thing about the masters is they can’t really refuse you as a student.
They leave their lesson plans in their work.” — Austin Kleon
While I was in this typewriter rabbit hole, another oddity popped up … James Cook, typewriter artist.
James tells his story in this video.
BTW, one of my earliest prized possessions was an IBM Selectric (with its many font balls) that weighed 37 pounds.
And all of this reminded me of a find in Reno. An old typewriter abandoned on the banks of the Truckee River in a homeless camp. Was the masterpiece completed?
Can you keep this odd typewriter-stories thing going?
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I read and I sat and thought about what I read, trying to come up with a good comment and failed, so what I will say is a typed conversation can relay not just information but a person's emotions while typing and I don't know how that is but I often feel like I can feel the writers emotions while I am readying what they wrote.
I read and I sat and thought about what I read, trying to come up with a good comment and failed, so what I will say is a typed conversation can relay not just information but a person's emotions while typing and I don't know how that is but I often feel like I can feel the writers emotions while I am readying what they wrote.