Handmade

As a writer, I didn’t know whether to be more alarmed or amused by an article in the current issue of Dallas Child magazine.  Author Rudy Klancnik marveled that his son is still being taught to write in cursive script.  “When’s the last time you wrote a sentence in cursive?” he asked.  “Exactly how much longer cursive will be taught in our schools is anybody’s guess.  I’m thinking it’s short-lived.”  (Ironically, the contents page of the magazine features cursive writing in an illustration for another article.)

I would be less alarmed at the possible loss of cursive handwriting if public schools in my area hadn’t already stopped teaching children to print their words.  (Schools still expect young children to submit their work in writing, but the skill of print is taught in public schools at the preschool level, and public preschooling normally is only available to students from impoverished families or whose first language is not English.)  Even while I’m composing this on a keyboard, I mourn every loss of writing that is handmade.

image: Wikimedia commons

My better-read friend Elaine pointed out recently that another journal, The Paris Review, features interviews with Jonathan Franzen and Louise Erdrich.  And besides Erdrich’s widely known penchant for writing her manuscripts by hand, the Review includes an illustration of a narrative chart from Franzen’s Freedom.  He wrote the chart, yes, in cursive.  Elaine writes more now in cursive.  Not that she expects to become the next Franzen or Erdrich from writing by hand, but for the reasons Judy Reeves discussed in A Writer’s Book of Days – a return to the sensuality of writing in feeling the movement of pen against paper.  I mentioned Reeves’s book last fall, but this is a good opportunity to repeat it and recommend her website, www.judyreeveswriter.com/

I welcome computers as others previously welcomed the technology of the typewriter and printing press.  But there’s something deeply resonant about the use of hands, something embedded in our idea of our own humanity.  When a group of ancient tribes decided to record what they knew about their origins, they declared they had been made by hand.

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I hoped to post writing prompts today, but people are still shy, so I'm extending the contest for the meantime.  Hope to hear your great ideas!

So good for you it's scary

I filled out the questionnaire yesterday while waiting in the doctor's office for my checkup.  You know, that questionnaire, the list of your diseases and unhealthy personal habits.  I got to the bottom of the sheet of paper and turned it over, looking in vain for the most important of questions for a writer's health -- are you writing regularly?  Well, are you?  Do you, like me, sometimes need an incentive to write?  Or do you perhaps need something to ponder while you wait, something to distract you this Halloween season while the phlebotomist -- a sanitized modern vampire disguised as a pleasant-faced young woman in pastel blue scrubs -- draws the last drop of blood from your body?  I suggest Judy Reeves's A Writer's Book of Days, a compilation of those, yes, dreaded and scary writing prompts.

image: Wikimedia commons

I've had an aversion to prompts for years, but in Reeves's case, the only scary part is how good they are.  Writing friend Robin Y. recommended this book to me and insisted we work on one together.  Then she set her cell phone timer for fifteen minutes.  The results amazed me.  Okay, lightning doesn't strike every time, but every time there's another page and a half in my notebook.  (Reeves urges you to write by hand, on paper -- love it!)  And besides the magically evocative prompts, she offers practical advice and gossipy tidbits about famous writers and their habits.  In honor of the season, I'm quoting an excerpt suggested by her September 10 prompt -- "a list of her hungers."

"She hungered for hunger, fearing satiation above all things.  To be satisfied, to rest, was death to her.  So she pushed away lover after lover, dissecting the faults of each, picking each to the bones.  So she yielded to the urge to leave here and go there, moving on before the terrible moment of consummation.  Her penultimate hunger was for money, the money to pursue the other hungers.  And the only way to amass the money she needed, the only way that wouldn't interfere with following those other hungers, she realized, playing with the thought until its horror receded, was to kill.  To kill the selfish people standing between her and the hungers she longed for.  So that, in the end, she hungered for blood."

A Writer's Book of Days is widely available in bookstores or through links on her website, http://www.judyreeveswriter.com/  Happy Halloween!