A Burgeoning Love Affair

with my typewriter. plus, the advice I gave an aspiring 13-year-old poet

Psss…did you see last week’s post, Death is Not a Four-Letter Word? It seems to have hit something tender for many of us. Check it out and let me know you what you think.

Death is Not a Four-Letter Word

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I love the smell of an antique mall.

Old has a distinct odor—something like secondhand smoke and mildew mingled with a few centimeters of dust. And while some may be offended by this scent, it sends a direct signal to my brain that says, “Opportunity. Connection. Romance.”

And that’s exactly what I was hounding last week when I stepped into Bo-Mar Hall Antiques & Collectibles. I had been feeling blue, having spent the majority of the week sick on the couch. I was achy and bored and melancholy. I needed some retail therapy.

I’m not the type of girl to go out and buy new throw pillows. No, I get my high from finding deals in dusty places. So as I walked the narrow aisles between towers of antiquity, I moved through the relics like an archaeologist sifting the earth for secrets. I caressed teacups. I dropped to my knees to flip through records. I sat in an ancient velvet chair. I considered my connection with each. I wondered what they’d whisper to me about where they’d been, and where they’d like to go.

When I first saw the typewriter, it was buried in a dark corner beneath a vase, a lamp, and a wooden bowl. But I saw the smooth curvature of its case, recognized that it was lying in wait for someone to take it home and co-labor with it. Sitting on the cement floor, I opened it up, ran my fingers over its keys, smelled its must.

I took a couple thwacks at it. Nothing happened. I realized I didn’t even know how to tell if it worked.

In that moment, I almost put it back. I almost talked myself out of it. I felt silly, like a dumb millennial wanting to jump aboard the vintage train. I nearly convinced myself that I was better off before the soft blue glow of my MacBook Pro. But something inside me just could not resist the romance—the idea of pounding away at poems in the wee hours of the morning, breathing my coffee breath all over it and living recklessly in a world without a delete button.

I tucked it under my arm and bought it.

*

My Rover 5000 isn’t fancy, and I have to type with two fingers because my others aren’t strong enough to strike the keys, but there is something satisfying about the gunshot of each letter, the absoluteness of the ink.

Ernest Hemingway famously said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” And that is what I feel I can do. It has shaken up my writing because, with no option for revision, I am a wild woman at the keys. It is liberating, to write without looking back. It feels dangerous.

It is teaching me to be a braver poet—and thus, a better one.

*

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with a young girl who thinks she wants to be a poet when she grows up.

She was interviewing me for an assignment, and she asked me many questions about my path to becoming a poet.

[It was a weird one, a crooked one, an unexpected turn.]

She asked what steps she should take in order to have a career in writing, and I bit my tongue from saying what it wanted to say most.

[Marry someone with a great job and health bennies.]

And then she asked me, with face hidden behind mortified fingers, if she could share one of her poems with me. She wondered if I could give her some honest feedback.

I responded the only way I knew how: I shared the same advice my muse whispers over me when I sit down to write. I let her in on the secrets my typewriter has divulged, when—with no backspace for backtracking—true words have appeared in Courier font.

Here is what I told her: