Stori 4

She thinks that starting up her allotment of writing for today with indenting seems to be the best way to produce a viable body of work. She scratches her head, is not quite sure if she uses the word “viable” in the right context, in the right way. She ponders if there even is a right way or a wrong way in writing. She detests conventions of classifying and cataloguing written pieces into “genres”, she has no clue whether her own writing is fiction or nonfiction. It might probably pass as fiction, which kind of puts it down a notch. And on a very prosaic, a very practical, concrete note her writings will not be published that easily. Her preferred publishing “houses” would be university presses, giving her work instant stamps of approval. But her musings lack footnotes, she does not write scholastic treatises, she does not end her writings with a “works cited” list, she does not use the Chicago Manual or APA- Style citations. She has trouble in writing because, all she did for the last decade was essay writing for school, proper scholastic work, so she approaches writing in general as that, a means to inform, a means to disseminate meaning, to decipher reality, to draw conclusions, to find similarities and dissimilarities between vastly differing procedures, among differingfields. She is sitting in the Kwantlen College Learning Center; it is by now July 2008. Summer came into this city, while she was typing her days away, while she was pecking like a woodpecker at each and every keyboard she came near to. She just writes, tries not to forget to save her work, emails it to herself, tries to categorize her files alphabetically and numerically, tries to save it on disks, writes, writes, writes. Yesterday she started her second book this year, while the first one is not even finished. It is finished in scribbles on paper, but half of it still waits to be typed. She tries to type 2 pages per day, diligently, she prints them out, hoards them neatly on her dining table, sends themout to publishers, ponders whether to get a literary agent. Her life becomes stale, her only distraction are the differing keyboards all over town, black ones, white ones, ecru ones. She does not know how to put the accent aigues on her e’s, she foregoes that. 1

She grapples with different printers, different soft wares, she moves around this town in search of the perfect library to sit down and type, type, type. She is not into plots, constructed narratives; she cannot phantom what other people think about, she prefers to describe this keyboard, more so than people. Machines are utterly fascinating, who knows how they work, which button makes them do what. She is very nontechnical, thus she stands in awe in front of all these machines. Cranes make her gasp for air, lift trucks are smaller dinosaurs than tall cranes. Cities are fascinating; the RAV line downtown sings its songs. The tunnel boring proceeds. The clock on the wall is three-thirty; she is totally confused these days. She does not know whether she should use numerals or words in writing, should she write plus or +, @ or at, British or American spelling. Should she write Vienna or Wien, the local term or the British term, should she write Rue Ste Catherine or St Catherine Street? Should she be consistent, capitalize Kingston all through her text, or write Kingston once and kingston the next time. Should she play by the rules or decidedly use erratic orthography, trying to liven up her prose with linguistic hiccups. These are the things she thinks about these days in this hot Vancouver summer, sometime after the end of Junuary; these are the things she ponders. She never thinks and always ponders. She misses structure, and writes away all day long. Each and every day, without blueprint, sans rules. She has to stop to make sure that she can impose some kind of coherence on her prose, a leaning towards grammatical conformity, with hiccups in between that make for the fabric of good poetry. She paints with words; the language is conte, chalk and pigment, clear brushstrokes and eloquent lines. She halts her writing to inhale her surroundings, this busily typingey place. Where suburbia stops and individualism starts, where research and innovation still have a chance, in this conform lab, where poets sing to their keyboards. Where pathos lives, where self doubt rules, where words splash on to the monitors, where the Xerox machines spit out the lively, the very organic word constructions of each and every one of us here. Where pages are waiting to be 2

filled with halted and d suspended dreams, whatever that means. Where accuracy has to wait, where words hook into each other to form a beautiful chain. Make that “aesthetically pleasing” chain. She cannot find the icon for the word count; this software is too complicated, too new. She is at the mercy of all these technical advances, her craft is under attack, she has to obey the spell check, and thus she cannot dance freely and virtuously over the page, she does not see and hear birds singing, no inspiring nature dictates poetry to her, only a sliver of green as seen through the thick curtain, in this lab the air conditioner is the music. People talk in a language she cannot decipher, that is the music, and the hammering of the buttons of the keyboard further her words, force her writing forward, make her articulate meaning, semi conscious stabs at illustrating reality. She can see the beige brown brick wall outside; she tries to figure out what to write about the wall. If this was a painting she could describe it, ad nauseum, filling page after page with a description of rectangular stone pieces. Dissertations about brick walls, structuralism, post structuralism, deconstructivism, maybe disintegration of the writer’s life. She ponders how many more words she should hammer down, where is the bloody word count. Yesterday she wrote seven and a half pages, today, three; this is not a good story. Just a story of someone who writes away, who sits in front of a typewriter, who plays with words , who runs after accurate descriptions of reality, who does not know if this is a keyboard a typewriter a computer, someone who loses her ability to spell, to type, to concentrate, someone who is fascinated to leer down at her fingers hammering on the tastature, who scratches her head, looks at the mouse and the “-icrosoft” writing on it, someone who longs for finding the word counting button. In July of 08.

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