This post was written, from crappy draft to good enough, fully and wholly by a human. An aging English woman, mother, writer, artist, and storyteller.
When I logged into Squarespace to write this piece, I was greeted with a new feature—an AI generator, built-in right there to the text editor. What would you like to add to your piece, the tone, the purpose? All that.
I’m ready to wrestle with this blistering topic and appreciate Joanna Penn’s grasp on its implications for the good of writers and her encouragement to be ‘AI inquisitive.’ I also enjoyed a Fireside Chat at the London Writers Salon with Eric R. Burgess on ‘AI and Our Creative Work.’ You can read Eric’s piece, How to Prevent ChatGPT From Destroying Creative Jobs.
However, as I wrestle with this issue, I know I want to connect with the stories and hearts of others, not the convenience of artificially generated words that merely fulfill an obligation. And that is what I will continue writing here: the words of a real person.
Will we soon be searching for the human among the proliferation of words, as I search for food among the supermarket shelves of the processed and the artificial?
A Real Picture
Two weeks ago, offshore on an island in Maine, I swung in a hammock a week into a retreat for women writers. I am stunned at the relaxed look in this picture.
It was real.
Not an AI-conjured image nor a social media-massaged suggestion of ease.
The long-soaking of rest, dawn, time, meditation, and prayer. Quiet. Birdsong and the impossible yellow chrome green of spring that comes late to a Maine island. I was enchanted all over again with this place. And the company of women, talk around the evening fire, the ideas that followed, and the quiet alone of reading on the porch; long hours of sleep, good food in abundance, walks and talks, and all that fell to us of weather and views.
Mustard on McGee Is., late May Maine.
I needed to update the untruthful headshot that resided on this website’s Home page for the past decade. It’s been years since I decided to stop dyeing my hair; to be who I am now. That old photo of artificial color, though a sincere smile—who is that woman?
Not artificial exactly, but not the whole story of now. So, time for that old shot to go.
And Typewriters
Writer, mother, storyteller. And typewriter collector. That incorrigible pursuit.
Would AI encourage or discourage foraging online for yet more typewriters, those subversive returners to the analog? I’m not going to ask. But I do look—at Facebook Marketplace mostly—and so, of course, I find and I buy.
Just this week, two miraculous machines.
One, the sweetest little red pristine, mint condition Galaxie. Earlier than any on the database. Worth the drive from Boston to Connecticut. From a seller who was the salt of the earth, who chatted and reminisced, and who had sent us lunch suggestions before we’d even started our drive.
And the other purchase, the direst arrival I’ve ever had, and Channel Blue, the rare Corona 4 color I was so hoping would be a home run. It was diabolically bad. The miracle in reverse, packed in a single flimsy box—despite instructions—with a smattering of sort-of-padding.
Time to start a mail insurance claim, ask for a refund and begin again. And the red miracle cheers me up. The chrome return lever shines; there is not a scratch anywhere. The bell resounds with singing.
It is also the giveaway typewriter for newsletter subscribers next month. I’ve been looking for something special for the past five months, and this is it. It will be sent out well-packaged.
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Words Freely Given
On the way home from buying the red typewriter, we swung by the Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, MA. The poet’s dip pen and ink wells on a shelf in her bedroom, with its distinctive rose wallpaper. Illustrated map of the homestead I drew after the last visit: download a free copy here.
And when you read this site, you have an imperfect, slow, and real human quietly pulling thoughts the old-fashioned way by notepaper, pen, yes, even dip pen sometimes, and typewriter.
Translating those through these keys to your device, and heart and mind.
To ask you to take your own eyes off the screen and go and make something.
Colors of a late Maine island spring. Impossible yellow-green, seemingly lit from within. I will be searching for this color in pigment for the foreseeable future.
Checking out Edward Hopper’s signature at the Farnsworth Museum’s new exhibit, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, Rockland, Maine. I was fascinated by the color used for each brush-signed signature of Hopper. A close-up encounter with the real and not the artificial. I soon had the guard looking at them also. On exhibit May 27-August 27th, 2023.
Excited to find, home from Maine, the spring green-yellow still lights the meadows of the Arnold Arboretum in the late afternoon. Viewing this on a large screen? Click on the image to see it full screen to really get the pop of detail!