Published in the Great North Arrow, March 2020: Keyboarding Roots & The Great Typewriter Challenge
- jim Young ”There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” - Ernest Hemingway I began writing at an early age. I remember one Sunday afternoon pounding away on the keys of my mother’s Underwood typewriter at the dining room table to create a 2 page Newsletter with short stories and jokes mixed in with a hand drawn and hand coloured Woody Woodpecker. It was a very labourious work of art requiring several passes of the page to type my stories into a 3 column format. Typewriters were very unforgiving when it came to typos and each mistake had to be painstakingly erased with a special typewriter eraser that would rip the paper more often than not, if great care and attention was not given to the task. But my newsletter served its purpose of filling my boring afternoon and it didn’t bother me that I was only able to produce the one copy. After all, I had no one to read it anyway, as we lived in the country away from any friends and neighbours. My parents of...