The Type Rider project sprang out an experience I shared with my sister and father that began when I was 12 years old, a collaborative story we wrote on a typewriter that sat on a desk in the upstairs hallway of our house in New Hampshire. My father started us off one night, scrolling in the first blank page and tapping out the first sentence that led to hundreds of other sentences we added over the course of the next two years. Without ever explicitly saying it, the three of us were forming a bond through this shared creativity, supporting and celebrating each of our contributions and exploring the wide field of narrative possibility.
We don’t have those pages anymore, but what I remember is how our words wove together and shaped something larger than their individual parts, and yet at the same time how we each made a distinct mark in the story we were telling, branding it with our own particular language and taking it on the wild ride of our imagination.
This morning, while I was upstairs getting dressed, I heard the sound of the keys going in the kitchen. My partner, Amy, gifted me an Olympia Traveller de Luxe for my birthday this year, and we’ve been keeping it downstairs on the kitchen island, where it invariably jostles for space with the butter dish, half-cups of coffee, bills to be paid, and various objects that need putting away.
This is the third typewriter we’ve set up in the kitchen. The first, another turquoise Remington Ten Forty I purchased to replace the Type Rider typewriter that got mangled by American Airlines on a visit to San Francisco (but that’s another story) is now being used on the High Line outings we make on the weekends. The second, purchased on sale at a Cold Spring, NY antique store, is now housed at the Brave Girls Art studio across town. But this one, the bright orange-and-white Traveller de Luxe, feels like it’s just for us.
“Dear Olympia,” I wrote on my birthday. “Welcome to our family….this is just the beginning. This is our first day…”
Later, I found Amy’s words on the page, too. They were in red. (The ribbon lets us write in both red and black.) “This is the beginning indeed. Start here. Dream bigger. Dig deep, stretch your wings and fly. There’s a net if you need it. Leap.”
In fact, we have been leaping, daily, into the thick of collaboration, not just in our creative work – our Maude in the Making project, for example, and the planning for our upcoming classes at Serendipity Retreats in October – but in our relationship itself, which is – of course – collaboration on a much larger scale. In the midst of the zooiness of living (co-parenting, managing a home, growing a business, and meeting the financial demands of the above), we’ve discovered a place that grounds us, orients us around all of the big changes we are making, internally and externally, and provides a tangible expression of so many intangibles.
Our “Dear Olympia” letters have now become an open platform for us to exchange thoughts, observations, questions, vulnerabilities, and celebrations. We write everything from the ordinary – “We just returned from a nice strenuous bicycle ride to Lyndhurst to look for pants at TJ Maxx,” to the logistical – “Do you know any good financial therapists?” – to the grateful – “There are moments when things converge and make sense, when we don’t second-guess the gifts we are given,” and to the healing: “It feels good and cathartic to cry…I think our souls need it in the same way the ground does, to prepare for new growth.”
Amy and I have been writing together, in one form or another, for more than a year. Emails we exchanged while I was still living in Amherst, MA formed the beginning of our connection. We shared poetry – ours and others’ – as we deepened it. Now she is the first person I turn to when I need a strong editorial eye and honest feedback.
But it is here, on Olympia’s pages, where we keep a visible record of our process and progress. The typewriter serves the multiple functions of therapist, coach, confidante, and mirror, without uttering a sound other than the keys hitting the page. On Olympia, we are both validating and validated, recognizing and honoring the other’s perspective and insight. We find comfort, compassion, and company.
But these letters we write to each other are also, in some way, letters to ourselves. They allow us individually to make an offering and to help steer the ship of collaboration: “I love these moments when we just let go, open our hands, and release. So I wonder what we will release this week, what we will undo and unmake and unorchestrate and then what will come as a result of all that letting go.”
What we are discovering through Olympia is two-fold: one, that having a common canvas to land our ideas and investigations through words connects us in powerful ways; and two, that our dreams and visions for the future are coming into clearer focus more quickly because we are finding ways to support and nurture them together. That we are making this process visible – to ourselves, to the boys, to whoever enters this house and sits at the kitchen counter – gives us an additional sense of accountability, connection, and pride. With red-black ink and a bell that signals each end of the line, we are charting our way forward, one page at a time, word by word.
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Maya Stein:
Maya is a Ninja poet, writing guide, and creative adventuress. Among her latest escapades are a 1,200-mile bicycle journey with a typewriter, a cross-country poetry workshop trip, a French crepe stand at a Massachusetts farmers market, and a relocation from San Francisco to suburban New Jersey. She has published four books of poetry and creative non-fiction, is a not-so-secret photographer, and teaches Feral Writing classes both live and online. Find out more about Maya and her work at www.mayastein.com
