Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin

"Under an acrylic case in an exhibition I curated about my mother, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), sits the first typewriter she purchased. Compact and impossibly heavy, the machine comes from an era of word production so distant as to feel alien. The keyboard has no exclamation point. To create the favorite punctuation of tyrants and optimists, one must type an apostrophe, then backspace and type a period."

"The Underwood waited in my parents' attic for decades as Ursula and the world moved on to electronic typewriters and eventually to computers. I hoped visitors to A Larger Reality, at Oregon Contemporary through February 8, could experience a little of the residual magic that I find clings to it, pecking out whatever they please, taking home the original and leaving a carbon copy for posterity."

An exhibition displays the first manual typewriter purchased by Ursula K. Le Guin, kept under an acrylic case and occasionally set out for public use. The Underwood's weight and missing exclamation key recall an earlier era of mechanical word production and specific physical constraints. Visitors respond by typing poems, memoirs, fiction, epistles, political statements, and fan mail, with varied levels of confidence and sound. Some draft elsewhere and return to create finished pieces. The interactive experience cultivates personal connection, shared custodianship of an object, and a ceremonial passing of imaginative energy between past and present users.

Read at Hyperallergic