Author Mary Gordon: “I write by hand.”
Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. But I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality. For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.
Even if you’re not a writer, what can you do to include virtuous labor? How can you get physical? How can you put flesh, blood, and thingness into what you make?