Amy Gerstler | CTRL+Shift: Writing practice at the dawn of the digital era

What digital devices do you have access to for writing?

This laptop is my home computer. And then I have two sort of travel ones. One is a MacBook Air, which is like this but much lighter and thinner. And then one is an iPad mini, which I don't write on that much, but I write on a little, and it's like an iPad but it's a little smaller. It's like kind of purse size.

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What are your physical archiving conventions?

I'm not precious about that sort of stuff. People yell at me every once in a while, like, "What? You don't keep your draft?" or, "You don't keep copies?" or, "You don't-?" And I'm like, "My office is this big. I get rid of things so that I have, you know-two writers live in this house, and books are coming in like every moment. It's just a constant battle with the rising swell of, you know, paper avalanches. So, no, I don't keep a lot of the stuff like that, because I'd have room for (new work).

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What role does correspondence play in your revision practice?

... And so, I end up with a paper copy in a file, at least one. And also at that point, I'm usually trying to bribe a couple of friends in to reading it before I send it off. So, I'm either emailing them, or handing them a copy.

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How do you back up your files?

Well, I make the folder that is the book that I'm going to submit, to see if I can get it published. And in order to have arrived at that, I've printed things out and done my gungy little no-tech, on-the-floor, dogs-walking-over-it, leaves-falling-on-it kind of procedure that I was shame-facedly describing to you moments ago. And so, I end up with a paper copy in a file, at least one. And also at that point, I'm usually trying to bribe a couple of friends in to reading it before I send it off. So, I'm either emailing them, or handing them a copy.

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How long have you been writing professionally?

I'm fifty-seven, and I started publishing, you know, small poems in school magazines back when I was in college, when I was, 18, 19, 20. So if you start it there, then that amount of years. If you start it when I had my first chapbook, then it would have been after I finished college.

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What digital devices do you have access to for writing?

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What physical tools do you use for composition?

I think actual writing is almost all on computers now, but note-taking is probably 75% notebook and pen, and 25% take notes on the computer.

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What genres do you work in?

I write poetry. I do different kinds of journalism, more in the past than currently, but still some. I used to do a fair amount of art journalism, like reviews and sometimes catalog pieces, and sometimes essays about visual art. And I did other kinds of general journalism. And I've written some Non-fiction and a teeny bit of fiction. Sort of.

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How do you name your files?

The (file) names change, because I was so happy when I realized that you could change the names. ... I have Carbonite. ... I've gone through all different kinds of back-up things. I've had all different kinds of viruses and crashes and-you know. ... I got religious about backing up.

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How did the advent of personal computing and the internet influence your writing practices?

What I like is I can take a chunk of text and move it up here and it doesn't take me 40 minutes to retype the whole damn thing. And if I don't like it, I can try it down here. And if I want to print out a copy of something as a prose poem, and a copy of it with some line breaks, and look at them next to each other, I can do that in a flash. All that? I couldn't be happier. Because then I'm spending my time reading and writing and revising, and not spending my time [makes typing sound]. "Oh! Now I have to do the whole thing all over again!"

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What role, if any, do other people play in your writing?

But, no, email is, I think, great for writers, for correspondence, for sending people-I mean, going back and forth with revisions. All that...these are all mediums, right? I mean, yeah, they're mediums, or technologies, or both, and they have their own characteristics. It's not the same as a genre, but no, they require different things of us as producers and consumers,and they have different effects. I find it difficult to believe that anyone would argue with that. So yeah, email has many of the same characteristics but is different from a written letter. And a letter written on a manual typewriter is different from, you know, Charles Dickens dipping his pen, if that's indeed what he did. You know. Once-not bragging-but once, I got a little letter from John Ashbury, a tiny one about something, and bet your bottom dollar I saved that.

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