Stephanie Strickland | CTRL+Shift: Writing practice at the dawn of the digital era

What digital devices do you have access to for writing?

Pens, pencils. There's four computing devices in this one room. I keep an old XP Machine going—with difficulty, these days. I liked Word 2003. I managed to get that and Word 2007 on that machine, and then I have a little small Acer, which is underneath there, which is actually probably the most advanced, but again, it's Word 2007 is on there that I write with, and it's for travel. And then since the last thing I made was an app for iPad, I was forced to buy an iPad—show the thing on it! So that's over there, a mini.

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What are your physical archiving conventions?

I had some paper notebooks and things. I was looking through old notes and things. And I would sit and I would write, every morning, for maybe three or four hours and at the end of the morning, I would go and type it up—I mean input it. I did not look at it again. ... Some of the time, it just seems crazy if there's just too many versions...

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What role does correspondence play in your revision practice?

Sometimes I send some stuff to Denise Duhamel who is also a dear friend, but mostly, after it's almost sort of done.

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How long have you been writing professionally?

I think it must have been early '90s that the first book was published, I think? It might have been.

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What digital devices do you have access to for writing?

Pens, pencils. There's four computing devices in this one room. I keep an old XP Machine going—with difficulty, these days. I liked Word 2003. I managed to get that and Word 2007 on that machine, and then I have a little small Acer, which is underneath there, which is actually probably the most advanced, but again, it's Word 2007 is on there that I write with, and it's for travel. And then since the last thing I made was an app for iPad, I was forced to buy an iPad—show the thing on it! So that's over there, a mini.

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What physical tools do you use for composition?

Well, if I'm generating new material, I will certainly do a certain amount of writing by hand. I capture, at various points, the material in a Word processing program. The one I work with most intuitively is Word 2003. I'm annoyed at all the extra ridiculous functionality.

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What genres do you work in?

Poetry.

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How do you name your files?

At some point it's the name of the poem, or it's a name that references the name of the poem. For a long time, I will do revisions within that file with the date at the top. ... Then, at the point of a manuscript, there's a whole file that's an entire manuscript and those will have dates or something, you know, called "1, 2, 3," or something. ... I back that up onto a flash drive and then I have this sync toy stuff that Microsoft makes for its computers. So I have that on there, and so I sync that onto there. That works okay. Then I have a little wallet backup drive that I try to put from there onto that, but it doesn't work as well.

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

I was extremely aware with every shift in software, every shift in functionality. ... There's a whole period of becoming sort of a little more ergonomically aware of working with computers and they've changed so much, you know, as many different ways as possible, you shift off ...

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

I have one very dear friend, Nancy Knutson who had been in the program with me, she also wrote fiction, and for a long time, every Sunday morning she was in—she moved to New Mexico—we'd call each other up and talk about poems back and forth. Rachel Loden is another person that at times we'd exchange work.

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