EVENT CANCELED: Margaret Regan

We regret to inform you that the Immigration Stories with Margaret Regan event has been canceled. This free reading was set to take place on Thursday, April 14 at the Unitarian Universalist Church. We will update you if the author will be rescheduled in the coming weeks at the same venue. HOWEVER...the UU church still plans to hold a discussion on issues of immigration with local experts. So the conversation continues! There are also two other events to check out that night: Heather Gold performs "I Look Like an Egg, But I Identify as a Cookie" at 7pm at the Kress Gallery (3rd Floor of River Park Square Mall) or there is Sam Kean's discussion of The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World for the Periodic Table of Elements at 8pm at the Bing Crosby Theater. Click here for a complete list of events.

Check out our Get Lit! Festival PSA

Keep an eye out for our sweet new 2011 Get Lit! Festival commercial on TV. You can also check it out on YouTube .

Get Lit! posters, signs, and festival guides are all over the place. Where have you seen Get Lit! Festival around town? Let us know!

Get Lit! Festival Workshops: Learn From The Best!

If you’re a writer, a reader, an artist, an illustrator, a journalist, a blogger, or just a collector of unique experiences, come join us at the Riverpoint Campus, Phase One Building on April 16th for our series of great workshops hosted by renowned authors and local educators. Listed below are a few of the workshops being offered. You can also go to our website for a complete list.

The Second Draft of History

Aspiring journalists, history buffs, and nonfiction junkies will find their interests collide in this two-hour workshop presented by author Jack Hamann at this year’s Get Lit! Festival. Globetrotting journalist and nonfiction author Jack Hamann has worked as a network correspondent and documentary producer for CNN and PBS, as well as publishing articles for the likes of The Seattle Times. His stories have brought him around the world, spotlighted his interest in humanitarian efforts, and gained him recognition for his investigative book, On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II. Working under strict deadlines, reporters famously produce “the first draft of history.” In this workshop, Hamann will be discussing the desire that many journalists have to revisit past stories and flush out the entire truth behind the “first draft.” His experience, both as a seasoned journalist and nonfiction author will examine the satisfying experience of uncovering hidden facts buried beneath years of apathy and even secrecy.

The Zine Scene

Zines are a blossoming form of personal expression packed in an inexpensive, easily printed punch. To those unfamiliar with what a zine actually is, they can best be described as self-published mini-magazines, usually meant to be printed out at home and distributed locally. Your own zine, produced at our Zine Scene workshop, could include a wide range of your many interests or your one obsessive passion. It could include images, illustrations, or text borrowed (legally!) from other source or showcase your own talent for the arts. Join zine gurus Julia Lipscomb and Lindsae Williams-Sindalu who will give you skills to express yourself in a new way. Click here to learn more about the Bird's Nest Zine Library, right here in Spokane!

Blogging 101

Take the “blah” out of blog with this informative and interesting workshop presented by local Eastern Washington University educator Dr. Molly Johnson and professional blogger for The Spokesman-Review Dan Webster. These working professionals bring their practical advice for creating written work that can communicate your ideas to the world while building your online credibility. Unlike news articles, blogs can showcase the personality behind the writer while still imparting useful knowledge to your readers. And unlike forums and wikis, blogs can also entertain your readers and, at the same time, build your credibility in one, personalized webspace. If you have the desire to make an online professional presence for yourself or just want to contribute your two cents to the blogosphere, this workshop is for you.

We also teamed up with the Northwest Inland Writing Project to offer several workshops designed specifically for educators. Expert teachers will present the best-practices they have learned for expanding reading and writing in the classroom.

Igniting the Inner Reader

How, as an educator, do you build a passion for reading in students distracted by television and video games? This workshop, taught by Jenifer Junior High language arts teacher April Niemela, will share strategies to improve reading with fun activities based on reading appreciation that can transform your classroom into a community of readers. Bring your camera and an eagerness to participate in interactive lessons!

Putting Pen to Paper

Remember as a child, writing letters to pen pals or making personal and top-secret entries into your very own diary? Remember the satisfaction of writing in neat cursive, or recording your memories, or expressing your inner thoughts on an actual piece of paper? Now days, so many children have lost that connection to paper and, as a result, the connection to writing. Join Northwest Inland Writers Project educators, Barbara Crumb and Beverley Wolff, as they teach the use of writer’s notebooks in the classroom to engage students in the art of the written word.

All workshops are $30 ($20 for students with student ID.) Register at spokaneparks.org. You can also call 509.625.6200 or visit Spokane Parks and Recreation at City Hall.

Continuing-education credits (clock hours) will be available for K-12 teachers through NEWESD 101. The cost for 3-5 hours is $10 and for 6 hours is $12. You can sign up for credits the day of the event with a check.

Sometimes the Story Finds You

Each year we ask some of our festival authors to offer up some wisdom on writing. Suzanne Morgan Williams, author of Bull Rider, shares her thoughts on the writing process as well as the importance of people sharing their stories with each other.

Sometimes the story finds you. I’ve been giving revision workshops lately and the first thing I ask writers is “What is your book really about?” The fact is, during that first draft, I never know and I suspect that’s true for others too. So it’s an important question. Until you answer it, your work can’t sing. What starts out as a conflict, say between a cautious mom and her son who wants to be a bull rider, ends up being about loyalty and empowerment and family resiliency. Oh, and about two brothers – one, Cam, who now doesn’t want to be a bull rider and another, Ben, who was a bull rider until he was blown up by an IED in Iraq.

This was not the story I set out to write when I began Bull Rider. I didn’t want to write about war injuries. But my son-in-law was in the service and the war in Iraq was heating up and I just kept thinking about this other brother in the O’Mara family and what he might be doing if he were a Marine. Cam’s story was changing to include Ben and Ben was demanding equal space on the pages. So that’s what Bull Rider was really about: the consequences and sacrifice of war and the strength of one fictitious family. It just took me a while to realize it.

I think the best books come from the writer’s emotional experience and the questions he’s grappling with if not directly from his or her physical experience. That’s what gives a book heart. That’s when you can answer that question, “What’s your book really about?” And those books can open conversations. They allow others who’ve maybe had that physical experience to access their own emotions. Or they let those who haven’t been through the book’s conflict to practice – what would they do? How would they feel? In the case of Bull Rider, it was also my honor to learn from real stories – from the blogs of wounded soldiers to the stories of my father-in-law who landed at Anzio beach and fought through Italy and Germany during World War II. My husband said his father never talked much about the war and when he finally told me this story in 2006, I understood why. So much loss. “Did you like Italy?” I asked him. “There wasn’t much left to see.” That and the numbers from his unit – 90 percent dead, wounded or missing – pretty much summed it up.

My father-in-law was 86 when we talked. He died last week. I treasure the memories he shared and put them into Bull Rider. But how many years did he not say anything? Who could understand losing nine of every ten of your buddies? What price did he pay to not bring that pain home to his family? The story in Bull Rider found me. I’m not a veteran and I’m not from a military family, although we’ve become one since our daughter’s marriage. I am a good listener. I listened to myself. Then I listened to so many stories. It is my honor to share a little bit of what I learned. I hope it opens a conversation.

For a list of books about the military experience and military families that are good reads for kids aged 7 through high school visit her website and open Veterans, then Books.

If you are interested in hearing more, come to see Suzanne's reading during the Get Lit! Festival at Auntie's Bookstore on April 16 from 1-1:45pm. She is also leading a workshop for ages 10 and up from 9:30-11 am on Saturday at the Riverpoint Campus. Both events are free!

Big Read interview with the Get Lit! Programs Coordinator

How is the Big Read important to our community? Whywas Tim O'Brien's book chosen? What does "thinking outside of the book box" mean? If you are interested in finding out about behind the scenes information for the 2011 Big Read, please check out The Big Read blog, for an insightful interview with Danielle Ward!

For details on all the many events that are currently going on, please visit the NEA website.

Free Adult Writing Workshops!

Writers in the Community, part of the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at EWU, will be offering free adult writing workshops each Saturday during the month of March. This is a great opportunity to sharpen your skills and work with other writers, plus-- let's say it again-- they're FREE!

There will be workshops in fiction, poetry and non-fiction, beginning this Saturday, March 5. All of the workshops will be held in the Phase 1 building of the EWU Riverpoint campus, and there will be signs in the main lobby to direct you to the correct classroom.

Here is the schedule:

Saturday, March 5, 11 a.m.-2 p.m.: All genres (fiction, non fiction, poetry).
Saturday, March 12, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Fiction
Saturday, March 19, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Nonfiction
Saturday, March 26, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Poetry

The theme for these workshops is "Kicking at the Dust." During this Saturday's workshop, poets will focus on nature poetry, fiction writers will examine how to use tension to drive the action in stories, and non fiction writers will be focusing on food-related memories.

Please RSVP to witc@eagles.ewu.edu so they know how many students to prepare for!

Writers in the Community (WITC) is an internship program for graduate students working toward their Master of Fine Arts degree. During the school year, participants lead classes, seminars and workshops in such varied settings as hospitals, prisons and retirement homes, as well as elementary, middle and high school classrooms. They also sponsor a number of community events related to reading and writing in our community, such as the Whitworth Writing Rally each fall; Broken Mic, a series of weekly open mic readings; and of course the youth, teen and college poetry slams during the Get Lit! Festival.

Get Lit! at First Night 2010

This year Eastern Washington University's Get Lit! Programs will be ringing in the New Year with talented students from our Writers-in-Residence program at RiverCity Leadership Academy, Barker High School, and Havermale High School. These young writers have been discussing literature and working on creative writing with Get Lit! professionals. Since 2004, Get Lit!'s Writers-in-Residence program has helped inspire over a thousand young writers in K-12 schools in and around Spokane.

Join us to hear what these budding writers have been working on with our visiting authors! We look forward to seeing you at the NEW Auntie's Bookstore Annex at the River Park Square Mall on the 2nd Floor near the Macy's skywalk. The event will start at 7pm and go until about 9pm. Click here for a complete First Night schedule of events, or here for complete information. Buttons are $12 advance purchase and $15 the day of the event. Their website has a listing of all the locations buttons are available for purchase. As usual, children 10 and under are free with a paying adult.

Have a safe and arts filled New Year's Eve!

Writing = Change

As we face another new year with its call to action in the form of personal resolutions and all of its promise, the thought that comes to mind is how words play a role in effecting our future.

Here at Get Lit! we work year round to showcase poets, authors, essayists, journalists, songwriters, screenwriters, playwrights, and graphic novelists that are contributing to the larger conversation--or rather conversations, since there are many dialogues in process--that impact our understanding of the world we live in. We make a point to bring at least one leading environmental thinker to the festival each year such as Paul Roberts, David Suzuki, and Maude Barlow. In the past, we have hosted political voices like bell hooks, Naomi Wolf, and Reza Aslan. And we have had nearly 100 poets and 100 fiction/nonfiction authors share their work over the years. The goal is to spark discussion within the community and introduce new authors to people in our region.

We also host many educational outreach programs in K-12 schools in Eastern Washington with the hope that our professional writers and authors can help teachers show students that their pens/pencils have a little bit of magic in them. With a pen, a piece of paper, and a point, these young writers are given the opportunity to share their ideas with others. Writing no longer feels like an assignment. Instead, many students have noted having fun, feeling powerful, and getting excited about learning more about themselves and others through sharing. With our "Telling the American Story" theme for 2011, we are also expanding on our usual workshops and panels with a focus on getting local writers of all ages creating and publishing their words. So watch in February for more information on our workshop options!

Meanwhile, we've come across a few articles by Paul Haeder in downtoearthnw.com that address this idea of the power of words. For those of you who don't know, downtoearthnw.com is committed to reporting and sharing environmental news and sustainability information from across the Inland Northwest. Here are the articles that sent us down this road:

Power of the Pen: Memory of Earth, Wind and Fire Environmental writing from the edge of the world; fiction and poetry brings truth

Power of the Pen II: Can poetry bring truth? Modern environmental movement welcomes creative thinkers

We invite you to share your thoughts about writing as an agent for fostering change. What have you read lately that compelled you to action? What have you written lately out of passion? In this fast, faster, fastest world, words can serve as a necessary stop light, encouraging contemplation, a new perspective, and even a call to action.

Third Coast Contest Deadline Approaching!

The Third Coast Magazine Poetry and Fiction Contests deadline is fast approaching! Make sure to submit your work by December 1, 2010. Contest winners in each genre receive $1000 & publication. All entrants receive a one year subscription to Third Coast.

The contest will be judged by Brad Watson in fiction and Natasha Trethewey in poetry.

Guidelines: Submit one previously unpublished story of up to 9,000 words or three previously unpublished poems with SASE and a $15 reading fee payable to Third Coast. Please send each entry separately to:


Third Coast 2010 Fiction or Poetry Contest
Department of English
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331

For more information visit: http://thirdcoastmagazine.com/contests/

2011 Festival Headliners Announced!

Drum roll, please!

Eastern Washington University's Get Lit! Programs is delighted to announce the headliners for our 2011 Get Lit! Festival, each presenting a distinct perspective on our theme of "Telling the American Story."

Tim O’Brien will discuss The Things They Carried, his classic collection of stories about American soldiers in the Vietnam War. Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife, will present feminine perspectives on the classics. Matthew Dickman will be interviews as well as read from his All American Poem, an energetic depiction of our everyday experiences with pop culture and beauty.

Get ready for nonfiction writers Maude Barlow, global activist and author of international best seller Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and The Coming Battle for the Right to Water; and Sam Kean, sharing his creative take on the Periodic Table in New York Times bestseller The Disappearing Spoon.

Headlining children's writers include: Louise Borden, author of a myriad of books, including a dramatic, true tale about the creators of Curious George; Suzanne Morgan Williams, author of Bull Rider and other multicultural and historic nonfiction books for children; and Michael Harmon, the unconventional author of the youth books Skate, The Last Exit to Normal, and Brutal. Our musical headliner is singer and songwriter Ani DiFranco, who will perform original songs and spoken word.

Festival passes for the headlining events go on sale Friday, November 5 via TicketsWest or by calling 1-800-325-SEAT. By purchasing a pass, you will be saving $20-$25 off individual ticket costs and service fees. Passes gain admission to see Tim O’Brien (with Brian Turner), Sam Kean, Matthew Dickman, and, on Friday, either Sena Jeter Naslund (with Nancy Rawles) or Ani DiFranco in concert. The regular festival pass is $45. The pass that includes the Ani DiFranco concert ticket is $60 (quantity limited). (Note: individual DiFranco tickets go on sale November 5 for $35.)

Students will again get in free with a current high school or college ID to the headlining events (except DiFranco). Student tickets will be available at the college bookstores or they can get one at the door as space allows.

Mark your calendar for April 13-17 and start thinking about your own American story!

National Novel Writing Month...a.k.a NaNoWriMo

November's not just the month of yellow leaves and huge turkey dinners. Between November 1 and 30 annually, NaNoWriMo creates an opportunity for writers to sit down and crank out a novel from scratch (50,000 words being the goal).

Anne Lamott said, "For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts." And that's the philosophy behind NaNoWriMo: turn off your self-editor, don't worry about anything except quantity, and plunge forward into all the griminess of a first draft.

From their website, here's how NaNoWriMo works:

1) Sign up for the event by clicking the "Sign Up Now" link at the top of the site.

2) Check your email and read the ginormous email our noveling robots send you. It will have "Love" in the subject line, and may be hiding in your Junk folder.

3) Log into your account and use the links on the My NaNoWriMo page to set your timezone, affiliate with a region, and tell us a little bit about yourself.

4) Begin procrastinating by reading through all the great advice and funny stories in the forums. Post some stories and questions of your own. Get excited. Get nervous. Try to rope someone else into doing this with you. Eat lots of chocolate and stockpile noveling rewards.

5) On November 1, begin writing your novel. Your goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by midnight, local time, on November 30th. You write on your own computer, using whatever software you prefer.

6) This is not as scary as it sounds.

7) Starting November 1, you can update your word count in that box at the top of the site, and post excerpts of your work for others to read. Watch your word-count accumulate and story take shape. Feel a little giddy.

8) Write with other NaNoWriMo participants in your area. Write by yourself. Write. Write. Write.

9) If you write 50,000 words of fiction by midnight, local time, November 30th, you can upload your novel for official verification, and be added to our hallowed Winner’s Page and receive a handsome winner’s certificate and web badge. We'll post step-by-step instructions on how to scramble and upload your novel starting in mid-November.

10) Win or lose, you rock for even trying.

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So do some finger stretches and get ready to write on November first! We'll see you again when you stumble back into daylight with triumphant shouts. Learn more and sign up at http://www.nanowrimo.org/.

Poetry in Motion

Our longest running Writers-in-Residence Program is at Central Valley's Barker High School. For five years, Get Lit! Programs paired local writer Renee Roehl with Barker students interested in exploring creative writing. Students meet once a week for several hours in a writing workshop that explores poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The program continues throughout the school year and results in an amazing anthology of their collected work. Since many of the students continued with Renee year after year, she has seen so many of them grow as writers and as people.

The teenage years can bring with them a keen sense of observation as young adults explore the world around them. The students at Barker have already seen so much and they have some powerful things to say about it. While some of the students prefer to share their guts and glory on the page, I have seen the end of the year performance at the school and have even noticed some of the students sharing with the community at open mics and poetry slams.

Here is one example, a poem on film. Thanks to Eastern's Writers in the Community and local nonprofit TinCan, Jessica Andrew and several other students at Barker High produced this:



Tincan uses information technology and interactive media for education and community development. Jessica was featured in Tincan's October Newsletter. It offers info on what she is doing now.

This month's student spotlight is on Jessica Andrew. Jessica started with Tincan last May through the Subversive project at Barker High School. Since then Jessica has joined the NEA Films 4 Change program at Tincan and has found herself in the producers chair. Jessica, who is extremely organized, makes a perfect producer for the film. She has been responsible for the role of scriptwriter and production scheduler while also recruiting actors and keeping contact with all team members. Jessica is a senior at Barker High School and is currently taking running start classes at Spokane Falls Community College. Her creativity and drawing skills will prove beneficial in her pursuit for a degree in architecture at WSU. Right now Jessica's number one job is taking care of her 20-month-old son.

Get published with the help of New Pages

Are you a writer looking for a place to publish your fiction and/or poetry? While Poets and Writers and Writer's Market are the two most popular options for locating literary journals and competitions, arguably the best organized and most informative website is New Pages. Hugely supportive of independent and university presses -- as well as independent book stores, record labels and alternative weeklies -- New Pages hosts a variety of free resources for writers on the hunt. Writers can narrow down their search by clicking on a variety of contest lists, either for individual stories/poems or for book-length manuscripts, and they can also peruse an inspiring list of calls for submissions -- the rare and highly desirable situation where presses are begging to receive one's work.

New Pages isn't just for writers, but also for readers in search of quirky reads that the bigger publishers may have passed on. Click on "Book Reviews" for exciting new titles being published by these intrepid smaller presses.

And don't forget to visit one of the writing groups in town, such as the Inland Northwest Writers Guild, for more advice on where and how to publish your writing. Their next meeting is at 6:30 PM on August 18th, in the auditorium of Auntie's Book Store.

Is GenY Studying Less?

Keith O'Brien of The Boston Globe recently asked, "What Happened to Studying?" Based on research about to be published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. How much does today's average student study?

Just 14 hours.

Professors, administrators, students and parents are taking a hard look at the research, wondering what could account for so few hours being devoted to studying: "The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them."

Essentially the two professors who conducted the research believe that professor/student relationships are based on doing as little as possible. Students complain about hard assignments and give negative course evaluations, so professors trying to keep their jobs make assignments less complicated and receive positive course evaluations.

Another interesting aspect of the research showed that students themselves were concerned about how much they were studying, stating that they "didn't know how" to successfully study.

What do you think?

Is this a reflection of students raised by helicopter parents used to negotiating with or bullying their high school teachers? Has technology simply streamlined aspects of research that used to take hours? Have rising tuition costs forced a greater percentage of students to work while in school, leaving them less hours for study? Should colleges be doing more to ensure their students know how to use the resources provided? Should high schools?

Read the full text here. And let us know your thoughts!

Spokane Author Shann Ray Wins Prestigious Writing Award

We would like to offer congratulations to Spokane resident Shann Ray, winner of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for Fiction, a prestigious award sponsored by The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference of Middlebury College. His winning manuscript, American Masculine: Montana Stories, will be published by the independent publisher, Graywolf Press, in 2011.

Shann Ray is the nom de plume of Dr. Shann Ferch, a professor currently employed by Gonzaga University, where he teaches classes on leadership and forgiveness. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals such as Northwest Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney's and The South Dakota Review. He also is an award-winning poet, a Fulbright scholar, a former collegiate basketball player and a father of three daughters.

Get Lit! Programs recently contacted Shann Ray over email in regards to this blog posting. He generously and eloquently offered the following quote when asked about Spokane and the Northwests' influence on his poetry and prose:

"Spokane's lit scene is the place where I was given the gift of seeing the world with new eyes. The great psychiatrist, and holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl once said: 'what is to give light must endure burning.' Frankl also said the most true expression of our humanity is to give ourselves in the ultimate unselfish act of loving another human being. I agree. Here in Spokane, I feel such gratitude for the deep investment other literary artists have made in me. Poet Jonathan Johnson completely transformed my vision of life with others, beauty, and the crucible involved in prose that is both elegant and filled with torque. Poet Chris Howell's Light's Ladder shattered me, and then made me whole. Jess Walter's discernment regarding plot and the undercurrents that move society, and especially his kindness, have been invaluable. Sherman Alexie's poetry collection, The Summer of Black Widows, his collection of stories, War Dances, and his vitality and generosity as a person have helped keep my hope alive as a writer.

"The Northwest, a span of wildness and fire I think of as running from Washington to British Columbia and from Alberta to my home state of Montana is another form of crucible. Spending time with my dad in the high country, and letting the landscape absorb me has given me an abiding respect for the ravishing mystery that is the created world.

"Awe, violence, loneliness, emptiness, forgiveness, intimacy, fullness and grace are aspects of our relationship to landscape that help form the interior of my poems and stories and the people who inhabit them. Both landscape and people leave me with a breathtaking sense of the many subtle and enduring ways perfect love casts out fear."

For more about Shann Ray and his writing, visit his website

A Scrap of An Idea

ODE TO PAPER

Plain white lined object
Floating through the air in the breeze
Leaving and arriving at different destinations
Movable, portable
Wanting nothing more than
To communicate
To relay words and numbers and symbols
Accepting different languages
Written by different hands
Light-weight
Loose-leaf
Different purposes
Different roles
Without this, little children of all ages
Grown adults with childhood spirit
Could not enjoy the gift of freedom
To make airplanes that
Fly high into the heavens
To make frogs and tigers and birds
That expand our minds
To make footballs that
Cause touchdowns in the middle of class
This dull, reusable, recyclable piece of trash
Is the binding of our society, our culture, our world
Connecting life into a whole

- MARCI PHILIPS
(We found this poem in the College of Central Florida's literary journal IMPRINTS and the Paper Sculpture art is by Jen Stark.)

I love this quote by George Bernard Shaw. "Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love." Writers can create the world as we'd like it and expose life in all of it's complexities. Let's here a big HOLLER for those artists who play with paper...whether it manifests into a sculpture, a piece of writing, or even a prayer for peace.

As Picasso said, "The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." With that in mind, we invite you to share with us your scraps of ideas: a lonely line, a fuzzy outline of a thought, a few of your favorite words that jump off the page in the dictionary. Who knows, maybe if we free these words and ideas from our mind, they will finally find a home on paper.

The Social Life of Paper

The following are excerpts of an article written by Malcom Gladwell, printed in the March 25, 2002 volume of The New Yorker. To read the entire article, click here.

Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn't happened. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance -- the most common kind of office paper -- rose almost fifteen per cent in the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don't agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk -- or the spectacle of air-traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips -- arises from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives.

The case for paper is made most eloquently in "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (M.I.T.; $24.95), by two social scientists, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. They begin their book with an account of a study they conducted at the International Monetary Fund, in Washington, D.C. Economists at the I.M.F. spend most of their time writing reports on complicated economic questions, work that would seem to be perfectly suited to sitting in front of a computer. Nonetheless, the I.M.F. is awash in paper, and Sellen and Harper wanted to find out why. Their answer is that the business of writing reports -- at least at the I.M.F -- is an intensely collaborative process, involving the professional judgments and contributions of many people. The economists bring drafts of reports to conference rooms, spread out the relevant pages, and negotiate changes with one other. They go back to their offices and jot down comments in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offered by the informality of the handwritten note. Then they deliver the annotated draft to the author in person, taking him, page by page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process, the author spreads out all the pages with comments on his desk and starts to enter them on the computer -- moving the pages around as he works, organizing and reorganizing, saving and discarding.

Without paper, this kind of collaborative, iterative work process would be much more difficult. According to Sellen and Harper, paper has a unique set of "affordances" -- that is, qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.) Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text. Digital documents, of course, have their own affordances. They can be easily searched, shared, stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material. But they lack the affordances that really matter to a group of people working together on a report. Sellen and Harper write:
Because paper is a physical embodiment of information, actions performed in relation to paper are, to a large extent, made visible to one's colleagues. Reviewers sitting around a desk could tell whether a colleague was turning toward or away from a report; whether she was flicking through it or setting it aside. Contrast this with watching someone across a desk looking at a document on a laptop. What are they looking at? Where in the document are they? Are they really reading their e-mail? Knowing these things is important because they help a group coordinate its discussions and reach a shared understanding of what is being discussed.

Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles -- piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.

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In the tasks that face modern knowledge workers, paper is most useful out in the open, where it can be shuffled and sorted and annotated and spread out. The mark of the contemporary office is not the file. It's the pile.

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It is only if paper's usefulness is in the information written directly on it that it must be stored. If its usefulness lies in the promotion of ongoing creative thinking, then, once that thinking is finished, the paper becomes superfluous. The solution to our paper problem, they write, is not to use less paper but to keep less paper. Why bother filing at all? Everything we know about the workplace suggests that few if any knowledge workers ever refer to documents again once they have filed them away, which should come as no surprise, since paper is a lousy way to archive information. It's too hard to search and it takes up too much space. Besides, we all have the best filing system ever invented, right there on our desks -- the personal computer. That is the irony of the P.C.: the workplace problem that it solves is the nineteenth-century anxiety. It's a better filing cabinet than the original vertical file, and if Dewey were alive today, he'd no doubt be working very happily in an information-technology department somewhere. The problem that paper solves, by contrast, is the problem that most concerns us today, which is how to support knowledge work. In fretting over paper, we have been tripped up by a historical accident of innovation, confused by the assumption that the most important invention is always the most recent. Had the computer come first -- and paper second -- no one would raise an eyebrow at the flight strips cluttering our air-traffic-control centers.

Thinking Career Change? How About Papermaking?

Timothy Barrett, internationally recognized master craftsman and paper historian, states that "the study of books can give us an entirely new picture of the development of all disciplines and of human knowledge in the broadest sense." He asks, "how can the material study of books and paper reveal new things about our cultural heritage, about history, that we wouldn't otherwise be able to learn?" For example, he discovered that papermakers in the 15th century were trying to make imitation parchment instead of regular paper, most likely as a way for papermakers to cut scribes out of the equation by making imitation hand-copied manuscript books. Early mass production!

Combining the skills of artist, ethnographer, scientist, and historian, Barrett documents and demonstrates centuries-old hand-papermaking practices that may otherwise be lost. As the founding director of the papermaking facilities at the University of Iowa Center for the Book — the only academic program in the United States that focuses on producing traditional Western- and Japanese-style papers and teaching-related techniques — he has trained a generation of papermakers to create conservation-sound paper.

He says that in order for scholars in the field to utilize their knowledge of different papers and book production techniques, they need to get hands on experience in the book arts: paper-making, letterpress printing, bookbinding and calligraphy.

Believe it or not, this is a REAL job with practical implications. Barrett and his co-workers recently fabricated the handmade archival paper used to re-house the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution as part of the “Charters of Freedom Re-encasement Project.” They created a layer of white paper to be placed under important documents in their display cases. The paper supports the parchment of the original documents, "provides a white background for better viewing, and helps stabilize the internal humidity in the encasement."

This goes WAY beyond the childhood experiment of turning dryer lint into paper. If you'd like to learn more check out Barrett's Japanese Papermaking: Traditions, Tools, and Techniques.