I’m planning my usual annual Kickstarter campaign in October, but in the meantime a cause has come to my attention that I want to support, if at all possible, with a mini- campaign right now. A couple of months ago I ran a global contest for handwriting in a minority or indigenous script, and one […]
As some of you know, for the last four months we’ve been holding meetings of the online Writing Beyond Writing Book Club. It has been an absolute blast. Participants have been starting from issues or questions raised in my new book Writing Beyond Writing and then heading out in a hundred different and fascinating directions. […]
At #EndangeredAlphabets I’ve been in the habit of telling anyone who will listen that Nüshu is, or was, the only script to have been invented and used solely by women, but as usual, life is more interesting, and I have been giving out false information. There have in fact been, in one sense or another, at […]
Everyone who knows me knows I like a challenge; they also know I’m happy working with my hands. So I’ve decided, as my summer project, to make a table beyond tables. I’m starting with the two vital elements: wood and text. The wood is astonishing. For a remarkably reasonable price, I managed to lay my […]
Thread 1: My hero, the Australian anthropologist Piers Kelly, has written extensively about cultures, especially in Southeast Asia, that have their own mythic narratives in which they were given writing by a deity, but owing to bad luck, enemy action or their own foolishness, lost it. (There’s a chapter about the topic in my book […]
Spring has arrived disturbingly early up here by the Canadian border, but this is good news for you as it means my Spring Sale has also arrived early. I’m offering three of my favorite wall art carvings at reduced prices, namely: “Om shanti shanti shanti om,” in the exquisite Pallava script […]
International Mother Language Day, February 21st, is a kind of well-intentioned bureaucratic expansion of the Bangladesh observance of National Martyrs Day, a remembrance of the day in 1952 when five people were killed for protesting their right to speak Bengali (Bangla) rather than Urdu, the official language of the new state of Pakistan. What came […]
The first monthly meeting of the Writing Beyond Writing Book Club (Western Hemisphere edition) was an utter blast. We journeyed through fonts based on one’s own handwriting; low-energy and high-energy writing systems; Hungarian runic script redesigned as Netflix logos; the burning of books to establish a script to unify an empire; Latin manuscripts containing paintings, […]
Since Writing Beyond Writing was officially published last month, I’ve led several phenomenally successful talks about the Endangered Alphabets Project in general and the book in particular, and something has struck me each time: every question asked by someone in the audience led directly to a chapter in the book. Somehow, in writing a book […]
Dear friends of the Endangered Alphabets and also of puzzles and games: World Endangered Writing Day 2024 was a huge success, and continues to be a success as people flock to our YouTube channel to catch the videos of talks they didn’t manage to see live, or that have been recommended to them by friends […]
