Nowadays, we think of writing as something that appears on paper, or a screen (or a billboard), and something we read/consume individually, but this is a very recent idea. Venture back a few centuries, or out among the endangered alphabets, and writing is part of a performance–such a fascinating difference that it’s the subject of […]
As many of you know, I am fascinated by our perceptions and misperceptions of writing, and one of these that occurred to me as I was in the middle of drafting Writing Beyond Writing is the fact that the invention of printing led us to think of writing more and more as a product and […]
A surprising (to me) number of people still wonder why someone would go to all the trouble of inventing a new script for their language when, as they see it, the world seems to have enough perfectly good ones going around. Let’s hear the answer, or some of the answers, from the source. A guest […]
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 […]
