Tag: Anne Avina

Keyboard vs. Cursive: The Debates Rages On

Our country is divided. No, not the red/blue thing, although that’s happening, too. I mean cursive vs keyboard.

Photo shows a handwritten recipe for Apple Loaf Cake mounted on a piece of polished wood. From the early 1900s.
Grandma Anne Avina’s hand-written recipe

I’m a writer, but I don’t write as much as I used to. I type. I text. I tap images on screens. Then I wonder why my handwriting is going to hell. A beautiful teacherly script never flowed from my pen, possibly because I’m a lefty and the letters are designed for right-handers, but it used to be legible. I didn’t used to get stuck on n’s and r’s or finish “ing” words with just a line. But I’m in a hurry. See the chicken scratch in the photo. My printing is neater, but it’s too slow.

Many American schools have stopped teaching cursive, defined by Wikipedia as “any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters.” The Common Core State Standards encourage schools to teach typing on computerized devices, as well as printing in upper and lower case letters. But with limited hours in a day, they no longer require that cursive be taught.

In a casual survey of school practices, I found a mix of writing by hand and on machines, particularly school-issued Google Chrome laptops, but a definite leaning toward digital devices. Side note: how much do all those computers cost???

Photo shows the author's handwriting in her journal about the 2023 Super Bowl. The writing is slanted slightly left and includes a crossed out word and correction.
Sue’s handwriting is like a secret code

In our grandparents’ day, students spent hours developing their handwriting, often adding beautiful swirls to the ends of capital letters. My own grandparents, who went to school in the early 1900s, only made it through eighth grade, but their handwriting was beautiful and legible.

Now, people say we don’t need it. Who writes by hand anymore, aside from signatures? We don’t write letters. Or checks (I do), or take notes by hand (I do). We grab our phone, tablet, or laptop and type. It’s faster. It’s neater. It can be saved and shared. It’s the way the world is going.

Did you know that Queen Elizabeth kept a handwritten journal? One theory is that no one could hack into it to share her private thoughts in the media.

Me, I used up all the ink in another pen writing a poem yesterday. Eventually I typed it into Google Docs so I could share it with my poet friends on Zoom, but that first blast was on paper. Many poetry teachers insist students draft their poems by hand. Studies show the brain functions differently with handwriting vs. typing, that there is value in the hand-brain connection. They also show that students who take notes by hand are more likely to remember what the teacher says because they have to select what’s important to write down rather than simply recording every word on their laptops.  

Some argue that if kids don’t learn to write cursive, they won’t be able to read it, whether it’s the Declaration of Independence or a letter from their grandmother. But, say the anti-cursives, everything can be scanned and translated into computer-speak these days.

People have been writing by hand for thousands of years. Do we really want to make it obsolete? On the other hand, if people can’t read cursive anymore, my handwriting is like a secret code that no one can read unless I choose to translate it.

What do you think? Do you print or write in cursive? Do you write by hand at all these days? What should the kiddos be learning?

If I haven’t put you to sleep by now, let me recommend this book:

The Missing Ink: The Disappearing Art of Handwriting by Philip Hensher, Faber & Faber, Inc., 2012. The Missing Ink is a deep dive into the history and culture of writing by hand with pen and ink. Hensher interviews people about their handwriting, takes us on a shopping trip for the finest fountain pen in London, takes a look at Hitler’s handwriting, tells us how ink is made and describes how the Bic pen took over the world from the 1950s on. He pleads for the preservation of the art of handwriting and offers situations where writing by hand is referable to keyboarding. Fascinating stuff for word nerds like me.

Full disclosure: This blog post was entirely written on a computer.

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Portuguese grandma book lives on and on

Stories_Grandma_Neve_Cover_for_KindleStories Grandma Never Told was conceived one day more than 25 years ago when I was hiding out in my parents’ vacation trailer making random notes in the wake of publishing my first book, The Iberian Americans. That book was an overview of the experiences of immigrants from Portugal, Spain and the Basque Country. My roots lead back to all of those places.

What about the Portuguese women, I asked myself. What has been passed down from my great grandmother to my grandmother to my mother to me that makes me who I am? The eyes, the nose, the body, yes, but what else? Who were these women? The few books about Portuguese immigrants that I had found focused on the men, as if the women didn’t come at all. There were stories to be shared.

The result was my next published book, Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California. The title is slightly misleading because the book does not include my grandmother’s stories. I never heard them. Instead, I looked up “Portuguese” in the phone book (pre-Google) and started interviewing women: family, friends, people who were active in the Portuguese community and the people they insisted I speak to. I had never been exposed to much of the Portuguese culture. A few words, a few foods, but not much more. My parents’ generation insisted on being as American as possible. Forget the old country. But I got involved, I learned, and I wrote.

It took almost a decade to get this book published. We had already moved to Oregon when I finally got the letter (pre-email!) from Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books offering to publish Stories Grandma Never Told. It was released at The Dia de Portugal celebration in San Jose in June 1998. That was one of the best days of my life. My family was there, and the books sold like crazy.

Eighteen years later, the book is still selling, but not in the same way. After nine years doing a fantastic job with my book through three printings, the people at Heyday decided it wasn’t selling enough to be worth doing another printing. But it was still selling, and I wasn’t ready to let it go, so I started my own publishing company, Blue Hydrangea Productions, hooked up with a local printshop, Lazerquick in Newport, and produced my own edition with a gorgeous new cover photo of my grandmother, Anne Avina, on her wedding day.Stories Grandma Never Told_justified text.pmd

That first Blue Hydrangea edition kept selling. I went through three printings, and I’m still getting orders. I’m out of envelopes and almost out of books, but Stories Grandma Never Told lives on. I am releasing a new edition this month through Amazon’s CreateSpace print-on-demand program. You can order it online right now. Again, we have a new cover. This one features my great grandmother, Anna Souza. Why go through Amazon this time? Cost and efficiency. It costs me nothing, saving me a big printing bill and allowing me to charge less for the book. I can also offer it as a Kindle ebook for the first time ever. Plus, since most of my orders come from Amazon, they won’t have to get the books from me, meaning readers can get copies more quickly. I will still get paid and should make more money than before.

Why self-publish? These days, it’s a big question in publishing. It’s so hard to get accepted by traditional publishers, although I have done it several times and expect to do it again. Some self-published books are poorly written and badly edited, but many respected authors are taking control of their own careers by publishing their own books. We have the technology now sitting on our desks. Why depend on someone else?

“Grandma” was originally edited and formatted by the best at Heyday Books. I’m just keeping their work going. Why? Because the readers still want the book, and they don’t care how it came to be. I marvel at this, that I wrote something people want to buy and share with their mothers, daughters and friends. How could I let it die?

Grandma Souza, who died in 1954, would be shocked to find her face on the front of a book. She never learned to read in either Portuguese or English. But here she is, digitized in 2016 and being written about in a “blog.” As she might have said, “Ay, Jesus.”

 

 

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