Tour de Seat-of-My-Pants

By Zach Hively

Here comes Studio Tour season.​
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It's October, which around here means it’s time for our most hallowed annual tradition—cramming to get ready for the Abiquiú Studio Tour.

For some, this tradition means taking time to affix some final price tags to finished pieces and getting some good sleep leading up to the Tour itself. But for the rest of us who aren’t that one person, it means creating a year’s worth of high-quality art in eleven days. Or, sometimes, learning a new artisan trade in those eleven days.

This time, for me, looks like assessing if I can still write an entire book of poetry and get it printed without paying some exorbitant expedited rate.

Even I can’t speed up that fast. So, this time of year instead means I get to slow down.
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And why not? I spend 50.5 weeks a year on the computer, where I can look up information any time I want, even and especially if it is irrelevant to the work I’m meant to be doing. I don’t get a lot done, but I get it not done at ludicrously fast speeds, so long as the local internet is working.
So when the leaves are changing, I get to shelve my computer and my ambition for the last ten or, if we’re honest, four days before Studio Tour. And I lug out my trusty Royal typewriter. 

I introduced the Royal to my poetry process many years ago. You see, I feel not quite right when I try drafting poetry on a computer. There’s an alchemy to creating something physical; also, it’s really tough to niggle over a comma placement on a typewritten page, or to check baseball scores. So! I type poems on actual paper, and I check baseball scores on my phone without even having to open a new browser tab.

But you know what? There’s something else special about words typewritten by hand, something I learned when I framed poems for my first-ever Abiquiú Studio Tour, and that is this: People will pay actual money for them.

This is rare in the poetry world. Everyone from my parents to my poetry teachers has warned me never to anticipate significant financial windfall from my work, or any financial windfall at all. 

Typewritten haiku, from my Owl Poems (Casa Urraca Press)

I cannot mass produce these hand-crafted poems, much as my bank account might like me to. I’m stuck going as slow as I can one-finger type. And that’s okay—because this way, studio tourists might have some leftover funds for all the other magnificent artists involved.

Besides, it feels really good to be using my hands for more than computer work again. I hope I remember this feeling the next time October rolls around without warning, as it so often does.