Current writer and novelist, Fred Durbin, featured in USA Today

Are typewriters making a comeback? Current writer and novelist, Fred Durbin, thinks so, and was featured in a story about this in USA Today. A taste:

In Midland, Pennsylvania, Fred Durbin’s students at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School are writing like many of the 20th century’s greatest minds: on typewriters.

Guided by “The Typewriter Revolution,” a book by Richard Polt that Durbin described as “walking a line between writing and philosophy,” students use typewriters from Durbin’s personal collection.

First, though, Durbin, who’s also a novelist, had to teach the students about typewriters: how to store them, carry them (“They’re luggable, but not portable,” he said) from one classroom to another, how to load paper into the rollers and to use the keys.

“We use them to connect with younger people who are so lost on their screens, who are used to seeing everything instantly,” he said. His approach is to get students to think of themselves as artists, “using our senses and focusing on one thing at a time.” A typewriter, he said, demands one’s full attention, unlike a computer where other tabs tempt the easily distracted.

You can read the full story here.