Project Spotlight: Typewriters Anonymous
PHILLIP T. NAILS is co-founder of Typewriters Anonymous, a band of typewriter and performance poets, musicians, and artists who bring analog vintage spectacle to special events. Additionally, they produce workshops and performances that cultivate community, collaboration, and creativity. Phillip says, “We want to strengthen our communities and our own wellbeing through poetry and healing-centered practices. We want to make things we cannot yet imagine.“
What is Typewriters Anonymous?
Typewriters Anonymous offers interactive poetry and typewriter workshops, installations and event activations that nurture connection, creative expression and belonging. Our work invites participants to tap into their creativity in an inclusive, community-focused and supportive process. Our work moves along a spectrum from individual artists sourcing words, stories, inspiration from spectators and crafting live poems on the spot, to customized workshops where artists serve as facilitators that guide groups to explore topics and build community through the creation of poems, collages, and other artworks.
We recently started hosting something we call Analog Hangouts where people gather and bring typewriters, or use one of ours to write poetry, make collages, and simply be human. It’s a space for people to slow down and be in the moment.
Typewriters Anonymous is born out of me and my lady wife Elisabeth’s creative journey and partnership. We are seasoned collaborators with strengths as event producers, emcees, healing-centered poets, program/curriculum designers. We believe in the magic of typewriters to help people unplug, experience flow, connection, and self-expression.
What led you to this work?
In the 80s I bought some typewriters because they were $5 at the yard sale and they came in a cool box. After some poets came and performed poetry at my high school, my life was changed forever and I knew I was going to be a performance poet. Over the years I would incorporate the typewriter into my writing and performances but I have to admit it was sheer demand for typewriters that has brought our project this far. And it makes a lot of sense. People are tired of their computers and cell phones. And despite the fact that social media is so much of our lives now, people feel more disconnected than ever. To be asked a thoughtful question and be listened to for a meaningful response, and then translating that emotional information into a typewritten poem, in real time, is a gift. It is a gift that a poet can give, sitting at a typewriter.
Elisabeth Nails (center, typing on grass) and Phillip T. Nails (right, typing on stage) co-founded Typewriters Anonymous.
In addition to providing a unique service, Typewriters Anonymous employs and showcases local artists and poets. Can you talk about how your project centers community and collaboration?
Thank you for this question and for seeing us. If moving to Los Angeles and continuing the path of the artist has taught us anything, it is to listen. We are not capitalists in a position to impose some grand scheme or vision of what we think should be. Instead, we ask questions, we try to provide useful additions to the conversation. We try to employ what writer Adrienne Maree Brown calls emergent strategy. It is in this way that we’ve tried to continue to build our project, to be a complimentary tool in the community where we are privileged enough to get to make art.
Additionally, when we work together we can thrive. It is not necessary to compete for clients and resources because there are so many interesting ways we can lift each other up. And to experience our project, is to be a witness to the ways in which we do this. A lot of connecting through shared experience.
What is your hope for this project in the next 5 years?
We want to thrive and we want to bring our collaborators with us. We want to bring poetry into places it does not traditionally appear. We want to strengthen our communities and our own wellbeing through poetry and healing-centered practices. We want to make things we cannot yet imagine. We want to continue to lift up the poet’s role in our society and we can do that by pushing out more art projects into the world.
Why do you feel that projects like this are important, particularly in dark times?
In many ways this is a legacy project. Not only do we use the typewriters to create poetry on the spot but we, lovingly, have these machines restored and worked on. When they break, we fix them. They need upkeep. Like a living thing. Like ourselves. Technology can lead us astray and make us feel disconnected to our humanity. But typewriters persist as good tools that can continue to be useful for the conversation we need to have right now. A conversation rooted in presence and sustainability.
We engage in commerce (another ancient practice) so that we can trade our gifts and skills. Our audience is typically a group of people who have been gifted the experience by one person who KNOWS, who GETS IT. They give this magical, poetic experience as a gift. And people are really changed by it. They feel seen, heard. This moment of mindfulness is really something that every brand in the world is trying to sell, with some “high end” contraption made of trash that will soon be swirling in the ocean. We just invite people to realize that YOU are the poetry.
To book us for your next event or party, head to our website! Feel free to write with any questions or ideas at info@typewritersanonymous.com.
