Being a dedicated week in April when I take over the doctoral suite in my College of Education for Boone, North Carolina’s biggest, baddest type-in.

The pictures never get the vibe across. You can see how handsome my machines are (I know, right?). You can see a bunch of young people confronting those same machines. But you can’t hear how a room of students drops in: how a few minutes of “where’s the 1?” and “how do I erase?” dissolves into a perfect near-silence. That’s the sound of genuine interest, people. I know–we don’t hear it much in school anymore.

I have heard this sound a lot. Nothing else sounds like it. You probably think it clatters like an old-timey newsroom in here, but you’re wrong. Folks aren’t sure enough of themselves or their machines yet, for one thing–and they are rarely applying enough foot-pounds to the keys to raise the din.

Instead, it is pretty quiet. It is the sound of a task perfectly meeting someone who finds themselves actually wanting to do it. It is the sound of a person encountering an object familiar and strange all at once, and wanting to find out where the threshold is.

It is the sound of humans in the real world wanting to do something that reminds them they are in the real world, rather than suggesting they escape from it.

Setting up the machines and telling everyone about them creates new energy. Suddenly other professors are wondering if they could bring a group in at ten-thirty, because what they had planned to do might be more awesome on typewriters. They really don’t know what will happen–but why not find out?

Maybe it’s the heat and the sunlight as winter finally fades in these mountains; maybe it’s the first pollen gone to all our brains. We don’t know how the students will respond, but we have got to roll the dice.

Remember not knowing what would happen next in class? And how the excitement / risk pulled you in along with them, to go on the ride? Remember doing something really for real, for the first time?

But the best has to be midweek, when folks have begun telling their friends about it. That is when students just start dropping by, in groups of two or three or solo, and sit down without a word and do their thing for a while, then take their pages and leave.

I give them space, but I can see the contours of their focus. Could be a letter, looks like a poem; pages of single-spaced reflections, screeds, a short story. Sometimes there’s something in the Notes app on their phone open on the table next to the machine; sometimes it’s all first draft, new stuff happening right now.

In these moments the room feels like something sacred. Like a portal we’ve managed to pry open, just for a few days, through which someone can find a part of themselves they had forgotten about for a long time.

Beneath the notifications and comments and likes, maybe there is something hard and shiny. Maybe you want to reach down and hold it up to the light and turn it in your hand. Maybe this typewriter can help you do it.

Why don’t you come on up and find out? We’re open all week.