Thirteen years and two days ago, I found a typewriter in an antique store. Golden Girls is a rarity in a downtown Helena filled with random businesses, most that don’t last more than a year or two with the fickle nature of a small town and its ever shifting proclivities. It remains, while so many others have come and gone over the years, it remains a little yellow beacon on the corner across from the Post Office, and in truth, I would imagine 80% of the products inside have been there all along.
I remember stumbling into there, one chilly day at the end of March when it felt much more Winter than it did “almost Spring.” I remember carrying a used book I’d just found in the bargain bin down the road at Aunt Bonnie’s Books, another stalwart that has refused to fold despite the changing of the times. I saw her sitting there, right near the entrance up on top of a jewelry case, and I remember thinking “I wonder if there is still ink on the ribbon?”
I tore out the blank page before the title page on that book, a book I bought to make blackout poetry with, and risking getting asked to not touch, I cranked it in.
I’ve spoken at great length about what came next, how I just started typing, without thought, without editing, without even a whisper of forethought, and a poem fell out. THE poem fell out. The poem that would become Typewriter Series #1, only I didn’t know it at the time. The poem that would, more than almost anything else, change my life.
The way it felt to write without any hope of editing, without a backspace key, without spell check or the ability to swap lines around, erase them, change a thought at all, was liberation to my strange Autistic brain. It felt good. Really, really good.
I bought the typewriter. A late 1930s Remington Rand Seventeen that probably weighs 40lbs and meant I’d have to haul it around downtown back to my car. It was big, it was dusty, it had cobwebs inside the keys and the hammers, and it smelled like oil and time and words. It was perfect.
I started writing a new unedited, completely unfiltered poem every day after that. Once a day stuffing old book paper from books destined for the landfill, I’d stand and I’d pour it out. Whatever it was. It was for me, and at first I had not a single inkling of the idea to ever share them with anyone, ever. Lady G swooped in and changed that, and in the process, the rest of my life.
She suggested soon after that I scan the poems in, that I save them, that I post them to Instagram, despite at the time it being completely dedicated to the over-filtered snapshots of random people’s lives. I remember thinking that no one posted poetry on Instagram, no one wanted to read these strange little poems that fell from me. “They will,” she promised. And in a “if you build it, they will come,” Field of Dreams moment, I decided to try.
As usual, she was right.
The snowball started to pick up steam slowly at first but then kind of dropped down the cliff and really started to howl. People everywhere started reading, started sharing, started wanting more of them. In what can only be explained as happenstance, luck, and being the only one doing it at the time, things kind of blew up. I decided to sell signed prints (something I’m still doing today, though so few buy nowadays) and within the first two months, had sold almost $25,000 worth, shipping them all over the world and recording every order manually on a notebook.
In another turn of happenstance, one day whilst shipping the orders out at the Post Office right across the street from Golden Girls, a newspaper reporter for the Helena Independent Record was standing behind me. They heard the postman asking where this batch of poems was heading (they knew me pretty well by that point) and asked what deal was. A few weeks later, they ran a story on it.
A few celebrities becoming fans, a lot of luck later, and somehow I had a literary agent (the amazing Rachel Vogel that still represents me today) and three major publishers competing with one another to publish my very first book, Chasers of the Light.
I still cannot understand how, or why, or any particular reason that all of that happened, but I know it unlocked the rest of my life. The rest of Sarah and I’s life together. It’s sent us on book tours all around the world, it’s introduced us to thousands of people in hundreds of places, some we still call friends and family to this very day. It helped us book more weddings with people that began as fans of my writing, it’s helped us to travel to them, to share their special days with them, to follow up years later and photograph their new children as they added them to the family.
All we’ve done, all we’ve seen, honestly, because of that first poem in that antique store 13 years ago.
Poetry unlocked our lives, it graced us with the opportunities that I truly do not know would have come otherwise. I think 99% of success is luck, as talent is never, ever, an indication or predictor of actually succeeding. Some of the most insanely talented people I’ve ever met still haven’t been given the ridiculous opportunities that I have (I’m looking RIGHT AT YOU
) and I cannot find the logic in that. I can be thankful, I can count all my lucky stars that somehow, some magic how, this happened to me, but I still cannot make sense of it.I don’t know what will come from here, I do know that since that day 13 years ago, social media has been completely overrun with people doing precisely what I do, often stealing my actual words in the process, and I know the market is saturated. I know too that not everyone wants to hear from yet another straight white male poet, even if this one is neurodivergent and bizarre and intensely prolific in his output in a way that he cannot even control.
I do know I have another book of poetry coming out in the Fall of 2025, and I do know I am very, very excited for it. I do know I’ll need your support in a way I’ve never needed it before, that the more of you that choose to pre-order it will directly control if I ever get to publish another book again. I have big ideas for it, I want to show the world that the words that fall from this bizarre brain still have a place, that poetry still has a place, and that though things have slowed down, they haven’t stopped here. That our life still has some twists and turns ahead, and that there is still so much I see, that I want to show to you.
For now, I just want to say thank you. Thank you to all of you for these thirteen years of joy, of wanderlust, of magic. Thank you for reading the poetry I write, for reading these essays, thank you for upgrading your subscriptions and helping keep this place alive, I could not have done it, I could not be doing it, without you.
Bottom line, take the chances, take the risks, buy the typewriters, write the poems. You never, ever know what is waiting around the very next corner for you, you never know what’s coming. Be there when it does, be there when time catches up and you fall right into the loving arms of that 1% that gets graced with luck.
You never know. You just never know.
Thank you, for 13 years of magic.
If you enjoy this, please take two seconds to click the Heart to Like it at the bottom, and ReStack it or Share it. This really helps my work get seen by more people and helps this place grow.
Ancient typewriter
and a blank sheet of paper.
My whole life began.
Share this post