It’s amazing to me what a hunger there is for the activities we used to take for granted: drawing, sewing, cursive.
This week I taught the second of two workshops at the New York Public Library, with a focus on cursive handwriting. The participants spoke: they were less interested in the crafts from last week. They wanted more cursive.
We worked on three activities: lists, letters, and journals. First, we brainstormed what kind of lists we can make: to do, grocery, and new year goals were a few that came up. Then participants spent time writing their lists. Next, we spoke about letters – I had brought paper and envelopes – and discussed who we could write letters to. Friends, family, someone in the community were mentioned. Finally, we journaled: although we attempted the three full sheets of Morning Pages (Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way), this was tough in the time we had left. The goal was to finish one page.
At Artist & Craftsman, where I did a workshop last weekend, I had three ten-year-old students who had never had cursive instruction. They were delightful, and I could not believe how quickly they picked up the skill, simply using cursive alphabet tracing pages, and having lots of time to practice. Here’s the thing about cursive: like anything else, the more you practice the better you get.
Cursive handwriting is just one activity in what I refer to as the analog arts that so many of us are yearning for in our wholly digitally-overloaded world.