Sarah Paul Ocampo:
Some might call The Typing Explosion a literary-performance group or performance art, but it was more like a girl band with writers instead of musicians. It started as a one-off in 1998—I had just met Sierra, and I had known Rachel for a long time—so I invited them over to my apartment, and we all brought our typewriters. It was a really easy birth … I had the basic idea, and we sat down and worked out the rest. We performed the next week at Zeitgeist Coffee in Pioneer Square (at that time located in the Washington Shoe Building), thinking it would be a one-time performance. We ended up performing for over ten years.
There are so many moments that stand out from our years as the Dianes of The Typing Explosion. (When we went into our hivemind typing pool to collaborate, each of us was named Diane. Not that anyone else knew that necessarily, as we didn’t speak aloud during our typing sessions, and no one was allowed to speak to us, and we communicated only through poetry and our intricate system of bells, horns, and whistles. But having a secret identity helped us enter that collaborative-performance space.)
Sarah Paul Ocampo:
The Typing Explosion consisted of writing poetry on demand, usually writing three poems at a time. There were rules displayed on an overhead projector that had to be followed, in order for audience members to receive their poems, and a massive black shredder that would be used if you didn’t follow the rules.
Sierra Nelson:
We had borrowed a giant Shredmaster—a truly horrifying-looking machine, heavy, looked like it might eat a finger—and if anyone broke our posted rules (many of which were borrowed from the pool: no shoving, no spitting, etc.) their poem-in-progress would be shredded. Mischievous friends would sometimes threaten to break a rule or mess with us, but people rarely did. Once they got there, people wanted their poem—when you see it being created right before your eyes, just for you, you want to know what it says. The fact that people rarely broke the rules I think speaks to the underlying thrill of poetry—what we hoped people would discover or remember from our shenanigans. We lured them in with the hoopla of our vintage costumes (this was before Mad Men), the clamor of our communiqués, and the electric pounding thrum of typewriters—but what was cranked out of our colorful machine was intimate, subversive, tactile, and person-to-person.
Sarah Paul Ocampo:
Participants had the choice of selecting a poem title we had typed and filed in a card catalogue, or they could write their own title. No title would ever be repeated. Each of us contributed to the poem—there was no pattern or routine for who wrote what. We spoke to each other through sounds and had a paper-passing technique that mimicked a secretarial corps de ballet. Each poem was dated and notarized by us, and signed for by the recipient. We kept the carbon copy and they got the original.
Sierra Nelson:
All of our mothers had been typists at one point in their careers; it was a job that many women found was the only work they could get in the ’50s and ’60s, and the anonymous typing pool of seemingly interchangeable women could be especially grim. We wanted to shed light on that history and also to upend it. We weren’t typing what you wanted: we were typing what we and the poem wanted. What you got was what you got; it was punk like that.
Sierra was the first secretary that the audience member would be introduced to in the lineup. She was the blonde—the happy-go-lucky, best-foot-forward, right-away-sir secretary. She took the title and started the poem.
Rachel, the redhead, sat in the middle. She was known as the zany one, the firecracker, the wild card. She had a whistle and kept us on track with our “union breaks,” clocking us in and out.
I was the brunette—the dark cloud, the office vamp at the end of the line. I stamped the completed poem with The Typing Explosion Union Local 898 stamp, dated it, and had the audience member sign it. Oftentimes we would pin the carbons behind us on outstretched pantyhose. (It was pretty grotesque, really.)
The Dianes all played different parts in pushing the poem through. Over the ten-plus years we performed, we calculated we typed about five thousand original poems.
After a few years of the sit-down typing, we ended up getting some grants and then branching out into theater installations and recordings. It was theater, it was sound, and it was writing. We performed with musicians, artists, dancers, drag queens … in bars, libraries, movie theaters, bookstores, art galleries.
Rachel Kessler:
I remember performing in Venice during the Biennale. It was the summer that hundreds, if not thousands, of old people dropped dead all across Europe from temperatures of 104 and on up. Nowhere was there air-conditioning. We were strolling around in a semihallucinatory state with our typewriters strapped to our chests (thanks to the beautiful cigarette-girl boxes John DeShazo made us), typing poems for people. An elegant older Italian woman came up to us and complimented our fashion, praising us especially for wearing pantyhose, regardless of the heat. I felt very proud, having impressed this beautiful woman, as the world dipped and swayed in fever.
Sarah Paul Ocampo:
San Francisco, the early aughts. We were performing at the Beauty Bar in the Mission. It was a great place for us, as the vibe was throwback and you could get your nails done while having a martini. Rachel and I stepped out to have a smoke when a bike messenger rode by and spit on Rachel and yelled, “Fucking yuppie!” Rachel, who I recall was wearing a pink wool two-piece skirt suit, her hair in an updo, yelled back, “I’m a secretary! From the sixties!” The injustice.
Sierra Nelson:
A collage of highlights from the years:
Typing outside for the tens of thousands who attended Bumbershoot. Some people waited in line for hours for a poem, and at one point it started to rain and Rachel’s electric typewriter started sending out sparks.
The Wave Books Poetry Bus tour. It was a literal bus that rolled into town with “Poetry Bus” written on its side, picking up and dropping off poets throughout North America, fifty cities in fifty days. The Typing Explosion did the Toronto to upstate New York leg, ending at DIA:Beacon. I remember a bemused John Ashbery getting up to the podium after we performed one night in DIA:Chelsea and saying, “Those ladies are a tough act to follow.”
Typing followed by waltzing in the ballroom of the historic Kalakala ferry, rain falling into buckets all around us, coming in through the holes in the boat’s ceiling and sides. That futuristic nautical behemoth operated from 1935 to 1967 and, in its prime, was featured at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
Performing at a Wieden+Kennedy party where Erykah Badu was the headliner, and a business guy creepily leering as he said, “Will you be my little secretary?”—as if nothing had actually changed in gender and power dynamics since the ’50s.
The surprise of sold-out shows at the On the Boards studio for Dear Diane—our first full-length theater piece, the script of which was based entirely on our collaborative poems written over the years. Directed by Jamie Hook and with stunning set design by Kathryn Rathke, it showed a day in the life of the typing Dianes: from waking up together in their shared bed with a rock band sleeping underneath, to sharing a brown-bag lunch with the audience, and later overthrowing Bossy-Boss, played by the incredible Sarah Harlett, to write poetry in solidarity in a kind of surrealist-socialist revolt. One key ingredient in that Dear Diane show was a magical polar-bear character that would bring the Dianes cocktails when they went to the swimming pool of their minds (with a tiny replica of a motel pool pulled from the filing cabinet) or offer hugs in the ladies’ lounge. In fact, this same polar-bear costume has played a part in many facets of Seattle’s cultural history and is on display at MOHAI.
In our commissioned cabaret show, Love, Exciting Love, at Capitol Hill Arts Center (in the building that now houses Velocity Dance Center), we explored “154 kinds of love,” most of them expressed through original songs and each with a different costume. In one part of the show, my then-eighty-year-old grandmother, Grandma Green—who had led quite a life and was known among friends for her psychic abilities—took live calls from our audience to answer love-life questions. I remember one gentleman—a local TV celebrity, in fact—asking if he would ever find love. Grandma Green started with some solid practical advice (“Do the things that you enjoy,” “Sometimes love is slow and there isn’t any reason”), but she ended with the pronouncement that if he was patient she could see love coming his way. A year later, we read in the paper that he was engaged!
Sarah Paul Ocampo:
I was working at Zeitgeist when the phone rang. I picked up, and the guy said he was calling from USA Today’s arts section, and he asked for me, Sarah Paul Ocampo. I thought it had to be some kind of joke; I didn’t even know that USA Today had an arts section. They’d read about us in a Seattle Times article that had been picked up by the Associated Press. They sent out a very thoughtful interviewer and did a color photo with a two-page article. We were crossing our arms in the picture with our “Rules” projected across our faces. We couldn’t have imagined this attention. At the time, we were actually losing money each time we typed (because of cabs, paper, ribbons, nylons). We didn’t have a manager, so we were trying not to pee our pants when we started getting interviews with Spin, Jane, Mademoiselle, Bust, Sunset, and Allure.
The day before a guy from People magazine came to interview us, we had done this amazing ’60s girl band–inspired photo shoot (a whole lotta beehives) with a great photographer they’d sent out. The next day the interviewer showed up to meet us two hours late, which I remember was a real drag because we had taken off work/gotten a babysitter to make this happen. The guy asked us why we didn’t have management and basically told us we’d never make it big if we stayed in Seattle. At this point, we told him he was an asshole, paid our tab with our tip money, and left. They never ran that article (or those photos!).
Rachel Kessler:
I remember an amazing burlesque show/reading with Michelle Tea that we performed in at the Speakeasy in Belltown. We opened with the opposite of burlesque, where I played a manual loop on an Unwound record while we all slowly put on our pantyhose. Like maybe nothing was happening and it took a very long time. The room was so quiet. Then we typed a lot of dirty poems, as per our participant’s requests. They were quiet but inside their minds they were filthy. Which reminds me of a terrifying performance in Bellevue where we stared at the audience as if they were our mirror while applying lipstick and the drunk husband of a journalist who we had offended started heckling us, like an irate mom idling in the station wagon: “WHAT are you DOING? WHAT is taking you so long?” Without blinking, Sarah Paul stared and honked her horn at him, somewhere out there in the darkened theater.
But good things can happen in Bellevue too. Our first audio poetry installation piece “Salon” premiered at the Bellevue Art Museum. We turned three hairdryer chairs into interactive sound sculptures, surrounded by the rest of the detritus of a hair salon from the late 1960s: handbags stuffed with what looked like rain bonnets and coupons that were actually poems, magazines that we had hacked and made into poems, as well as one hundred different nail polish jars labeled with our own invented color names, such as “Minimum Wage Red,” that made a list poem.
Sierra Nelson:
One of my favorite performances as The Typing Explosion was outside Bailey/Coy Books on Valentine’s Day 2003, I believe. It was freezing cold; I don’t think there was snow, but it felt on the verge, a rare thing for Seattle. We were bundled in late ’50s wool suits outside the store’s big front windows on Broadway, and probably wearing some of the elegant coats Rachel had inherited from her grandmother. I remember it was a weekday and we were typing in the early evening, so people could get love poems on their way home from work: our valentine to Seattle. We debuted our handmade Thirteen Love Poems and One Ugly One book that night to sell in the store, but the part I remember most was cranking out those new originals on our Smith Coronas for all the lovers and loners until it got too dark to see.
More than being a “literary-performance group,” I felt like we were in a band. A band of sister writers. We weren’t thinking about what we were doing; we were just doing it. Nobody told us we couldn’t, or if they did, we didn’t listen. We just kept saying yes. We went from doing nonverbal “type-ins” to creating evening-length theater pieces and installations, to publishing several chapbooks and touring the country, as well as performing with bands, artists, poets, dancers, and anyone else who seemed like a good time.
Rachel Kessler:
During the years we collaborated as The Typing Explosion, I got pregnant and had two small kids. Finding ’60s secretarial maternity garb was hilarious. It seemed like I was always either pregnant or sporting a broken arm or ankle, or both. We showed up for an interview with USA Today with a baby in a buggy—I was broke and couldn’t afford a babysitter. Making art with toddlers and infants suckling is challenging, and I do not know if I would have continued if it hadn’t been for this collaboration. Sierra and Sarah Paul would come over to my snot-encrusted apartment and joggle babies while we worked. We’d stick the baby in the ExerSaucer, and Ruby, at that time a toddler, would watch us rehearse, offering sage directorial advice: “Too much talking.” When we were overwhelmed with babies, we just stuck them in the show. Iris, as a four-month-old, appeared in Merry Christmas, Anyway as a sort of baby Jesus. When she started crying onstage, I nursed her briefly under my costume, then, after the scene, handed her off to my friend Mishy, backstage, who also happened to be lactating. My kids referred to my fellow Dianes, individually or as a team, as “Ser-Ser.” We were this cult of three female typists, writing collaborative poetry, flanked by infant daughters.
Sarah Paul Ocampo:
Occasionally, we had the opportunity to perform somewhere where the stakes felt a little higher. One of those times was performing for girls at King County Juvenile Detention. We had little time to load in and out, so we came dressed in our ’60s secretarial outfits. We went through the metal detector, got patted down—a guard counted our props and extras before we sat down to type. At first … nothing. But then one girl jumped in and seemed to break the spell. Later the librarian told us that girl was kind of in charge of the group, and if she hadn’t given her approval, we would’ve been sitting there without anyone participating for the duration. Like most titles that people wrote for themselves, the titles they wrote were personal: “The Chola That the Homies Call La Tiny,” “Baby Daddy,” “Cutter.” Afterward, we did a quick Q&A, and a woman asked us if we were hiring—we took that as a big compliment. As a side note, while the female inmates were being led out after the show so the males could come into the library, a good-looking (I’m guessing) seventeen-year-old lifted up his shirt, showed me his twenty-four-pack, and whispered to me, “I want you to remember this.” Okay … I will … Um, I do. Thank you.
Rachel Kessler:
We went on this epic tour of the King County Library System (who knew our county stretches all the way to Skykomish, Enumclaw, Muckleshoot, and Algona-Pacific!) with death metal band BlöödHag, who have been known to throw copies of Octavia Butler and Philip K. Dick sci-fi novels at kids while playing. Somehow, by the powers of my Tetris mind, we packed all our typewriters, overhead projectors, screens, card catalog, and the Shredmaster among the baby car seats in an old hatchback clown car nearly every day of April (National Poetry Month). That was the most money we ever made. It was fantastic to roll into a small town, sample the deep-fried delights of their fast food drive-ins, and be the bizarre women making noise in the library. One day I decided to get an IUD installed during my lunch break (I had just given birth to my second kid, it seemed like a good cutoff point) and then went on to our scheduled library appearance that afternoon experiencing pretty intense cramping. Sierra and Sarah Paul made me a button that said, “Kiss me! I got my IUD today!”