Eight people sat in Sally Loo’s coffee shop in San Luis Obispo, drinking coffee and working on their computers. One man sat and typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. The sounds of the machine joined in to the chorus of chatter, clicking and dinging away.
Sally Loo’s was just one of six locations for Typing in Public, an ongoing written collaboration of celebrity writers, artists and locals said Catherine Trujillo, one of the project’s creators.
At Steynberg Gallery, Francesca Nemko looked on as people sat and typed by the window.
At the San Luis Obispo Public Library, Anna and Dan Gold ushered people over to the typewriter sitting on the table in the middle off the room.
“This project belongs to the community,” Trujillo said. “It’s important that people know that San Luis Obispo has things like this. Events like this don’t just happen in big cities.”
Trujillo got the idea for Typing in Public after her project last year, Reading in Public, was such a success, she said. People read passages from books and poetry aloud in various places downtown.
This year, Trujillo wanted to do something slightly different, she said. The project has received online responses from people in Florida, Michigan and even parts of Canada.
“It’s our way of celebrating the written word,” Trujillo said. “The way people write might be changing but it definitely isn’t going away.”
In hopes of encouraging the public to write, Trujillo got prompts from Dr. Paul Frommer, creator of the Na’vi language for the movie “Avatar,” Paulo Coelho, author of “The Alchemist,” Gerald Casale from Devo, and more.
Last Saturday, Trujillo, along with a team of volunteers, took Typing in Public to the streets of San Luis Obispo. Typewriters were located at BlackHorse Espresso, Linnaea’s Café, Sally Loo’s Café, the San Luis Obispo Public Library, Steynberg Gallery and the Sanitarium.
Volunteers sat at the six different locations in San Luis Obispo, where members of the public sat and typed their thoughts and responses to writing prompts from celebrity writers and community members on old-fashioned typewriters, Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
“Feel free to sit and type,” read booklets placed at each location. “It can be something you’ve authored, or if something in this booklet piques your interest, please build on it. Type your own version of how it should continue.”
In addition to responding to the prompts, people sat down and wrote poetry, famous quotes and letters to loved ones. Everyone that sat down had a chance to go back in time and work on a piece of history.
Stephanie Stein, a psychology freshman, sat down in the library to type a letter to her pen pal. Because of e-mail and other technology advances, she hasn’t written a letter in ages, she said.
“The typewriter is much more tactile,” Stein said. “I have to be more methodical with it. Computers are much more frantic.”
By the end of the day, Typing in Public had collected more than 500 hand-typed poems, quotes, letters and other writings from the typewriters, Trujillo said.
Trujillo, who said she has been working on this project for months, contacted approximately 20 celebrity writers to send in prompts. Of the 20 celebrity writers and artists she contacted, approximately 12 responded to the project with writing prompts.
Over the past few weeks, people have been responding to the prompts via Twitter, text messaging, and posting on the Typing in Public website, Trujillo said.
At 6 p.m., Trujillo, along with several of the project’s volunteers read selected responses from people who sat at the typewriters throughout the day at the Sanitarium, a local Bed and Breakfast.
“We had so many responses we couldn’t read them all,” Trujillo said. “We had to pick out some of our favorites.”
At the end of the day, volunteers collected the typewriters and headed over to Sally Loo’s for the public reading.
Trujillo’s daughter Elizabeth was one of the readers at the end of the day. Her favorite was a letter a girl named Sara wrote to her sister, she said.
“It was really sweet that she could sit in public and share that in front of strangers,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what I should write.”