The background When the trailblazing Australian anthropologist Piers Kelly, the Indiana Jones of the minority writing system, began researching one of the many written forms of the Hmong languages of southeast Asia, he discovered something unusual and fascinating. Yes, as you’d expect, their writing mostly consisted of symbols we’d call “characters” or “glyphs” […]
My new book By Hand is already prompting such fascinating discussions–the term “crusade” has been bandied about–that I’ve decided to launch the By Hand Book Club (BHBC). It will build on the amazing success of the online Writing Beyond Writing Book Club, which arose out of the launch of Writing Beyond Writing and continued on […]
My new book By Hand explores the importance and benefits of writing by hand, especially in an age of digital tools and AI. To celebrate the art of handwriting, I’m holding a contest in which three winners—from any country in the world, whatever language they speak and whatever alphabet they use–will receive free copies of […]
It is remarkable how many of the roughly 300 scripts in use around the world have been created in response to dreams—at least 20. In some instances the dream involved a divine command to create a script for the dreamer’s community; in some cases it included actual shapes to be used as letters; in some […]
