TCJ: You write everything by hand, do I have that right?
Rachel Pollack: Absolutely. With fountain pens. Antique and modern fountain pens. It’s my great passion to collect them. I have way too many!
It’s an interesting process because writing by hand with a fountain pen in a beautiful notebook is very intimate. You get really deep into it. My handwriting is terrible. I write very fast and everyone who’s ever lived with me or been close to me has had the same recurring fear – that I’ll die and leave behind an unfinished manuscript that’s not been typed up and they won’t be able to read it to type it up. I have to really struggle to read it which forces me to get into it again very deeply. It’s part of the process. And then however many revisions after that I just revise on the printout and in the computer.
TCJ: This is how you’ve always written everything?
Pollack: Yeah because I’m really really old. [laughs] When I started sending stuff out, we didn’t have computers. I remember my first one wasn’t even called a computer, it was a word processing machine. The software was so limited that they had to dedicate the machine to that purpose. I’m a classical old person. I’m sick of these new ways of doing things. I don’t want to keep changing!
— (via)