Typo-fobia [sic]

Every writer needs an editor, whether the writer is churning out words on a keyboard or squeezing frosting from a tube.

I celebrated my birthday at the MET Museum in New York City the first day the restaurant was open post-pandemic. The cookie plate finisher was warming back up.

Back in the 1980s, when writers wrote on typewriters and spellcheck was manual and required a dictionary, Liz Porter and I had a talented, nit-picky editor for our first-ever craft book. She caught all the math errors (we didn’t make many), but she missed a couple of doozies on the back cover.

Not only were we misidentified in the author photo, the word “grammar” was misspelled in the paragraph about how we both had English degrees.

Classic Quilted Vests (1982) sold for $7.00. Liz Porter and I split about .35 in royalties per copy. Luckily, the first printing, 20,000 copies, sold fast, and corrections could be made.

Both Liz Porter and Marianne Fons are accomplished needlewomen. They have won blue ribbons for quilting in Iowa State Fair competition and top prizes in other contests. Both hold degrees in English but enjoy teaching patchwork, appliqué and quilting much more than grammer. [sic]

They began teaching as a team, and, though they both teach on their own now, still enjoy working together. [sic, re commas]

Liz and Marianne live on farms in rural Iowa, about twenty miles apart, but fortunately, in the same telephone district. [sic, loved those commas]

Pine Creek Ltd., one of the wonderful retail shops on Winterset’s town square, offers great lamps, furniture, rag rugs, cushions, and clocks, among other home decor items. Their setup for Christmas is gorgeous.

Pine Creek owners Bill and Larry resisted selling me “MERRY CHCISTMAS,” but I prevailed. In a family of writers, it occupies a place of honor every holiday season.

At QuiltCon this year I spotted a clever, resonant button on the lapels of several attendees and managed to track down its creator, Teresa Fiehn Milles.

I sported my “Quilters Against Fascism” button Saturday, April 5, at the “Hands Off” march from the Civic Center to the Iowa State Capitol in downtown Des Moines.

When I communicated with Teresa about buying a second batch of buttons to give to my quilty friends, she told me she had made a typographical error on a recent order from the supplier but would soon have correct buttons in stock.

We are likely to misspell words with pesky spellings when they are words we don’t use very often.

Hey, quilty friends, you can order buttons directly for Teresa here. Or, if you’d like one from my stash, become a paid subscriber at the lowest lever ($5 per month), and I’ll mail you one as a thank you.

I’m one of over 70 professional writers, journalists, and musicians that comprise the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check us out here and think about becoming a paid subscriber to one or two. If you are interested in what’s going on in Iowa at the state level, love nature, and appreciate thoughtful writing, I recommend Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture by Robert Leonard. He’s the guy I walked to the Capitol with on Saturday. We met in person for the first time that day.

You can see the gold dome of the State of Iowa Capitol building in the far background. (Left, yours truly. Right, Bob Leonard.)

Please, if you run across a typo in this column, don’t hesitate to tell me.