Dom Einhorn

I have never held one. My writing has always run alongside building companies rather than instead of it. The closest thing to a first commission is the one now in progress: a German-language essay on the Alsatian and Moselle Franconian languages, accepted by Die Rheinpfalz. Before that, everything appeared under my own name on my own terms, which is a different discipline, and an easier one.

Yes, in the late seventies and early eighties, on a French machine. Which means an AZERTY keyboard, and the specific misery of accented characters: é and è had their own keys, but circumflexes and cedillas involved dead keys and a certain amount of hope. The thing I actually remember is the cost of a sentence. On a typewriter you compose the whole thing in your head before touching a key, because correcting means correction fluid, a retype, or living with it. Writing on a screen let me start sentences without knowing how they end, which is faster and, I suspect, worse. There is a second thing. On a typewriter you cannot rearrange. The order in which you think is the order that appears on the page, and if the structure is wrong you retype it all. That produces a certain discipline about deciding the shape first. I would not go back. But when a paragraph is not working, I still find that the fix is usually to close the laptop and work out what the sentence is before writing it, which is a typewriter habit surviving in an unrelated machine.

Everyone talks about distribution. The change I have actually experienced is in collection. I published a short piece about a language disappearing, expecting a few hundred readers. Four hundred people replied, most of them in their seventies and eighties, and what they brought was not opinion. It was evidence: eleven separate accounts of the same slur, six accounts of school punishments, all six independently placing them in the playground rather than the classroom, one dated to 1949, one to 1956, one within the last decade. Four readers from Moselle corrected my framing and were right. None of that was hidden. It was distributed across a few thousand private memories that had never been assembled, because each person assumed their experience was a personal embarrassment rather than a policy outcome. No archive holds it. No historian could have collected it without years of fieldwork. That is genuinely new, and it is the good half. The bad half is that none of it is durable. A Facebook thread is unsearchable within a week and gone within a few years. I gathered a small original corpus on a platform that guarantees its disappearance, which is a strange thing to say about material documenting a disappearance. Everything of value has had to be moved somewhere permanent. So my working view: social media has become an excellent instrument for finding out and a terrible one for keeping. Journalism's job has shifted accordingly. The rare skill used to be access. Increasingly it is knowing what to lift out of an ephemeral place and put somewhere that lasts. The other change, which gets less attention than the misinformation argument: it collapses the distance between writer and correction. Being wrong in public used to take a week and a letters page. Mine took a day and improved the piece. I would not trade that back.