Jean Miller

Jean Miller is a poet, word processor, student and teacher. She just completed the teaching of a course on the writings of Gertrude Stein, at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in if and Feminist Poetics.


Working Notes, Jean Miller:

This is one of a suite of pieces dealing with/about/related to work. It is hard work to write about work when you work at a job that you don't like, especially if it is boring. I work 37.5 hours a week as a word processor in a legal office. This piece was written while I was at work--it is really a meditation on the word "work," letting the language do the telling--and was composed on a computer which has a program for checking to see if you have spelled the words correctly. If it finds words it does not recognize it gives you all the alternatives it can "think" of or tells you that it can find none. I incorporated these mechanical choices into the text as they came up. I think the computer has funny ideas about words. Once it gave me- doughnuts and toenails as two alternatives to the word doubtful.


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