The Possession Project Kelly Crowe

Amid our chaotic jumble of possessions, there is usually a shoebox in the attic, perhaps many boxes, filled with cards and letters, handwritten fragments of a life. These notes, diaries and journals are uniquely personal records that preserve our stories like fossils for future historians, biographers and archivists. But it’s a vanishing resource as pen and ink are replaced by texting, emailing, and voice messaging—digital communications that are transient and vulnerable to technical obsolesc...

This episode of The Possession Project is a story about the revealing traces of identity and personality that we leave on our former possessions, told through the history of a typewriter. There’s something appealing about a typewriter—its mechanical precision, its ingenious design, the distinctive tap tap tap of a human thought made suddenly visible, stamped in ink on a piece of paper. The mystique of the typewriter has something to do with the magnetic aura of writers and the physical e...

There’s something profoundly unsettling about watching a piano being pushed off the back of a truck. The awful shuddering noise as it flies though the air and lands on the garbage pile. And then there’s the silence as it lays there, a hulking carcass, keyboard face down among the rolls of old carpet and the rest of the household trash. This sad fate awaits many old pianos. I discovered this by accident, while browsing some online buy ...