Forgotten Manuscripts

＂Sergio Chejfec is an admirable writer.＂ --Patti Smith

＂Could anyone possibly believe that writing doesn’t exist? It would be like denying the existence of rain.＂

The perfect green notebook forms the basis for Sergio Chejfec’s work, collecting writing, and allowing it to exist in a state of permanent possibility, or, as he says, ＂The written word is also capable of waiting for the next opportunity to appear and to continue to reveal itself by and for itself.＂

This same notebook is also the jumping off point for this essay, which considers the dimensions of the act of writing (legibility, annotation, facsimile, inscription, typewriter versus word processor versus pen) as a way of thinking, as a record of relative degrees of permanence, and as a performance. From Kafka through Borges, Nabokov, Levrero, Walser, the implications of how we write take on meaning as well worth considering as what we write. This is a love letter to the act of writing as practice, bearing down on all the ways it happens (cleaning typewriter keys, the inevitable drying out of the bottle of wite-out, the difference between Word Perfect and Word) to open up all the ways in which ＂when we express our thought, it changes.＂

**Sergio Chejfec **was a fiction writer and essayist born in Argentina. Between 1990 and 2005 he lived in Caracas. He was writer in Residence in the M.F.A. Creative Writing program in Spanish at New York at the time of his death. His books include: Modo linterna (short fiction, 2013), La experiencia dramática (novel, 2012), Sobre Giannuzzi (essay, 2010), Mis dos mundos (novel, 2008), Baroni, un viaje (novel, 2007). He writes about memory, the idea of experience and urban perambulation. He has published various essays and short stories in diverse anthologies and collections. He has been translated into English, French, German, Turkish and Hebrew. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Resident of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Jeffrey Lawrence is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, where he teaches modern U.S. and Latin American literature and culture. He is the author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (Oxford, 2018) and the translator of Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America (Restless Books, 2016). His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Words Without Borders, _ BOMB Magazine_ and The Puerto Rico Review as well as in numerous academic journals.