Franki Elliot Sells Stories at Venice Beach

Franki Elliot, author of Piano Rats, is one beaming street vendor at Venice Beach. She sells stories, written on her elite manual typewriter—if a typewriter could be seen the same way as technology. The point is, it doesn’t fail because she is able to write stories on the spot for anyone and everyone who can come up with a subject theme.

This is navel gazing at its best. Something about writing on a typewriter transcends blogging. Elliot is able to illustrate and provoke thought in a story that is not much longer than a tweet, something that is cherished among writers and readers.

She is fearless, setting up shop all the way from Chicago to work for tips as all Venice Beach vendors do. The intimacy between her stories and the reader is very real. The L.A. Weekly writes, “Less than a year after indie publisher Curbside Splendor printed her first book, Piano Rats, Elliot is spending the summer in Los Angeles to compose free-form verse on her 1960s Smith Corona Corsair Deluxe. Saturday was the first time she brought her ‘live typewriting’ to a city outside Chicago.”

Typewriter Stories is as much a promo thing as it is pulp for her next project. It’s truly ingenious.

Once you read some of her stories, you’ll want her to write you one too. Pithy literature is nothing new, but it is new to a young crowd of children. A lot of kids ask Franki to whip up a story for them, perhaps their first encounter with a typewriter ever, in fact.

In the so-called Hemingway challenge, authors wrote a six word minuet of a story to compare to Hemingway’s. Rumor has it he considered this writing his best work: “For sale: baby shoes, never used”

In these mere six words Hemingway was able to provoke mystery and a fragile literary response as to “what ever happened to this baby”? Instead of gouging out a story that so often is the case in writers, he left the most important part open to interpretation.

Somehow this literature is able to transcend the most common form of short writing. Franki Elliot is very much a creative contributor to this culture.