Introductions
About Me
My name is Greg Bales. 
I am an editor by trade and disposition. My partner Kathy and son Gabriel live with me, as do a dog named Newton and two cats, Jane and Mr. Bingley. Beneath our small apartment lies a network of tunnels inhabited by fat chipmunks.
I can be found elsewhere on the Internet in the following places:
What else is there to say?
- I’ve had photographs published in both the 2010 and 2011 editions of the Friends of Hickory Hill Park calendar and in galleries for Journal des Femmes and cooking.com (mine is the astronaut).
- During the summer of 2009, one of my cats was named prettiest cat in Iowa City.
- Digital is a state of being into which I am always becoming.
- There are always more projects than there is time to do them in. Could I have my sleep removed, I would. Kathy thinks I’m crazy for saying that.
About This Website
Amalgamated (the Blog)
This is not my first blog. From 2003 until the spring of 2009, I wrote semi-pseudonymously as “Hermit Greg” at a blog called Hermits Rock. For a small-time miscellany, it maintained a fair readership and lively commentariat. Subjects I wrote about there included:
- Dinner
- The metaphysics of assisted reproductive technology
- Paintings, books, movies, and other artwork
- Celebrity Scientology gossip
- Labor coverage in local news
- The novels of Henry James
- University press blogs
The list goes on.
This blog is also a miscellany, so don’t be surprised to see topics swell and subside with the tides of my interest. More or less constant throughout this blog are things professional: the pleasures and pains of working with writers and their writing, editing with grace, and the frustrations of writing.
About the Typewriter
The typewriter in the banner image is a Royal FP that belonged to my grandmother. It lived on her kitchen table most days, and every morning for longer than I have been alive she would write a few pages in her diary with it. Then, after breakfast, she would write a letter, usually to one of her children—one letter for each day of the week except Sunday. My grandfather had a typewriter, too, an IBM Selectric, and around the time I was in eighth grade and learned to type, I liked to feel them hum beneath my fingers. But for me his typewriter, though by then already being displaced by word processors, looked toward the future: with correction tape errors could be corrected swiftly and the keyboard was light enough that my fingers could fly across it. To use his Selectric was to know what my life would become. In contrast, her typewriter’s keys resisted me. It took strength and persistence to press them. Because of that resistance, because it was the only machine of its kind I had ever seen, because it was one of the few things in my grandparents’ house that was exclusively hers, that typewriter has always been of a world I could only enter by trying to imagine it.
