The reMarkable Paper Pro Move and the Poetics of Portability
I am no stranger to reMarkable. My relationship with these tablets began with the reMarkable 2, the first device that taught me what true focus felt like: not the brittle focus demanded by screens, notifications, tabs, and noise, but a quieter kind of attention. A room within the mind. A white page where thought could finally sit down and breathe.
Then came the Paper Pro, which became part of the architecture of my work. I used it for notes, edits, presentations, last-minute revisions, the kind of careful thinking that happens in the space between preparation and performance. My reMarkable tablets became, in many ways, my aids: diligent, discreet, ceremonial tools that helped me gather my scattered thoughts and place them in order.
So when the reMarkable Paper Pro Move appeared, I was not immediately enchanted by the idea. A smaller tablet, I thought, was still another tablet. The eagerness to add one more object to my life simply because it came in a more portable size was not there.
But as a neurodivergent person, I also knew something else: size is not always a detail. Sometimes size is the difference between having a tool nearby and leaving it behind. This had been my case more than once, because I do not like carrying a bag or backpack everywhere I go. I wanted something that could stay with me without requiring a second thought. Something small enough to become almost intimate. When I saw that the Move was promoted as pocket-sized, I decided to give it a trial by fire: taking it with me to La Feria del Libro de Chicago.
For me, presentations are never only presentations. They are crossings requiring memory, timing, voice, presence, and the ability to carry an entire inner landscape into a public room. My reMarkable devices have always helped me do this. I can read my notes from them. I can revise them moments before speaking. I can adjust a sentence, sharpen an image, soften an opening, or follow an intuition right before stepping in front of an audience.
The Paper Pro Move did all of that, since everything was synced with my other reMarkable. Seamless. Familiar. It did not feel like starting over with a new device, but like discovering that the years I had spent writing, revising, preparing, and thinking had quietly condensed into something I could now hold in my pocket. It felt like carrying an oracle.
But the surprise was not only how well it performed during my presentation. The surprise was what happened around it.
Because the Move was with me at all times, nested in the pocket of my blazer, I began reaching for it without ceremony. During panels, between conversations, in the little pauses where thought usually disappears if it is not caught, I found myself writing. Not because I had planned to. Not because productivity demanded it. But because the device was there, small and ready, like a notebook that had been waiting for my hand.
It had the feeling of a little field notebook, eager to document what would be savored later. A place for fragments, lines, observations. The beginning of an idea or the return of one. The kind of thought that arrives softly and leaves quickly if there is no place for it to land.
Then came the Paper Pro, which became part of the architecture of my work. I used it for notes, edits, presentations, last-minute revisions, the kind of careful thinking that happens in the space between preparation and performance. My reMarkable tablets became, in many ways, my aids: diligent, discreet, ceremonial tools that helped me gather my scattered thoughts and place them in order.
So when the reMarkable Paper Pro Move appeared, I was not immediately enchanted by the idea. A smaller tablet, I thought, was still another tablet. The eagerness to add one more object to my life simply because it came in a more portable size was not there.
But as a neurodivergent person, I also knew something else: size is not always a detail. Sometimes size is the difference between having a tool nearby and leaving it behind. This had been my case more than once, because I do not like carrying a bag or backpack everywhere I go. I wanted something that could stay with me without requiring a second thought. Something small enough to become almost intimate. When I saw that the Move was promoted as pocket-sized, I decided to give it a trial by fire: taking it with me to La Feria del Libro de Chicago.
For me, presentations are never only presentations. They are crossings requiring memory, timing, voice, presence, and the ability to carry an entire inner landscape into a public room. My reMarkable devices have always helped me do this. I can read my notes from them. I can revise them moments before speaking. I can adjust a sentence, sharpen an image, soften an opening, or follow an intuition right before stepping in front of an audience.
The Paper Pro Move did all of that, since everything was synced with my other reMarkable. Seamless. Familiar. It did not feel like starting over with a new device, but like discovering that the years I had spent writing, revising, preparing, and thinking had quietly condensed into something I could now hold in my pocket. It felt like carrying an oracle.
But the surprise was not only how well it performed during my presentation. The surprise was what happened around it.
Because the Move was with me at all times, nested in the pocket of my blazer, I began reaching for it without ceremony. During panels, between conversations, in the little pauses where thought usually disappears if it is not caught, I found myself writing. Not because I had planned to. Not because productivity demanded it. But because the device was there, small and ready, like a notebook that had been waiting for my hand.
It had the feeling of a little field notebook, eager to document what would be savored later. A place for fragments, lines, observations. The beginning of an idea or the return of one. The kind of thought that arrives softly and leaves quickly if there is no place for it to land.
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And then, without realizing it, I was no longer taking notes. I was writing pages and pages of a story I did not know had been living inside me. I am a poet, not a storyteller, or so I believed. There is a comfort to the Paper Pro Move that I did not expect. It does not present itself as a machine. It does not feel like a miniature version of something larger. It feels like its own creature. Light, attentive. I kept writing until the final period made me step back and recognize what had happened: this little tablet had not simply helped me work. It had accompanied me into myself.
That is what makes it different. My reMarkable Paper Pro feels like my helper, my diligent tool, my disciplined page. But the reMarkable Paper Pro Move feels like a companion. It feels like a hummingbird moving between the practical life and the poetic one, erasing the border I had placed between productivity and essence. With its blue folio, I have named mine Huitzilin: little hummingbird in Nahuatl. Small enough to rest against the body. Quick enough to catch a thought in flight. Bright enough to remind me that writing happens in the midst of observation. Sometimes writing is something that follows us, waits for us, and, when we least expect it, opens its wings. I am happy to share that the story my dear Huitzilin helped nest has now been published and can be read here. |
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