Journal-ism

A file drawer (one of several!) full of my journals. (SOOC)

I've been chatting with PeckhamBelle (see Comments) about keeping a journal.
Here are a few further thoughts.

I don't know what to do with my latest journal, which only has a few remaining pages to be filled, because there's no room in this drawer to cram a single book more. I have filled a four-drawer file, and have already overflowed into several other drawers. Well over a hundred volumes altogether, including some that are computer printouts. Yikes.

As I read, I often copy quotations in my journal, things that impressed me in some way that I'd like to save. Many times I've gone into an old journal and found, in someone else's words or my own, just what I needed to set me on the right track that day.

Shown above on the left, a journal from 1990 with a self-portrait painted in acrylic on the cover; on the right, a journal from 2010 with a collaged cover showing a detail of another artist's work. Here are a few excerpts chosen at random.

1990: Finding my writer's voice

"For as long as I can remember, I've written in two voices. My 'fiction voice' is vivid, intense, exciting to read, challenging to write. It emerges when I write for readers other than myself in letters, essays, stories, poems. Occasionally it appears in my journal. My 'journal voice' is mundane, pedestrian, colorless, interior. When I read it, I cringe. I write 'blah blah blah.' I ask myself why my fiction voice is so elusive, why it avoids my journal book but stands ready to greet me at my computer. No matter how often I ask, no answer comes. ¶ Today, I glimpse an answer. My 'fiction voice' is the voice of metaphor and symbol. It's the voice that flows from the Underground Stream, the river of myth, the creative source, the spiritual source, the universal source. It's the voice that coalesces and creatively combines my feelings, my memories, my observations of people and nature. Nature is the source I can touch whenever I want to dip into that stream. I spend portions of every day observing nature, but rarely record what I see. I thought I had to paint it. What if I wrote it instead?"

2010: Oy, that novel! (Written during National Novel Writing Month)

"MODICUM is one of those old-fashioned words that appears most often in a single expression. In this case, 'modicum of success.' That's what I finally achieved today, working on the outline of my novel. I gave myself a week to actually begin writing, and it appears I will take two. I felt I couldn't just being writing chapters regardless of order, and it appears I was wrong and could have made much progress simply by diving in. But what I've chosen to do has been prayerfully chosen. I've moved in the direction that seemed the only one open to me. It has become a great labor! I'm having to overcome a powerful force of resistance whose source remains a mystery to me. But I persevere. I keep finding older and older mentions of being led to write a spiritual autobiography, going back at least to 1988. That's more than a score of the appointed threescore years and ten. I persevere because I CAN'T NOT FINISH THIS RACE, though my breath is ragged and there are blisters on my feet. I WILL, WITH GOD'S HELP."

Godspeed to all keepers of journals, sketchbooks, scrapbooks, and drawers full of poems à la Emily Dickinson. May this practice bring you joy, wisdom, and peace.