First Person
The Irregular Art of Keeping a Journal
Dear Kay,
I’m looking forward to this Friday’s journaling workshop with Felix Ford. It’s just the thing I’m craving right now, as a longtime keeper of a journal.
I’ve kept journals ever since fourth grade when I used a Kate Greenaway birthday book as a diary of one-sentence entries. I didn’t really get what a birthday book was all about, which may explain why I continue to be terrible at remembering people’s birthdays. “Nothing happened” on at least five days.
Turns out 1973 was kind of a drag.
When eighth grade hit, and I lost the student council election to Rod Hagwood, the agony of that loss led me to grab a spiral-bound notebook and start writing. I kept going through 18 more spiral-bound notebooks, all the way through the appalling thing with Ben Swift, my parents’ divorce, that time I got arrested for drinking beer in Centennial Park, the death of my mother, and the many margins where I practiced my autograph and drew pictures of shoes.
There was the journal in 1998 after we lost our baby.
Another one when somebody in the family got really sick.
Then there’s the journal that began after my dad died in 2021. That’s the journal I’ve kept going since then. It’s a daily habit at this point, one sentence or five pages, in a stack of notebooks. Picking the next color is a nice moment.
Are you seeing a pattern here? When the going gets rough, it helps me to write down all the swirling thoughts that make me dizzy. Writing fast—not on a computer, but on paper—has forever been a way for me to sit with the hard things and catch them on a page.
I got over Rod Hagwood winning student council president; he was a wise and noble leader of the eighth grade. The rest of it? We carry the heavy loads forever, but these journals show me things about myself that I revisit with different eyeballs, with the distance of years or months or, sometimes, just a day.
What I like about Felix’s approach to keeping a journal is her belief in extreme flexibility. Her workshop is going to be a time to look back and look ahead, right here at the end of one year and the start of a new one.
Love,
Ann
Thank you for sharing the art of journaling. Julia Cameron, in particular, highlights the practice of journaling in The Artist’s Way as imperative to a creative life. I am eager to learn more diverse journaling methods. I have been curating accoutrements for the class. Appreciate MDK offering this course to continue enhancing and flourishing a simple, appearing at times complicated, life:)
Three weeks ago I packed up 90 years of what we call journaling from my mom’s house and held my breath/curled my toes as I trusted them to UPS. 10 boxes arrived in my driveway the day after Thanksgiving. Mom began diaries when she was 15 in 1935, entries beginning “I went to school.” After 6 years, she switched to the New England Calendar and when that was no longer published, Sierra Club calendars. “Carbonspondence”, carbons of every letter she ever typed, are in binders by year. She also catalogued every card or letter she ever received. All the letters between my parents during the wars (II and Korean) were also saved. Aside from capturing “the hard things”, journals may also embrace a whole family’s history.
I wish I still had my childhood journals. They were lost in one of our many moves when I was in high school. I do have my oldest daughter’s baby book somewhere, never fully completed.
Something about the process of writing with pen and paper helps me organize and clarify my jumbled thoughts. I keep separate work and personal journals, but sometimes there’s overlap, especially when things get really rough and the rubber meets the road. Journaling has helped me work through serious depression and a host of trials as my kids (and my work kids!) grew up.
I highly recommend Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method. It’s actually pretty similar to what I was doing on my own ever since my grade school days, and it’s very flexible. I use 3 ring binders for even more flexibility in my work journal.
Yes! Writing on paper has been a companion since I was in 3rd grade. Little poems written on top of metal radiator cover until the heat chased me away. I’m looking forward to Felicity’s workshop to refresh the course I took with her. Thank you, Ann, for capturing all the threads of joy, laughter, and agony that that are sewn into the bindings of journals.
Ann, I am impressed with your relatively consistent journaling! I started with the diary with the tiny key, and have never been good at keeping up. I wish I’d started Felicity’s method many years ago. My current BuJo has big gaps, but now I know that’s perfectly OK. I just pick it up and start again, even if I didn’t write a single thing in August or November! In the past that would have derailed me and I’d have to wait until the next Jan. 1 to start again. I alway felt if I didn’t do it the “right way” I had to start over. I’m looking forward to Friday’s class to both refresh and recharge my journaling process.
I did this course in 2020 during lockdown and it was just what I needed then. I’m still practicing using Felix’s gentle, flexible prompts!
I have journals going back to the 1970s. What do we do with all of them. Lots of bad poetry, tender hearts and a pretty myopic view as befits a 14 yo in those reopening years.
No, really, what do I do with all of them?
I have that same question. Years and years of notebooks. Do I want to read them? What about my daughters? Probably not. So … build a giant bonfire? Shred pages into mulch? Allow moth and rust to destroy?
Depending on whether you are okay with your diaries being open to the public, a local history center may be interested. I donated diaries my mother and aunt kept during their high school years in the 1930s to the library’s local history collection. (And my sister and I enjoyed reading them as we created transcripts. She read them aloud over the phone and I typed. No transcript required to donate them, but it does make it much more accessible to researchers–especially younger ones without much experience reading cursive!)
Oh, Ann, thanks for sharing this. I similarly started journaling as a tween and the practice saw me through so many tumultuous times. In recent years I’ve been very inconsistent about it, and lately I’ve been missing it so much. Thanks for this reminder. Particularly that one sentence a day can be enough!
A perfect letter from Ann for my day today. As a lapsed journal writer, I just know that writing would help me get thru the scaries my family’s facing right now. The empty notebooks are on the shelf waiting for me…thanks for the nudge. (And Ann would’ve been a better president than what’s-his-name).
I tried to do an emoji but it didn’t work. I couldn’t agree more!
I love your chronicles of journaling, Ann. Beautiful stuff, the happy and sad. I have a few of my elementary diaries, full of misspelled words and i’s dotted with little hearts. Stories about tornadoes and snowstorms (divorce too) and 8th grade crushes. The High School diaries are where things get infinitely embarrassing. But it’s all beautiful, all real. In 2020, I dove into daily writing as soon as I realized school had been Completely Canceled and that we were living through a major Life Event. This became our family’s Quarantine Diaries and it currently sits in an InDesign file that is 109 pages long. (Reading it now is a trip.) I can’t wait for Felix’s class and I’m ready to start a new era of daily writing.
I too am looking forward to the workshop. Unfortunately I will need to view it later as I will be with the Grandkids that day.Too many lovely activities at this time of year.Loved her initial course!
dear Ann,
Though the specifics are different (the first of my *91* [not sure how I should feel about that number….perhaps it’s being an only child… ] notebooks was begun at Monte Vista Elementary — the archetypal “My Diary” with a little lock and key), I found your post so moving, so poignant.
My gosh, what a lovely piece of writing.
I’m eager for Friday’s class. I adore Felix for her completely freeing and joyous and deeply honest approach to… everything.
Very grateful to you and Kay, and Felix, for bringing this to us, for bringing so much to us. xo