Journaling as Responsibility

And poetry as by-product

Hi Pals.

I’ve been traveling to see family, reading poetry, and protesting in LA since I last wrote to you and I’m thinking about you. You okay over there?

I love a view from the plane. This photo looks like a 1970s album cover and also, if you look closely you can see Julia Louise Dreyfus in VEEP on my monitor reflected in the window, like some kind of comedy angel.

So, let’s jump in.

From May 31st to June 13th,

Jami Attenberg

hosted her annual #1000WordsOfSummer creative writing challenge and fundraiser and I participated in it again. This time I was reading and revising a draft I’ve been toiling on for a few years now. (Some people are fast readers and writers, I’m not one of them, you know this by now.)

As part of Jami’s challenge, she includes letters from writers who offer words of humor, encouragement, and camaraderie to get through the 2 weeks of writing boot camp. On Day 13, writer Aria Aber shared her words that will stay with me, maybe forever. I want to share this segment on what she discovered while journaling and then this poem for today.

Aber’s words:

“Re-reading those entries now, I understand I am keeping a record of what is happening to my inner world while the masks of the empire begin to crumble away. Maybe that’s all we can hope for when we write: to witness what happens around and within us. To diagnose, to examine the contradictions between our hopes and the ruins of our reality, the language, the chaos, the noise, the wounds of imperial violence, the grief, and the senseless deaths. This world you live in does not want you to be silent or quiet or still enough to listen to the voice inside of you, the voice that asks you what it means to be a human on earth. As a writer, you must do everything to resist the destruction of this question––out of it grows your soul, your hope, your imagination. You must read the world.”

Photo by Laura Kapfer on Unsplash

Some people journal to figure out their inner landscape, some to make meaning of the world, some to unclog their creative pipes so they can get to the good stuff. It’s why Julia Cameron’s recommendation to write Morning Pages in her legendary book, THE ARTIST’S WAY, hits with so many of us. Many resist journaling/writing morning pages because it’s uncomfortable (or frankly, because they don’t have time), but for those of us who worked our morning pages into our daily lives, it’s a blessing. And it’s a responsibility. You can’t ignore the truth, yours or the world’s, when you are addressing it daily, when you are getting dirty with your words for no one else to read.

I recently listened to Joan Didion’s NOTES TO JOHN, a collection of notes and diary entries, read by Julianne Moore, and while the first 30 minutes of it were truly boring to me, (fun fact, journaling can also be very boring and repetitive while we work out our words) the more journal entries that were read, the more the pieces created a full picture of her as mother, wife, writer, aunt, celebrity, and friend. Not only that, we read (or hear) what’s going on in the world that also shapes her point of view. She mentions her niece’s murder, and I bring this up for a reason.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading literary novel, A Gorgeous Excitement, by Cynthia Weiner, which was inspired by the Preppie Murder in 1986. Together, these 2 books give me a snapshot of New York’s Upper West Side in the 1980 — both drawing on real world events and written about privately first. (Weiner was a friend of the deceased and has been figuring out how to tell the inspired-by story for quite a while.)

So, journaling is a form of paying attention, and as we’re all being told constantly now, our focus is being commodified and short-sheeted. Maybe journaling is the last private place on earth to untangle a thought about society without feedback, critique, or trolling - and the last safe place to test our creativity without judgement.

The poet William Stafford wrote about journaling, and how it deepened his life, and I feel kinship with it. Maybe some of you do, too. Or maybe it will motivate you to pick up your pen when you need and try it out. Finding a good, simple quiet place in our noisy, anxious, chaotic world can be a relief, a privilege, and a responsibility all wrapped up into one these days.

KEEPING A JOURNAL 
by William Stafford

At night it was easy for me with my little candle
to sit late recording what happened that day. Sometimes
rain breathing in from the dark would begin softly
across the roof and then drum wildly for attention.
The candle flame would hunger after each wafting
of air. My pen inscribed thin shadows that leaned
forward and hurried their lines along the wall.

More important than what was recorded, these evenings
deepened my life: they framed every event
or thought and placed it with care by the others.
As time went on, that scribbled wall--even if
it stayed blank--became where everything
recognized itself and passed into meaning.

Photo by sumingliu youyou on Unsplash

Go easy and journal,

Kayla