Sunday Funnies

I've been thinking a lot lately about the writer's notebook. I'm interested in how we each choose to record ourselves. As a child I was an avid diary keeper. I read The Diary of Anne Frank and was so moved that I started my own diary and called her 'kitty.' I kept this trend throughout middle school, and then in high school, something crazy happened---I carried around my diary all over the place and it became a 'file' of sorts, with poems, story starts, notes passed between me and my friends during classes and so on. In college I began to tape things inside the 'diary'--but now they had become varying sizes and shapes. No more lock and key diaries. Each summer my Aunt Deby would purchase me a new 'diary'--and I would fill it the entire year, and most times need a refill at Christmas--so my mother began to buy me one every Christmas so that I'd start the new year with a new diary.

As the years have gone by, I've begun 'collecting' these journals, and using several at a time. Recently, this has begun to annoy me. I miss the days of the self-enclosed diary, which would have lots of different things tidily named with a start month and year, and an end monthy and year. I've lost diaries too, and when my car was broken into after a cross-country move, diaries, poems, notebooks, binders--many 'paper' items were stolen, probably to the chagrin of the theives who expected saleable items in that luggage--not my Phd notes.

Lately I've fallen in love with the 'Artists Notebook' approach--but that does take a lot of time and concentration--although I do confess to loving an afternoon at the local bookstore with a pair of scissors and double-sided tape. I buy magazines, write, color, draw--whatever I need to do to feel the creative juices starting to flow. I love how these can become historic artifacts for yourself. I think you should go do one right now, and then share a few pages with us here!