I’ve been wanting to do a post on the power of journals for some time now, ever since I read this article in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers. It’s about Brian Singer’s 1000 Journals Project. Here’s the gist: one thousand journals are sent into the world. Some are sent to friends. Others are left in public places. The journals land in the hands of artists and writers and average Joes; they’re filled and when they’re complete and available for viewing, we discover each page in each journal is a piece of art. Collaborative art.
I love this idea that people are making art separately and together out of something they find. What I love even more is that it’s something as ordinary as a journal. Nothing to fret about. No worries about perfection. It’s a page in a notebook. After you paint on one page, there are a whole bunch of pages left just waiting for you to take your pen and scribble. Doodle. Do whatever you want. And when that page is done, there’s another, then another.
This idea of “journal as art gallery” is enticing because it is so impermanent. Nothing to be framed and hung. Nothing to publish or sell. Always another page, and every page your own.
During a year-long writing intensive with writer and teacher Natalie Goldberg, I kept a journal to track my daily practice. All of us in the intensive did. Days we practiced—writing, sitting, or walking—we noted what we did and for how many minutes. We also recorded days we skipped.
I loved the journal part of our commitment to the intensive. I liked picking out my book. I settled on something mid-size and thick yet flexible, with a bright red vinyl cover. The pages were graph paper. For me the journal signified witness–witness to the fact that I showed up. It added structure to what was already a year of discipline.
Something broke free in that structure. I suddenly found myself doodling like I did when I was younger. I’d open my journal while at work sitting in a meeting and I’d draw the fellow giving a presentation, or I’d draw my hand. I got into inking typefaces, serif and san serif. Flowing, flowery cursive. Tight, narrow lettering.
I played with the headers for each day of the week. Sometimes I stamped them out with alphabet stamps I bought for the girls at a paper store. Or I wrote the days in a loose freehand.
I threw in color. Some days if I went somewhere interesting, like the time I took Dee and Em to see the Mexican Modern exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, I included a memento. The journal reminded me to be present, and any time I was cognizant of this effort to be present, I documented it as practice.
Once the intensive was over I stopped keeping track of my writing. I stopped recording my creative process. I still have my journal. I still have notebooks for my writing, and I have a painting notebook as well. I haven’t stopped writing or painting or doodling, although I have lost the structure. I’d like to get back into recording my practice, maybe once I settle into the new house. Once my life becomes sane again.
I’m struck by how for me the journal became a creative medium in and of itself more than simply a record of my work. It was like verb and noun all rolled into one.
I’ll let you know when I get back into it. Maybe we can start it up together. In the mean time, if you have a chance to keep a journal—a hard-bound book in which you draw, paint, make collage, and write—give it a try. Make it be about more than just the journal itself. Log your progress toward practicing your art. I think you’ll enjoy the process.
I love this post. It reminds me of all the journals I kept in art school when the structure of art was the most important thing in my life. And then last year, it was the Intensive and the structure of writing.
I struggled with keeping that journal last year about my writing process. First I got hung up on what kind of journal. Then I had a lot of resistance to keeping a journal. But after a while, I got into it. And let the process take me.
I ended up recording the books I was reading, when I slow walked the labyrinth, when I wrote in coffee shops – anytime I did anything that supported my writing, I wrote it down in that journal and logged it.
I stopped keeping the journal this year. And I miss seeing my process. In some ways, the blog has become the process. It is spontaneous. And the minute I post or comment is logged electronically.
When I see your sketches and the pages from your journal (which are beautiful, by the way) I long to grab an empty book and start sketching. Will I let myself do it? I’ll keep you posted.
I do have a question – how was keeping a writing journal about your writing process and a sketch book similar or different? What are the similarities in the processes?
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One other comment – on the way to see Mary Oliver last night, Liz and I were listening to Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, in the car. She was talking about journals as “containers” or something that holds us and reflects ourselves back to us.
We can journal alone and have the ability to mirror ourselves back, to hold ourselves, and then go back later and reread who we are. She also talks about art, music, dance, talking to friends you trust, as containers, ways to take time out from ordinary life for reflection.
Natalie calls it structure. Same thing. Practice, community, people we trust to help us hold our creative selves. I know without such things, my creative life would die.
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This is an inspiring post! I am often lamenting how the computer has pushed my journal out of my life, little by little. I may still write a journal entry, but now it’s often on my hard drive…or on my blog. there is something so satisfying about writing in a notebook though, and drawing there, and just seeing what happens. I miss doing that more.
On the other hand, the computer is a great place to be inspired by others’ journals in the form of blogs, and, on Flickr, by looking at actual hand written/painted/sketched/collaged pages.
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Fantastic topic, but I’m really curious why both ybonesy and quoinmonkey stopped keeping the practice journal. I’ve never kept a journal, because I worry either that it’s one more kind of writing to worry about and also that it would be too easy just to jot down some banal account of the day’s “meaningful” events.
What I like about the journal assignment you did in the Natalie intensive was that it had such a clear purpose and also that the purpose referred back to your other writing.
What do you think makes any kind of journaling meaningful and important?
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First, I have to say that I get tangled up in the terminology. I have a writing notebook and a painting notebook, and in both of those I practice my writing (for example, when I write with a group of three other friends in town) and painting. Then I also had this journal where I recorded my practice. And I didn’t know what to call it–was it a calendar, a schedule? I settled on “journal.”
I stopped largely because I had too many things going on. Three separate books, all with a different purpose, plus the computer and its various forms–email for an online writing group plus the blog. I was spread too thin.
But, to answer your question, QM, the journal where I recorded my process was different in that that’s pretty much all it contained. Well, except for when I started doodling in it. But I never wrote a story in it or did a 10-minute practice or anything like that. And somehow, probably because I started pasting in and drawing pictures, it became more of a visual thing. Something I enjoyed flipping through and looking at. Like elizabeth describes, it was so spontaneous–seeing what happens. Art without intention of art.
Good question, Nat, about what makes journaling meaningful. Intention (even though I just said I like how my journal produced art without intention). Structure. A journal can represent structure because of the way you use it to record. Beauty. The notion that objects all mixed up, media all mixed up–the mixing up can be beautiful. One woman in our intensive pasted photos–one each day–in her journal. Passage of time. Progress, process. All important elements.
How about you–what do you think?
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I’m fascinated that the “schedule” journal became the doodling/visual journal. Now that I think of it, I’ve always avoided journaling precisely because I don’t feel I can “do” any kind of visual art. I can’t draw at all, and I’ve never much liked taking pictures. Though it has made me feel like a person with only one arm, highly functional, but missing an arm. I love the visuals in a sketch book or an engineer’s journal with schematics. The combination of visual with verbal is what makes other people’s journals interesting to me. Maybe I need to learn how to draw.
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Well, that’s the cool thing about these visual journals. You don’t need to know how to draw. You can cut out images from a magazine or brochure, scribble, swipe some color with a paintbrush. Check out the ones at 1000 Journals. You can guess which ones were done by graphic artists or designers, yet the pages that struck me the most were done (I’m guessing) by people who don’t consider themselves artists.
Nat, have you checked out Post Secret? It’s on our blogroll. If you like the combination of visual and verbal (plus being a voyeur to people’s journals), you’ll love the site.
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Post Secret is a great blog. Nat, I wanted to say, too, don’t be intimidated by feeling like you can’t draw. I used to totally feel that way. Yet after being in art school and seeing how natural it was for everyone to keep a sketch book – even if they were photographers, papermakers, printmakers, or graphic designers – I learned that visual journals are for everyone.
You can use the techniques ybonesy talks about, cut and paste. Or you can just start sketching what you are drawn to. Tell Monkey Mind to take a hike, distract him for a while, and let yourself draw. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It’s only for you. And it’s very liberating.
To answer one of your other questions, I don’t know why I stopped logging my writing. I think I wanted to put my time into my photography and blogging and other practices. But then, you have to say, well, the log simply logged those practices. It was another structure or container that supported me. That’s true. I don’t have a good reason. I wish I did.
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elizabeth, I can relate to the computer world trying to push out all my visual paper journals. I think that’s happened for me. I do still keep little notebooks with snippets of things that appeal to me or that I want to write about. Or a quote that inspires me.
I think that’s why I’m so inspired by ybonesy’s sketches and by other blogs with visual elements and photography. All of these things are practices. They hold us.
BTW, when Mary Oliver was talking about practice on Monday, she was adamant about one thing and I quote, “Computers are bad.” She said it kind of smirkingly (can I make up a word?) but she meant it.
She said computers take away the process of seeing older draft versions of poems on paper with cross outs and past inspirations. She, like Natalie Goldberg, says she only uses them for final drafts. The rest of their work is written on paper with graphite or pen.
It makes you think about electronic media and how it’s taking over. Yet I love the immediacy of blogging. And the self publishing aspect of it. The world is changing. I guess we each get to decide what we want to keep from the Past in our processes and what we want to pull in from the Now.
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I’ve tried keeping a journal in the past but I am not disciplined enough. Back in 1981 on my bike tour from Mexico to Canada, I tried keeping a journal but somewhere in Colorado, about a month into the trip, I stopped. It just didn’t seem important to do at it the time. I just wanted to live in the moment and not reflect about it too much. I used to be able to remember each day in photographic detail; what the road was like, the wind condtions, the meals we ate, the people we me, but now 26 years later, things are fuzzier. Now I wish I had that journal for some of those lost details.
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Fascinating stuff about journals. What a gift this website is!
I have been keeping a journal faithfully since 1973 and have saved every one of them. They are lined up on a book shelf in my writing room in chronological order. I am fussy about the paper — it has to hold the ink well and has to be lined. In fact, I use graph paper now (available from Levinger) because of my arthritis. I don’t write in it everyday — only to wax on about certain topics like the War in Iraq or an encounter with a friend or stranger. I copy entire poems in there and also post favorite cartoons. So it’s a scrapbook, too.
Below that shelf are my diaries. I also began to keep a diary in 1978 and have every one in chronological order. Diary entries are exclusively about daily events, kind of like the 5-year diary my mother gave me when I was 8 years old — one of those tiny, red-leather diaries with a key and lock. I still have that, too, but the entries are something like this: “I wore a skirt and sweater to school today. We had spaghetti for dinner.”
Here’s an interesting practice. Every time I find a penny on the pavement, I look at the year. For example, on April 28th, I found a penny with the year 1987 on it. So I went to my diary and looked up what I was doing on April 28, 1987. And about four times a year, I randomly pick a date and read all my journal and diary entries for that date — going back to as early as 1973 — and in some cases, when I was 8 years old (if I happened to make an entry that day in my tiny 5-year diary). The good news is that I can see quite clearly how much I have grown, etc. The bad news is, I can see quite clearly how little I have grown. I am reminded of the Edna St. Vincent Millay quote: “Life isn’t one thing after another. It’s the same damn thing over and over.” I temper it with this piece of wisdom from Oscar Wilde: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
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Oh, that’s so cool. Find a penny, go to your diary to see what was happening then. Of course, only you, with your commitment to each day in each diary and your organization of your diaries, could do this!
Oscar Wilde–what a lovely quote, and how it so supports the mantra I took from a writing friend of mine: Art is Arrogant!
So be it.
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[…] Ybonesy and QuoinMonkey, on the great red Ravine blog started a post thread yesterday on keeping journals. […]
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[…] Choices have consequences. I’ve been thinking about sketch books and journals since reading One Journal, Ten Thousand Journals and handmade photographic processes since I did the Pinhole photo piece. I spend so much time in […]
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[…] love journals. I’ve written about my love of journals. I have doodle journals and writing journals, and I even have my first ever journal, a gift from my […]
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soooo true!….ive always enjoyed the relationship a journal makes with you. its witnessed all. art and its process is evolved out of little seemingly ordinary everyday doodles. and once its on paper it sticks in your head. it doesnt escape like other thoughts do….journals are essentials!….especially for artists!….
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Nice way to put it, ayeshakamal. “It’s witnessed all.” I like that.
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