The young man drove 256 miles away from his hometown, about as far as he could go on a tank of gas. He stopped in a station to buy more, but funneled it into a can instead of the car. A few blocks away, in a school parking lot, he doused the car with the gasoline, doused himself, climbed in the trunk, pulled shut the lid, found his plastic lighter and struck flame.
Tears well up in my eyes as I write those words, but they don’t spill onto the page as they did nine years ago when I wrote about my nephew in my journal. Although his wasn’t the first death I’d recorded—I’d already lost my father, my mother and two close friends—he was the first person whose birth and death I’d written about. I went to my cache of books, found the 1978 volume, and read the entry acknowledging a new baby in the family, James. Several months later I’d written that Jimmy was a peaceful child, always smiling when he woke up from his afternoon nap.
The account of Jimmy’s death was the most difficult thing I’d ever written, but doing so forced me to acknowledge this new reality. The grieving process is long, and only the passage of time can sand off the jagged splinters of pain. But, because of my journal, denial wasn’t an option. Setting down the horrific facts of his death on paper was the first step in accepting the unacceptable.
My journal’s beginning was inauspicious. In September of 1975, I picked up a blue ballpoint pen and wrote in a black-and-white speckled composition book, “The purpose of this journal is to record parts of my life I might otherwise forget.” The only audience I had in mind was my future self, who, at some point, would read and savor these fragments of memories. I wrote about ordinary events: my teaching job, car trouble, parties, arguments, camping trips, concerts, conversations, and confrontations. I soon found it to be a valuable tool to help sort out personal problems and weigh the pros and cons of important decisions.
I had no plans to maintain a journal forever. Yet each time I came to the final page of a book, closed it, and locked it in the cedar chest, I would spend a few days feeling unmoored, like a vacant rowboat bobbing on a lake. Those feelings vanished as soon as I bought another hardbound journal, which measures 12 ¼ by 7 ¼ inches and has the word Record written on the cover.
Many journalers prefer to write in spiral notebooks, but I like the permanence of a bound book. A notebook would make it too tempting to rip out a page after making an error. It’s better to think a bit and not make many mistakes in the first place. And when rereading past journals, I’m sure I would have yanked out entire sections and discarded them. The integrity of a bound book forces me to keep the strikeouts as well as the embarrassing emotions. They are all part of the process. I like the idea that my journal is an entity. As I write, I’m creating a lasting artifact.
To maintain continuity, I title each volume. It was a chance occurrence that made me decide to do this. I’d already filled up three books. My grandmother, who grew up on a tobacco farm in Kentucky, gave me a family Bible that had belonged to her mother. On the flyleaf, next to the birth dates of her children, she’d written, “1923, Locust Year.” Struck by the succinct evocativeness of those two words, I immediately went to the cedar chest and retrieved my completed volumes. I leafed through and found phrases that summed up what those years had been about.
I’ve titled every subsequent book, using a few words from the text. Sometimes I know as soon as a phrase comes from my pen that it will end up being the title. Other times I jot down some possibilities on the last page, and choose the best one later. Looking back over my list of titles enables me to see the course my life has taken. The covers of my journals vary—they are black, red, green, blue, and gray. However, inside the words are all in blue ink; I’m not sure why, but no other color is capable of expressing my thoughts. A friend once told me she wrote entries in turquoise, orange, purple or red, depending on her mood. But I stay true to free-flowing blue.
Over the years, I’ve tried different writing strategies. One summer I vowed to write every single day, but that made me view writing as a chore rather than a privilege. Now I generally write two or three times a week. In 1985, when I bought my first computer, I decided to switch to a datafile format. That didn’t last long. I missed writing while curled up in a big chair or in a hammock in my back yard. After realizing that I also preferred the physical act of handwriting to pecking at a keyboard, I reverted back to pen and book—low-tech maybe, but more user-friendly and portable.
When I’d been writing in my journal long enough to see its value, I began teaching a high school elective course in journal writing. At the beginning of each class I suggested several topics, but students were always free to generate their own. On Fridays we counted the pages we’d written and the students selected one or two pages to copy and hand in. Even after budget cuts killed the elective courses, the teachers in my department used journaling as a component of regular English curriculum. We knew students would learn to write faster—and enjoy it more—if they had the freedom to write whatever they wished in addition to the structured assignments we’d given them.
It was rewarding when former students came back to tell me that they were still keeping a journal. One male student who didn’t return is one I will always remember. Robert was a freshman, and the only boy on campus allowed to wear a baseball cap inside the classroom. He was completely bald as a result of chemotherapy. Sadly, his cancer resurfaced, and Robert died a few years later. His mother wrote me a letter to say how much she treasured the journal he had kept while in my class, especially the entries he’d written about his grandparents and other family members.
About a decade ago, around the time of my nephew Jimmy’s death, I began to see that the journal was more than a record of life. By then I’d completed seventeen volumes, and when I read recent ones and compared them to earlier ones, I saw irrefutable evidence of change and growth. Gradually, the stilted, noun-heavy, term-paper prose of the first volumes was supplanted by a more informal, flowing style. Somewhere along the line—impossible to pinpoint the exact moment—my adult voice had gradually emerged. My writing now had a less apologetic tone. I had become more self-assured but still wasn’t selfless. I’d become a little smarter but was far from wise. My writing was quirky, detailed, down-to-earth, and on occasion, even funny.
I wondered if I could write something suitable for publication. Maybe, if I had enough time to flesh out and polish my ideas. Teaching full time meant I had too many lessons to plan and too many papers to grade. At least those were the excuses I gave myself.
Then, quick as a jab from Oscar de la Hoya, it hit me. Whenever I settled in with my journal and lamented the lack of time to write, I was writing. I couldn’t deny the preponderance of evidence—books and books that swam in a sea of blue ink. I was already a writer. My journal had turned me into one. Through hours of writing practice, I’d experimented with different forms. I had learned to plunge beneath the surface of events. Recounting exchanges with friends and strangers taught me how to write dialogue. I knew how to use strong verbs, and specific language instead of generalities. I could paint a visual picture of a scene, and use the other senses to recreate setting. I could connect the dots of unrelated incidents into a pattern to show their significance. I could lay out an anecdote in a straightforward, unvarnished way. I knew how to heighten drama without distorting the truth. As each journal entry had a beginning, middle and end, I had learned how to shape a story and bring it full circle.
It was time to begin submitting my work. I pored over Writer’s Market and summoned my courage. I sent an essay to the Walking Magazine. A few weeks later, an editor phoned to say she’d accepted it. I wrote a travel article and the Los Angeles Times published it (with a gazillion edits). I emailed a memoir to an online magazine and later read my story on the Internet. Of course, many rejections also landed in my mailbox, but only the acceptances matter now.
Then the mining began. I sifted through old journals searching for bits that sparkled in the dark. In the journal where I wrote about my mother’s death, I found material to shape into an essay. It was about a French-knotted rug she had begun as a young bride and finished late in life. The rug, so many years in the making, became a metaphor for my gradual acceptance of her death.
In my journals, I found humorous anecdotes about my husband’s 1971 Mercury Comet that I strung together into an essay that also appeared in the Los Angeles Times. A description of monarch butterflies I’d written while on vacation near Big Sur became a central symbol in a how-to article later published in Writers’ Journal. When I biked in Natchez Trace National Park and decided to write about the experience, I used journal entries written during two earlier trips to round out the article. I had no intention of publishing anything about a road trip taken in 2004, but I was so impressed with the Hotel Pattee in Perry, Iowa, that I sat in the lobby and jotted my impressions in my journal. When I got home, I had plenty of material for a short article. Other travel pieces were easy to compile once I’d done interviews and gathered facts—it was exactly the kind of writing I’d been doing in my journal for years.
At one point, it occurred to me that my journaling experience might be useful to others. Rather than looking at individual entries for ideas, I searched through my journals for trends and techniques. I’d frequently written about nature. I often sprinkled humor in my pages to temper a mundane or gloomy tone. Whereas my earlier entries often began with lifeless statements such as “Well, today wasn’t the best day,” in later entries I made a point of starting with a sentence I’d never written before. I developed these ideas into articles advising beginning journalers to write about the natural world, to incorporate humor in their writing, and to start each entry with a salient first sentence. And even if your journal is not meant to be read by others, I advise beginners to make it interesting enough so you don’t bore yourself during future readings.
My journal gives me freedom to write without restrictions. I can shun punctuation, scrawl sentence fragments or leapfrog from one topic to another. This free-writing generates ideas for essays. While exploring the guilty pleasure of jigsaw puzzles, I ended up with several rambling pages, which I later condensed into an essay. Likewise, I have published firstperson pieces about roses, playing Scrabble, dunes, solving Sudoku, ice skating, painting houses, dictionaries and the old, gnarled fig tree growing in my yard.
Although up until now my published pieces have been essays and articles, in the future I may want to branch out. There’s no doubt that my journals will provide grist for stories and poems. And if I decide to write a book-length memoir, I am already halfway there. My journal has helped me stay on track in my writing and personal life. Decisions, plans, and goals that are written down aren’t easily ignored or forgotten. The journal also serves as a memory-jogger and fact-checker. I might remember that the Los Angeles riots were in April, but was it 1991 or 1992? I find my account in the 1992 volume. I can rely on my journal when I can’t rely on my perfidious memory.
At first I thought no one else would read my journal, but now I see it as part of the family archive. Because I write about world events as well as daily life, my journal is a historical document. I wrote nearly all day on September 11, 2001, chronicling events as they unfolded, citing details that probably won’t appear in history books. Whoever reads my account will learn that the military response to the World Trade Center attacks was initially called Operation Infinite Justice, and that on the evening of September 11 members of Congress amassed on the steps of the Capitol and sang an impromptu, a cappella rendition of “God Bless America.”
The question is, which will last longer, my published pieces or my journal? Although copies of the publications that carried my words are extant in libraries, and electronic traces remain in cyberspace, probably most of the newspapers and magazines are quietly disintegrating in landfills. But I can’t imagine my heirs discarding a collection of books with titles like Spindrift, Let There Be Latte, and Sky in the Shape of Spain. Inside those books they will find family milestones duly recorded: births, divorces, weddings, graduations, promotions, celebrations, and funerals. My journals as a family legacy will be more important, ultimately, than the published pieces that have arisen from them.
I feel both estranged from and sympathetic toward the young woman who started keeping a journal in 1975. She was often foolish and unfocused. The things she worried about then seem unimportant now. As she poured her confessions, depressions, and obsessions into the journal, it became the vessel for her emergence as an autonomous human being.
In fact, if my journal made me a better writer, it’s not much of a stretch to think it made me a better person. It served as a sounding board for new ideas; putting them on paper gave me a chance to examine and evaluate them. Because I complained in my journal, I didn’t have to whine to family and friends. It helped me clarify my values as well as my needs and desires. Through it, I’ve accepted blame, whenever warranted, for things that haven’t gone my way. It helped me shake off the past—it’s there on paper so it doesn’t have to replay in my head. It taught me not to repeat behaviors that had a negative outcome.
Even now, before I begin writing in a new journal, I fan through the pristine pages, ruled with faint aquamarine lines, and try to imagine what comedies, tragedies, or ordinary events will appear over the course of the next year or two. It gives me satisfaction to know that words will come into existence on those very pages, words that will continue my life’s narrative.
I look back on all the completed volumes, written in a sea of blue ink. The moods undulate, now heaped up in a crest of success, excitement, and happiness, now sinking into a trough of frustration, boredom, and hopelessness. The lows and highs drift by in a regular pattern, each hollow trough followed by a foam-covered crest. That’s the nature of waves, and of life. I wish my nephew Jimmy had known that despair doesn’t last forever. Even more, I wish he had kept a journal. He might have found a place to vent his rage instead of turning it against himself.
A personal journal can be many things. It can be a record of life events, a sounding board, or a tool for personal growth. Our passionate scribbling is both writing practice and raw material for future publications. For me, the journal has been all those things, as well as a source of pride and a lifelong commitment. I have no plans to quit. As long as they manufacture Record books and blue pens, I’ll keep on writing.