Chapter 6

Keeping a Journal

When I was 8 years old, my sister received a book of fairy tales for her birthday. She was uninterested since she was practical and scientific, and didn’t need fantasy in the same way that I did. I loved that book and while reading it I knew that reading was something I could never relinquish. I started walking to the Paterson Public Library’s Riverside Branch on Madison Avenue. In grammar school, I read through the children’s section and into the adult section under the encouraging eye of Christine, the librarian. I started with A and worked toward Z, picking up seven books, carting them home to read, and climbing the Madison Avenue hill once again the next week for seven more, the life inside those books more real to me than the life of 19th Street and the front stoop where, sitting on a wooden chair, my feet propped on the railing, I read the books. I read everything – the good, the bad, the mediocre, and I soon began to identify the writing that was unforgettable, the stories that made me cry or laugh.

As a child I rarely left Paterson and the Italian immigrant neighborhood where I grew up, so the world outside my very confined world was unfamiliar to me. My mother felt we were safe, as long as we stayed on our front stoop or in our backyard. She came to the United States from Italy when she was a young woman, and leaving this world of other Italian-speaking people was not something she ever wanted to do or see her children do. I think the trip to America in steerage, when she was five months pregnant, traumatized her so much that she tried to rebuild the confined world of her small village within our house. For me, books became a way of leaving behind the constraints of my mother’s world, of following these characters to places I could only imagine, to experiences I longed to have, even though I was never a physically brave or athletic child.

I think that’s why I loved the Little House on the Prairie books and the Nancy Drew mysteries. I read all those books many times because the lives pictured there were so different from my own and, while I was reading those books, I imagined I could be as brave as Nancy Drew, as courageous as the people in those covered wagons riding across the vast plains. How these books fueled my longing to escape from the world of 19th Street with its immigrant gardens and plaster statues of the Virgin Mary encased in homemade cement shrines. While I was reading, I could imagine in myself bravery I didn’t have, a day when I, fearless and undaunted, would travel to distant places.

At 13, I went off to Eastside High School in Paterson, where I was fortunate to have Alfred Weiss and Frances Durbin as my English teachers. They taught me the classic writers, taught me to love them as they loved them. They also encouraged me to keep a journal. They suggested getting a stenographer’s notebook and setting a time each day to write. Since then, I have always kept a journal and often my poems start in my journal. To keep the stream of language flowing, I write every day. Sometimes I use one of those beautiful books that are available now, leather-bound volumes with creamy pages; sometimes I use books that friends give me, small enough to carry in my purse. I always have more than one journal in which I write. Diane di Prima, the Beat poet who has become a close friend, showed me her journals in which she paints and does collage. Following her suggestion, I have begun to paint and do collage and to draw in my journals. The world of art is connected to that of writing.

When we go somewhere together, Diane and I bring paints and collage materials; we set aside time each day to write and to paint. Sometimes, we go to a museum together to allow contemporary American art or art of other countries and eras to be part of us. With her encouragement, I am trying to set aside time in my own life for moments like these – to allow the sights and sounds and smells of the world to enter the body – and I encourage my students to do the same.

Everything that happens, everything that you see and feel and touch, becomes a part of you and of your writing; the more you open yourself to the world, the more you will have to give back to that world through your writing. Get yourself a journal; it doesn’t matter what kind it is. It should be a size and shape that feels comfortable for you. Write in it every day. Learn to look at the world as only you can, and translate that world into your journal.