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117
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Ebook
2018
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Publié par
Date de parution
01 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781611179934
Langue
English
A peek inside the writerly testing grounds of Sue Grafton, Kim Stafford, Maureen Stanton, and others
This collection of essays by well-established professional writers explores how their notebooks serve as their studios and workshops—places to collect, to play, and to make new discoveries with language, passions, and curiosities. For these diverse writers, the journal also serves as an ideal forum to develop their writing voice, whether crafting fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Some entries include sample journal entries that have since developed into published pieces. Through their individual approaches to keeping a notebook, the contributors offer valuable advice, personal recollections, and a hardy endorsement of the value of using notebooks to document, develop, and nurture a writer's creative spark.
Designed for writers of all genres and all levels of experience, Writers and Their Notebooks celebrates the notebook as a vital tool in a writer's personal and literary life.
Publié par
Date de parution
01 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781611179934
Langue
English
WRITERS AND THEIR NOTEBOOKS
WRITERS AND THEIR NOTEBOOKS
Edited by DIANA M. RAAB
The University of South Carolina Press
2010 University of South Carolina
Le Mis rable 2010 Maureen Stanton
Some of the material in this volume has appeared previously:
Reginald Gibbons, My Own Particular Custom, Reginald Gibbons, reprinted by permission, appeared in an earlier version in Sheila Bender, ed., The Writer s Journal: 40 Contemporary Writers and Their Journals , Delta, 1997.
Sue Grafton, The Use of the Journal in Writing the Private Eye Novel, was previously published in Writing the Private Eye Novel: A Handbook , edited by Robert J. Randisi, published by Writers Digest Books in 1997, used with permission of the author.
Diana M. Raab, Use Journaling to Spark Your Writing, first appeared in The Writer (October 2007).
Peter Selgin, Keeping Up with the Days, was published in Cincinnati Review (Winter 2008).
Cloth and paperback editions published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2018
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:
Writers and their notebooks / edited by Diana M. Raab.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-57003-865-5 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-57003-866-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Authors, American-20th century-Diaries. 2. Authors, American-20th century-Biography. 3. Authorship. I. Raab, Diana, 1954-
PS129.W738 2010
808 .06692-dc22
2009029723
ISBN 978-1-61117-993-4 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Foreword
Phillip Lopate
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part 1-The Journal as Tool
Journaling-a Stepping Stone
James Brown
The Use of the Journal in Writing the Private Eye Novel
Sue Grafton
On Meeting Yourself
Robin Hemley
Journal-the Place of No Limit
Kim Stafford
Using My Notebook
Ilan Stavans
A Life Observed
Katherine Towler
Blogging like a Child-Arsonist
Tony Trigilio
Part 2-The Journal for Survival
Musements and Mental Health
Zan Bockes
Clearing the Decks
Kathleen Gerard
Le Mis rable
Maureen Stanton
Sea of Blue Ink
Kathyrn Wilkens
Part 3-The Journal for Travel
From an Audience of One to an Audience of Anyone
Wendy Call
Writing in Public Places
Bonnie Morris
Notes from an Accidental Journal Keeper
Michael Steinberg
Part 4-The Journal as Muse
Holdalls
John DuFresne
My Own Particular Custom
Reginald Gibbons
Thoughts on a Writer s Journal
Rebecca McClanahan
From Writer s Notebook to Poetic Journal
Mark Pawlak
The Icebreaker
Lori Van Pelt
Part 5-The Journal for Life
Daily Doodles
Dorianne Laux
Forgetting to Remember-Why I Keep a Journal
Kyoko Mori
Keeping Up with the Days
Peter Selgin
Anne Frank Redux
Karen de Balbian Verster
Journaling without the Journal
Michelle Wildgen
Appendix I Use Journaling to Spark Your Writing
Appendix II A Journaling Workout
Sources and Further Readings
Contributors
FOREWORD
The tenth-century Japanese court lady Sei Shonagon kept a writer s notebook in which she recorded a miscellaneous catch-all of things charming and annoying, rhapsodic descriptions of nature, odd facts, and malicious observations of her countrymen. She claimed to be chagrined when it was discovered and read, though a part of her must, at least subconsciously, have had readers in mind all along. Now considered an indispensable classic, Shonagon s The Pillow Book was also, if you will, an early blog.
Writing is one way of self-making. That a would-be author often nurtures to life a professional literary voice, as Sei Shonagon did, through the act of keeping a notebook, is a phenomenon to which many writers in this sparkling, splendidly useful anthology bear witness. These essayists find numerous ways to pay homage to their notebooks, which they describe metaphorically as: a laboratory, a mirror, a brainstorming tool, an icebreaker, a wailing wall, a junk drawer, a confessional, a postcard to oneself, singing in the shower, a playground for the mind, a jump-start cable, a memory aid, an archive, an anthology, a warehouse, a tourist s camera, a snooping device, a role-playing arena, an observation-sharpener, a survival kit, a way of documenting mental illness, a meditation practice, masturbation, a witness stand, a therapist, a housekeeper, a spiritual advisor, a compost bin, a punching bag, a sounding-board, a friend.
Such sweet-natured gratitude is expressed to these journals, as though their coming to be filled with words were an accident of grace performed by someone else, like a genie! The writer and the journal-keeper are sometimes two, companionate, sometimes one, indivisible. Oh, there is the occasional resentful note, the fear of surrendering your life to the practice of journaling, of being lured into narcissism, hypergraphia, or gruesome addiction. And there are the lingering uncertainties: should the notebook be spiral or bound? A book or computer file? Written in every day or only when the mood strikes? Performed in private or in public, at home or at a library or cafe? Is a writer s journal a separate literary genre, to be parsed by scholars, or just a more pretentious diary? Should the prose be rough, untrammeled, uncensored, or artfully composed, like finger exercises for a pianist? Arguments can be made on either side; and, generally speaking, every side turns up in these pages.
I salute the editor of this valuable collection, Diana M. Raab, who has done such a sensitive job of gathering these diverse, eloquent, and experienced voices, and encouraging their thoughtful, heartbreaking, rambunctious, free flights of testimony and speculation into being. Freedom is a frequent theme in these pages. The freedom to try out things, to write clumsy sentences when no one is looking, to be unfair, immature, even to be stupid. No one can expect to write well who would not first take the risk of writing badly. The writer s notebook is a safe place for such experiments to be undertaken.
Above all, the writer s notebook is an invitation to the Muse. The phonic similarity between the words muse and musing seems suddenly to make perfect sense. We call to our better self (another name for Muse) with these intimate scribbles.
Phillip Lopate
PREFACE
As artists have sketchbooks, writers have notebooks. Whether they choose to call them notebooks, journals, or daybooks, their motives are the same-to capture and document thoughts, sentiments, observations, ideas, ruminations, and reflections before these vanish.
The notebook may be thought of as a parking spot for the writer s ideas. It s the writer s studio and workshop-a place to collect and make discoveries about language, passions, obsessions, and curiosities. It s a place to scribble. There is no formula for keeping a notebook. The concept is that it should contain free-writing and memory triggers that will serve as vehicles to inspire future work. The notebook is akin to the author s other brain, the brain that has the freedom to think and muse freely with total recall. Writer Francine du Plessix Gray says this about journaling: Our emotions, and the power of their expression, are kept at a maximum by the daily routine of being inserted into the journal s sharpening edge. She says that keeping a journal is like sharpening a pencil.
For the most part, the words on the pages of a journal are the music and voice of one s true emotions. The pages of the journal make no judgments and should be free of editors, critics, and teachers. Whether the writer is expressing deeply held beliefs, recording snippets of overheard dialogue, making observations, listing ideas for future projects, or copying a favorite poem, the notebook should be a vital part of the creative tool kit.
The art of journal writing dates back to when our ancestors wrote on cave walls. The first published journals were those kept by Samuel Pepys in the seventeenth century. Between 1660 and 1669 he wrote an elevenvolume diary that was published after his death in 1825. The journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition appeared in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Then came James Swan, a Native American, who wrote extensively about whaling practices in the mid-1800s.
Walt Whitman wrote in his journal in the mid-1860s, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about activities and friends of special interest to him, including about the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau. In 1885, when Susy Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain, was thirteen years old, she began to write a memoir of her experiences with her celebrated father. Virginia Woolf, one of the twentieth century s most influential writers, said that she wrote in her diary to bring order to the chaos in her life.
Some private diaries, such as those of Woolf, John Cheever, Andr Gide, May Sarton, Ana s Nin, and Anne Frank have become published literary masterpieces. A more comprehensive list may be found in Sources and Further Readings.
My inspiration for creating this book originates from my own experience and the joy that journaling has brought into my own life. For more than forty years, journaling has helped ground me during good and bad times. When I was ten, my mother gave me my first journal to help me cope with the loss of my beloved grandmother. My mother s very thoughtful gesture resulted in a lifetime passio
