Write On Wednesday: The Power and Practice of Keeping a Notebook

...paying homage to the humble of art of journaling

“Notebooks are repositories of safety and sanction, places where we allow ourselves with humility to stumble and fall, to love and long for, to look at things we’re told either don’t exist or never happened, to unravel and make sense of them. Notebooks are where we first learn to give ourselves permission to create.” Elissa Altman, Permission, The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create

On the top shelf of the music closet next to my piano is a stack of spiral notebooks - the plain kind you get at the drugstore to stuff into your kid’s school backpacks. The last time I counted there were 46 of them.

On a bookshelf is a pile of 24 more spirals - my own pandemic journals, and a pile of 24 more with writing since 2023.

On another bookshelf, neatly aligned along with a collection of books about grief, are seven bound Leuchturm notebooks I filled during the two-year period leading up to and after my mother’s death in March 2016. These are the notebooks I consider most important.

Whenever I’m tempted to think of myself as anything except a writer, I remember these notebooks and realize that the urge to put words on paper is embedded in my human beingness, something as necessary as breath, as restorative as food and water.

These notebooks mean different things during different years and on different days. They are a place to explore ideas, hopes, plans; they serve as therapy; process journals for writing projects; records of feelings, noticings, and ways of becoming; reflections on books I’m reading. Sometimes they are nothing more than a glorified to-do list, reminding me of chores finished and appointments attended.

They are reflective of (to borrow my own book title) Life In General, and my own in particular.

“Notebooks and journals are repositories of safety and sanction,” writes Altman, “places where we allow ourselves with humility to stumble and fall, to love and long for, to look at things we’re told either don’t exist or never happened, to unravel and make sense of them.”

During this long, hot, world-weary summer, I have come to depend on my practice of keeping a notebook to sustain me, encourage me, and ground me. I am forever attempting to make sense of the all the senselessness around me. Keeping a notebook helps me by giving me a place to release the wondering and worrying, and a way to alchemize it into something that feels worthwhile.

As I wrote the final entry for August, I realized once again how much I need to write, even writing that never goes further than the pages of a spiral notebook. As Joan Didion says in her seminal essay On Keeping a Notebook, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear.”

Looking around this broken, beautiful world there is nothing we need more than something that helps us work our way back to ourselves – to thoughtfulness, wonder, hope, love, and care for the unique being that we are.

And while it’s true that I write to release and work through the constant swirling thoughts that run like a ticker tape in my mind, it’s also true that the physical act of writing (especially writing by hand with pen and paper) satisfies a basic need to make something, to do something with my hands.

Over the next few weeks, I want to tell you more about the ways this practice has carried me through this summer, but also through life. I want to pay homage to the humble art of Notebooking, and to the way I practice it.

I wonder…do you keep a notebook or a journal? And yes, in my mind there is a difference. We’ll talk about that next week.