rebeccakuder

Brown Bag Discussion: Writing of a life

After my last post, my colleague and I decided to host a discussion on the topic of what to do with our journals.  If you are interested, please do join us.

**

 Brown Bag Discussion

Writing of a life: Keeping the personal journal, 2.0

When: May 29, 2013, 12:30pm

Where: Antioch University Midwest Library

(900 Dayton Street, Yellow Springs, OH 45387)

You’ve kept a journal through the years…perhaps decades.  Your life is documented in those pages, which languish in towers of dusty boxes.  Now what?  It may have been healthy to keep a journal. But is it healthy to reread it?  And, ultimately, what do we do with our journals?

Join Antioch University Midwest faculty Jim Malarkey and Rebecca Kuder for a discussion about what we can do with the pages of our lives.

 This discussion isn’t about how or whether to keep a journal.  It’s for people who have kept a journal for a sustained period of time.  We’ll share our thoughts about what it means to reacquaint with our earlier words and selves, and ideas about what to make of these journals today.

If you’d like, bring one of your journals.

 Please bring your lunch.  Coffee and tea will be provided.

Note: Though this discussion will focus on hand-written journals, electronic journal keepers are welcome.

**

rebeccakuder

Journals, documents of a life, what to do with them

A "magic table" my daughter set up before we moved house.
The “magic table” my daughter set up before we moved house.

At  work today, a colleague asked if I knew anyone of my writing contacts who’s dealt with the question of what to do with decades of journals.

The question was unexpected, and as we talked, it shone a light into my own boxes, decades of life on the page, which my dear husband recently helped move from the attic of one house to another.

Take a walk through my first grade storybooks, stroll over to the first five year diary, with key, where I wrote things like, “Today, it was fun!”  Lean into college, its composition books covered with artsy collages featuring the amazingly beautiful and androgynous Famke Jansen.  (Wince at the terribly bad poetry inside.  Remember the heartbreak.)  Take care not to topple the towers of spiral notebooks full of Julia Cameron-inspired morning pages that helped me find my path. Live your life.

I’ve been keeping words written on paper almost my entire life.  “What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?” Joan Didion asks, in her essay “On Keeping  A Notebook.”  I know this question.

What to do with them, the books, the boxes, the bins?  I used to think some day, when I was famous, and possibly dead, a biographer would hunt through them, knit a portrait of me.  I used to think, “Some day I will have time to read them all.”  (I used to think I would want to.)  I used to think  some day my child would want to know me better, to see how I was.  To know all those words written, breaths taken before she existed.

I once heard about someone whose journals were taken by police investigating a murder of her friend.  (Imagine the violation in that!)  I can’t recall the details now (I probably wrote them down somewhere in one of the bins) but the person who told me the story said the most sensible thing to do with journals is burn them.  (I’m not unconvinced.)

But surely there’s something there to mine, to harvest.  Ideas, images, patterns.  Surely more than just kindling.  Surely shape can be made from mess.  Surely there was a point to keeping those words.

As I talked with my colleague today, it became clear that we understood each other–that each knew the deep strain in the question of what to do with these paper artifacts.  We decided to keep talking about the question, to see what happens.  To look into that abyss a bit.

So writers: Do you keep a journal?  What will you do with it?

rebeccakuder

Review of Wexler’s In Springdale Town (ebook)

Here’s a great little review of In Springdale Town,  by Robert Freeman Wexler (who is also my husband).   The ebook “opens with an ostensible introduction from the author, purporting to tell us the origins of the tale, but he immediately raises our doubts…”

What a lovely finish for the review: “This is a fantastically idiosyncratic narrative that will stick with you long after you put it down. A must must must-read.”

Trent Walters, J’agree!

(p.s. You can read an interview with Robert here.)

rebeccakuder

Oh, you beautiful mess

IMG_0256To have written, to have made order from chaos: to have written about messy life stuff that defaced three pages of legal pad, scratched, abbreviated, rounding corners, lines written above below obscuring other lines, arrows pointing everywhere but straight forward. To have made some sense of that snarl, of that juice. To have expressed my self.

To say: today I am a writer.