Post #73 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Kendra and I are especially pleased to once again welcome Susan Wittig Albert to our website. Susan’s just released journal-memoir —An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days (Southern Writers Collection Series)
In today’s post, Susan talks about her experiences with journaling and gives you three elements to add to your journaling over the coming month.
[NOTE: If you are interested in journaling, you will find our offer for a free ebook at the bottom of this post.]
-MB
Journaling the World
When I was a 28-year-old graduate student at UC Berkeley, I made a decision that changed my life. I began keeping a journal, and every year since 1968, on my birthday, I’ve opened a new journal. The entries record what’s happening in my life and my work, what I’m reading, and what’s going on in the world around me. The writing isn’t intentionally graceful, and I don’t spend time making it pretty or lyrical. I write what I’m thinking, how I’m feeling, what’s on my mind on any given day. I write for myself, as a witness to my life and to the world at large. In these private pages, I am a journalist of my own life. I am the only person who can report its events and record my thoughts, feelings, and impressions. In writing my life, I have learned who I was, who I am, who I will be.
My journal for 2008 was going to be like every other journal over the past forty years–except that the University of Texas Press was interested in publishing it. This meant that I was journaling not just for myself but for readers–but since I am also a blogger, it didn’t seem so difficult. As I began the journal, I was expecting to record another ordinary year of ordinary days in the life of a working writer: busy days of writing, reading, traveling, gardening, and connecting with family and friends; quiet evenings with my husband Bill. I expected to end the year with pretty much the same intellectual baggage that I carried into it. New ideas, yes. There would undoubtedly be new ideas, and perhaps some new creative energy. What I wasn’t expecting was a paradigm shift. Not as I entered my sixty-ninth year, the last third of my life. But that’s not what happened. 2008 was an extraordinary year.
When I was young, I had the naïve idea that I was relatively untouched by things that happened outside of my personal sphere. That wasn’t true then; it’s even less true now. Whether I’m writing for readers or writing for myself, I use my journal to record things other than my immediate life-events. For the past seven or eight years, I’ve written short “news summaries” of developing events that seem important to me, although I can’t always say whether or why they’re significant. But I have learned that what happens in Washington or London or Baghdad or Kabul touches me, sooner and more deeply than I expect. My journal’s news summaries track these significant events–and in 2008, there were a great many.
Texas (where I live) experienced record-breaking heat and drought that changed the way many of us understood climate change. Nationally, job losses, home foreclosures, bailouts, and political candidates were making news. Oil soared past $140 a barrel, gas at the pump topped four dollars, and we were confronted by the stark reality that petroleum is a limited, diminishing resource. As the summer wore on, the bleak national economic situation took on global dimensions–and an intensely personal shape. Books are my business, and book sales plunged. By late fall, Bill’s and my retirement accounts had dwindled and local real estate values were sinking rapidly. There were uplifting events: for me, the election of Barack Obama was a happy moment, a redeeming moment in American political history–and there were others. But I agreed with pundits who called 2008 “The Year of the Apocalypse,” and with Harvard economics professor Kenneth Rogoff, who described it as “a once-in-a-hundred-years’ meltdown.”
My journal is also a reading journal. I am a text person. I write every day, read every evening, listen to books when I’m walking and driving, and keep an annotated reading list in my journal. Usually, I read a lot of fiction, but my readings in 2008 took me into climate change, resource depletion, food and water shortages, politics, economics. Many of the issues I encountered were extraordinarily compelling, and I read more deeply and more energetically and with greater attentiveness than I have in years. The reading notes in my 2008 journal are like a map, charting my explorations into new and unknown territory.
Those readings, and the events I saw and documented–indeed, the very act of documenting–changed me. I write differently, read differently, think differently. I view my obligation to the world differently. I now understand that I am a witness to American life at the end of the Oil Age–with all the social and political upheaval that implies–and at the beginning of an anxious era of climate change. Terry Tempest Williams says: “To bear witness is not a passive act but an act of conscience and consequence.” I have a voice. I need to use it to tell the story of this time. I can beginning by telling it first in my journal.
An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days (Southern Writers Collection Series)–my record of 2008–has now been published. As I look back over the book and think about that tumultuous year, I am very glad that I have this personal record. And of course I’m still journaling–I just began making entries for 2011. This year will be different from all the years that have passed and all the years that are to come. But for me, each year’s journal raises the very same questions. What happened? What does it mean?
And what ought I do about it?
Journal Writing Prompt
An Exercise in Witnessing. Even the most intensely personal journals are enriched by a record of what’s going on around us. For the next month, in each entry in your journal, include three additional sentences:
1) a sentence about what has caught your attention in the news and how you feel about it;
2) a sentence about what you’ve read and what you’ve learned from it; and
3) a sentence about the weather and how it affected you. Sometimes these items will seem silly or trivial. Sometimes they’ll be so important that they’ll blow you away. Try it for a month and see what happens.
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Yesterday, Susan responded to three questions we asked her about her experiences with journaling. If you didn’t read it, here’s the link to: The Why and What of Journaling for Susan Wittig Albert.
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Susan Wittig Albert is the author of two memoirs: An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days (Southern Writers Collection Series)
Her books, which have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, include both contemporary and historical mysteries, as well as nonfiction and young adult fiction.
She is founder and past president of the Story Circle Network and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her website: www.susanalbert.com
FREE EBOOK: Limited Time Offer. If you are interested in journaling, we are able to offer you Amber Starfire’s ebook: Journaling Essentials–Everything You Need to Know to Start and Keep a Journal at no cost. This ebook is a $7.95 value. Amber has already stopped offering it for free on her website and we have promised that we will soon take it off our site. So while it is free, be sure to get your copy. Just follow this link to the page where we have three free ebooks.
