Journals, Diaries, and Kitty

My grandmother opened a small red record book with blank, unlined paper—with the words The Scribble=in Book etched in gold on its front cover.  She placed it on the floor for me to step my bare foot onto a page.  She traced the circumference of my foot onto the page with a pencil and wrote the date and my name into the middle.  This was to be my first journal entry—followed by tracings of my feet and hands until they superseded the space of two facing pages.  

Since then I have had a long history of writing diaries and journals—whichever I called them, as the word “diary” always felt more personal, and word “journal,” often used to designate newspaper and magazine writing, felt more business-like.  But the words “diary,” derived from the Latin word dies (not as in expiring), and “journal,” deriving from the French jour, both simple mean “day.”  Daily writing. Record of the day.

            When I was a young teenager, I had a faux red leather-bound five-year diary with a tiny lock and key, with a space of three lines per day. So constrained, I could only sketch in my days—“I went to school…I went to the bakery on my way to school…I ate broccoli. I had a piano lesson…I jumped rope with Michele Bednarz.”  I wrote this diary in Hungarian, my first language.  It lasted from January 1 through April 24^th, and ended on a note that I had gone onto the porch with my mother.  Starting with just a few words, by April I was filling the spaces with double lines—equaling six lines per day. The only note in another year was in English, “Evidently I am growing up because I got my first bra= today.  We looked for high heels.” 

            I picked up two years after my first bra, with a red-bound one-year diary, with 21 lines per day.  Writing double lines in each, I wrote 42 lines per day.  This diary is much chattier, if filtered through reports of washing and setting my hair, which kinds of donuts I picked up on the way to school.  But in this diary, I begin to describe interactions and conversations, and my emotional reactions to them. They have glimmers of philosophy and identity building. The book fizzled out in August. I look forward to reading this diary through in detail.  But this post is about my history with daily writing, and how I rarely miss an entry these days.

            My teenaged journals were mostly about boys—my yearnings, my crushes, my rationalizing how they were with me—especially the Vice President of the Pope Pius XII Student Council, and my agonies over passing him while he was on hall duty.  I was cast as Anne Frank, in The Diary of Anne Frank, and memorized whole pages of her work so that I could recite them while looking into the light trained on me on stage.  It was a profound experience, which, in later years, inspired me to write my book and one-woman performance of ashes, ashes: A Poet Responds to the Holocaust. I was moved by how personal her diary was, how she called it “Kitty,” how that young girl has given us an abiding and moving record of her life in one of the darkest times in human history.

When I married, my journals, written in large, unlined faux leather-bound books, were an instrument in which I tortured myself over my interactions with my new husband and his son, my ongoing troubles with my father and his second family, and the beginning of my career as a writer.  I kept a journal when I was writing my dissertation—a treatise on how psychoanalytic theories of the creative process applied to the writing of my first novel.  I was able to incorporate entries into the dissertation, itself. After those journals, I fizzled out.

            Although I kept sporadic journals—during travels—my consistent daily record was in week-at-a-glance books—to-do lists, activities, events.  I poured my soul explorations into my poetry, essays, another novel, fiction.

            Three years ago, inspired by Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages” assignment in her book The Right to Write, I bought several dozen marble composition books at back-to-school sales, distributed them to my writing classes, and started my current practice of writing three to four pages a day, preferably in the morning.  I realized that calling this practice “diary writing” reminded me too much of my early recordings—which, despite that these words describe Frank’s work—became unsatisfying and fizzled out.  I also did not want to call them a business-like “journaling”—especially since schools had adopted the practice of having students write journals for teachers who would then comb through, mark up, and grade them.  “Journals” came to mean a chore to me as a student and a source of guilt as a teacher.

            So, I call my daily writings “Musings”—a word that embodies inspiration, ease, imagination.  In the next blog, I will write about my journey with them, so far; how my students are benefitting from their daily writing; and what makes writing every day in my composition books so essential to me now.

            Comb through your old diaries, journals—your “Kitty” (your wealth, as “kitty” also refers to a—a fund of communal money)—and leave a comment on your experience of what they meant to you, why, and if you are writing daily, now.