April Notebook Check-In
And prompt!
Earlier this week I posted about my intention to be more deliberate about keeping a notebook in April. (You can read that post here. And read the Marginalian post on Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” here.) My notebook-keeping will take the place of writing a poem a day for NaPoWriMo, though I am hoping to use the notebook (in part) to generate some new poems and flash essays, as well.
I invited readers to keep a notebook with me this month, and I wanted to share a few more thoughts on keeping a notebook below, plus a prompt!
Noticings
If you’ve been keeping notes on your week, have you found yourself more attuned to the physical world around you? Are you on the lookout for interesting turns of phrase in your conversations (or even your thoughts)? I’ve definitely experienced some of that, and it’s part of what I love about taking a period of time to be intentional about writing down observations every day.
Making a private book
I’ve written about this before, but I love Kim Addonizio’s idea from the book Ordinary Genius about consciously making a “book” for yourself over a chosen period of time in one’s journal. You can read more about that here.
Prompt
For this week’s (optional) prompt from notebook material, I’d like to offer an exercise from my “Write into Mystery” course:
Are you keeping notes on your week? During the week, take notes on dreams, things you read, conversations, memories that come up, weather. Then look back over your notebook from the last week or two, circling or underlining phrases, passages, or images that were especially resonant for you. Modeling your piece after Rachel Zucker's "Mountains" (see excerpt below), choose three to five impressions to rewrite in a way that casts you as a character in your own narrative (using third person-- e.g., "she").
Play with the selection and arrangement of details, along with the style of the language (voice, sounds, interesting turns of phrase), until you have three to five discrete sections that hang together as a mini-essay that gives a sense of a consciousness moving through place(s) and time. Think of these sections as parts of a collage. How can you play with the interaction between mundane or everyday details about what you are doing and your inner experience of moving through and reflecting upon your life?
As you work on this piece, think about ways to create echoes or recurring motifs. What themes emerge? What guiding questions are you circling around? Play with those as they emerge. You will also be playing with leaps, non sequiturs, and juxtapositions, of course. Hopefully, this exercise will help you further open up to the wonder and mystery of everyday life!
From Rachel Zucker’s book The Pedestrians:
Here’s mine:
In the dream, she is at a party with other poets trying to ignore the overly intense guy reading his poems in the front room and the two women who are part of a love triangle. “Why do all the women look pale and slumped?” she says at one point. “Why are we going along with what the men want? Why don’t we make it what we want?” She wakes up and realizes she can always leave a party she doesn’t want to be at.
Her son seems happy at school pickup, pointing out the plants in the raised beds. “Cilantro, dill, kale, chard …” They begin talking about edible flowers. Her son says, “What kind of monster eats violets?”
In her essay group, they workshop her essay and tell her to “chop things up, roughen things up.” Rose says, “Readers want to read it to be with you— inside the wildness of your mind. Let them.”
Below that in her notes is “Do it —Energy.” She doesn’t know if that was the complete thought.
It can be the complete thought if she wants it to be.
For paid subscribers:
Post your response to the exercise above in the group chat, if you like! You can do that here.
Upcoming workshops:
Spring essay & memoir workshops with Megan Baxter and Nancy McCabe open on April 28th, and I’m hosting a generative workshop over Zoom on Sat. 4/27! See link for full descriptions and registration info.
Stay tuned next week for information about a special topics workshop with me in May and an announcement about my next round of generative workshops, with the option of being part of a cohort working closely with me on their writing.
