birds

I have some extra time during the summers – or at least I have more flexible time. So it’s often the time that I try to catch up on “fun” reading. For me, fun reading includes anything that I don’t have to prepare to teach, whether it be a novel that I’m dying to sink my teeth into (like James Patterson’s latest installment in the Women’s Murder Club series) or some recent scholarship in my field that I haven’t had time to read. As I scanned my bookshelves the other day, I saw a book that I’ve had a love affair with for a long time.

A few years ago, I took a teaching job that required me to teach, among other things, a general education course that would have a heavy emphasis on writing. I’m not a stranger to thinking about writing or even to thinking about teaching about writing… I started graduate school in an English program, taking courses in rhetoric and writing studies. But I switched fields before I had to actually teach a writing class. So, in my anxiety about having to actually teach units on writing or devise assignments that would help students develop their writing skills, I asked a writer friend for some recommendations. Her first suggestion was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Lamott wrote the book as a reflection on the art of writing, from the perspective of a published writer who now has to teach students the skills they need to become “good” writers, if not published writers. Toward the end of the book, she riffs on what passes through her mind on the last day of class, what she would really want to leave her class with:

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about being sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.

OK, so “subversive” might sound a little scary. It’s hard to think about a scrapbook page being subversive, I suppose. But the heart of Lamott’s observations relate pretty directly to how we journal or why we journal. Writing from a place of insight, of simplicity, of “real caring about the truth.” She points exactly to how I hope I can learn to write. I’m not there yet.

So, I have a little suggestion, and I’m curious to see how many of you might be on board with me. I’d like to put Bird by Bird back on my summer reading list. And I’d like to pull some sections out to refer to here in my blog, to draw connections to how we journal and why we journal on these creations of ours. In case you want to read along, I checked the amazon.com prices … you can get it used for as little as $4 or new for a little over $11, and it’s pretty easy to locate new copies in brick & mortar stores. And really, it’s a great read, full of her own insights about how she has lived her life – or how she hasn’t lived it, for that matter -- as a mother, daughter, friend. I’d advocate for putting it on a summer reading list even without the journaling challenge.

So let me know what you think. Are you on board, want to ride along?

Coming next week -- talking about audience. How do you decide who you're journaling for or to?

An added note: Check out the challenge forum at Creative Scrap Shack, where DT member Terrie McCoy Pieper has begun posting journaling challenges!