... from Journal to Memoir
July 31, 1990–I wrote the first words in one of seven journals I would write on my year-long solo trip around the world. June 16, 2016–I wrote the first words in one of ten spiral-bound notebooks I would write on my seven-year journey to publication of my memoir, When Your Heart Says Go–My Year of Traveling Beyond Loss and Loneliness.
How do you get from there to here—journals to memoir? Telling that story could be another half-dozen journals and who knows how many loose-leaf notebooks. This is what I know for sure:
Turns out I don’t know anything “for sure.”
What I do know is my experience. First, keeping the journals. I have been a journal writer since back when we used to call them “diaries” and they came with a tiny lock and key confirming all would be private, for our eyes only. Sometimes that was true, but as too many of my journal-keeping friends can attest, was not always the case. But most of us just keep doing it anyhow.
The second part of keeping the journals is, well, keeping the journals. For me that meant packing a growing and messy stack of them (those five-year diaries with lock and key by now a relic of the past) and lugging them from home to apartment to marriage to divorce and so on for years—decades. At one point, in my mid-twenties, I burned many of my journals, embarrassed by my naiveté and romantic, rhyming poetry. (I have since forgiven myself and accepted that of course I was naive—I was young and romantic.)
But journal-keeping became a practice of my daily life and remains so to this day—sometimes just a page or two, sometimes riffs that go on and on and who’s counting pages. I keep these journals in the top drawer of the little cabinet that’s attached to my kitchen table and every morning, pour my coffee, light my candle, get out the journal and pen and begin. I date the page and write the first word and what happens next is sometimes as predicable as the San Diego weather, but more often a surprise, especially to me.
I don’t keep all my journals anymore; just too many of them. Now I have a New Year's Eve ritual of reading the years’ accumulation, keeping what matters in a separate collection, and releasing the meanders, the whines, the pissing and moaning, the mundane to what will either be recycled or released into a ceremonial bonfire.
Not so the journals I keep while traveling. Those I keep in a separate place and carry with me to the next place. I have those original six journals from the around-the-world trip as well as journals from travels to Bali (1975), Bolivia (1977), New Zealand (1989), Barcelona (2003-2005), Paris (many times, but never enough), and many other places more exotic than my kitchen table—even that fishing camp at Lake of the Ozarks (2000).