To stay on ‘nodding terms’

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In theory, I should be very good at keeping a consistent journal. I’m a writer and editor; I know the practical, emotional and creative value of putting pen to paper. I even enjoy these activities. But reality, as the saying goes, is harder.

My biggest hurdle? I have a nagging worry that I could be run over by a bus, and that all my private musings could immediately become public. This sounds unhinged, I know. I don’t believe anyone would actually wish to publish what I write (or even that I’d know it was happening; I would be dead). It’s the notion that someone could read my scribbles and consider them a definitive answer or opinion, instead of what they would actually be: snapshots of my mood, or an idea, or notes from a day I had the time to pick up a pen. This fear is an effective deterrent; it stops me before I begin.

Nonetheless, I do read others’ private journals. I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s classic, “A Writer’s Diary,” and more recently, “Notes to John,” a book composed of missives by Joan Didion, the patron saint of essay writers everywhere. (I was so eager to get my hands on that one, I pre-ordered it.) I was curious to see how these greats worked when they wrote for themselves, when nobody else was looking. Turns out, they’re full of oblique references and incomplete thoughts — still fascinating and instructive, if a bit hard to follow. (The Didion book also felt creepy and voyeuristic, as if I really shouldn’t be reading it.)

It just so happens that “Notes to John,” was released on the very same day (and by the same publisher) as “The Book of Alchemy,” by Sulieka Jaouad. This could be mere coincidence or a bit of strategery by the publishers. I don’t know. But at the risk of becoming a caricature of a public media essay editor, I bought that book, too.

Joaud’s first book, “Between Two Kingdoms,” grew out of a column she wrote for the Well section of the New York Times about living as a young person with cancer. (She was diagnosed with stage 4 leukemia at 22, and has been fighting the disease, on and off, for the last 15 years.) During the early months of the COVID pandemic, she started a Substack called the Isolation Journals – which has since grown to 200,000 followers – and that project seeded the idea for “The Book of Alchemy.”

The book is designed as a 100-day project, marketed as “a guide to the art of journaling.” Think self-help, but make it literary. It contains 100 short essays (organized into 10 chapters, introduced by Joaud), written by authors including Gloria Steinem, Pico Iyer, Jia Tolentino, George Saunders and Ann Patchett. Jouad’s theory is that reading and journaling go hand in hand. From the introduction:

I have long believed that journaling allows you to alchemize isolation into creative solitude. As it happens, reading also enacts that shift. Rather than feeling trapped and alone with your thoughts, you’re in conversation. You’ve got company.

I bought the book a couple of months ago, but set it aside until I felt I could commit to it. There are lots of methods to trick yourself into a consistent journaling practice, and I’ve tried many of them. Lots of people, including my co-editor Kate, swear by Lynda Barry’s four-square method. (I used that one for a while; it worked until it didn't.) Sara, my other co-editor, uses the notes app on her iPhone as an on-the-go-journal that, she claims, is “a hot mess of half-formed thoughts.” Other people I know are devotees of Julia Cameron's morning pages from “The Artist's Way.”

This last full week of June, I told myself it's time — just in time for my family’s annual trip to a lake in Minnesota. I’ve been reading the short essays in Joaud’s book (each just one or two pages long) and writing, by hand, for 10 to 15 minutes in response to the prompt provided by the essay’s author. Write down 10 images from the last 24 hours. What would you write about if you weren’t afraid? How are you really? The runaway bus fear is still there, but I’m getting better at ignoring it. The interplay between reading and responding to someone else’s writing makes the practice feel less self-involved and claustrophobic, encased in walls of my own voice. It’s allowed me to begin again, and feel like I’m (maybe) getting somewhere.

If Didion were still alive and writing  — and Joaud had asked — I wonder if she would have participated in “The Book of Alchemy”? I’m no Didion expert, but probably not, I think. Instead, she might have slid a copy of her essay, “On Keeping  a Notebook” across the table. In it she discerned that the purpose of writing things down, for better or worse, is to: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point,” Or, as she writes, to stay on “nodding terms” with ourselves.

The Cog newsletter is taking next week off, but we’ll be back in your inboxes the following Sunday, July 13. Happy writing or reading — or both.

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