5 Comments

Oooh. You've made me want to go down to my basement and get my very first notebook and take a picture. I have saved all of mine starting with my first one which I started when I was 12 or 13 years old. I am not sure why I've saved them. Until very recently, I have never even looked at the entries again. I want to save them so at some point my children and grandchildren will have a history. I wish I had stories and a better understanding of my mother and grandmother. My mother-in-law has journals, but the ones I really want to read are all in Dutch. I do want to get them translated one day. She has dementia now and can't speak, so I feel these still remind me of who she is and was. And I love reading people's 'real' stories. Not the sanitized version. I love going deep. Thanks for this prompt.

Expand full comment

I hope you had a fun trek down into the basement to visit your notebook treasures, Kim! When my father (also a prolific artist) passed away I inherited all of his belongings-- this included several unfinished sketchbooks. I have started filling up the empty pages of a few of his sketchbooks as my own. It's the most interesting form of a-synchronous communication.

Expand full comment

Love "gardening our interiority." Haven't kept a proper journal as a hub for thoughts in a while, but boy do I have notes and lists and scribblets all over. Also have sketchbooks for various projects. Interiority complex? Anyway, I don't think I'd burn 'em. Not hiding anything, and not worried about the judgy ones once I'm fungi food. It is funny to look back at day-to-day journals, though. Anyone might seem a little crazy, even from one moment to the next.

Expand full comment

INTERIORITY COMPLEX! hahahaha. Exactly that. Yes indeed-- the most disturbing pages of my notebooks are the pages and pages and pages of buzzkill checklists, calendar commitments, work-to-do-items, that populate one page and then roll onto the next and the next and the next... Some years of notebooks are supremely buzzkilly in this way. I imagine a future ancestor picking up the thing, flipping through & being like- "DAMN. WHY WASN'T THIS PERSON JUST MAKING MORE FUCKING ART?" (*tipping my hat to future ancestors* thanks for the reminder)

Expand full comment

Also, that's a great pic! Thanks for sharing.

Expand full comment