Keeping a Journal You Love - Softcover

For many writers, a journal acts as a compost pile. They throw a whole bunch of stuff in there, which separately is not worth much more than this morning's coffee grounds or this afternoon's banana peel; let it sit for a while and heat up; and before they know it, they have a rich compost, from which whole stories, memoirs, screenplays, you name it, can be made. This "stuff" varies from writer to writer: it can be memories, opinions, conversations overheard, secrets, quotations from other writers, snippets from the newspaper, observations, dreams. While Robert Hellenga records the off-kilter feeling of living in a foreign country, William Stafford can find a whole poem's worth of new experiences in a typical day. "We take a day trip every day of our lives," says Bender, "when we view our time here on earth as full of surprises." And who knows where a journal entry might take you? David Mas Masumoto's journal entry on a frustration of farm life morphed into an article for the Los Angeles Times about a problematic peach (tasted good; looked bad; became "homeless in the marketplace"). From there, it became a book called Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (Harper). As Masumoto says, "good things can happen with our journals." --Jane Steinberg