The Eclectic World of the Diary

May 2, 2010

                         

                               THE ECLECTIC WORLD OF THE DIARY   

I think it should be obvious that there are as many different types of diaries as there are people who write them.  They are, above all, artistic expressions of the self.  If not in the type of diary, at least in the style, they are as unique as the individual who put pen to paper.  Reading diaries and journals you will come as close as possible to reading someone else’s mind or to walking a mile in their shoes.

Certainly what is important to me is not the same for you and what is important to me today may not be so a few years from now.  From a confused college student in the turbulent sixties to confusion and upheaval in my sixties, the chapters of my life include everything from living in a utopian community and cult to milking cows, from teaching to single parenthood, from homesteading to bookselling, from disastrous marriages to love.

 A journal is a continuous novel with only one main character guaranteed from beginning to end.   The theme may remain the same but the other characters shift and the plot and setting may flip like frenetic channel surfing in the soap opera of life.   

Unlike a novel, a diary is written in your “true voice,” which is like the clothes you wear around the house when you are sure no one is going to see you.   A journal can be written with an honesty that is too raw, possibly too politically incorrect, and too self-exposing to be disguised as a writer’s work of fiction.   I have often found the truth to be unbelievable.   At times I have written what could not be printed in the paper.

Consider what a National Diary Archive would contain:  history, social culture, adventure and travel description, religious experiences, hobbies, recipes, nature stories, weather phenomenon, garden notes, teen-age angst, motherhood, parenthood (parental angst), relationships, sex, dreams, art sketches, photos and so on.  The perspective could be emotional, psychological, sociological, spiritual, or historical.   

I cannot imagine a more fascinating library.  Even if I don’t want to read what Julia Child ate in every restaurant in France, maybe someone else would.   

Wouldn’t you think it would be more important for the Library of Congress to want to preserve this than everything  ever said on Twitter?

Posted in Are Diaries Worth Saving?, diaries, Journaling, National Diary Archive | 7 Comments »

Green With Envy

April 30, 2010

                                                 GREEN WITH ENVY

The local paper was not interested in printing my article on building a National Diary Archive in this city.   However, they have run feature stories about the still wildly popular hobby and lucrative business of scrapbooking.   

Counter-intuitively, a local store that sells blank books for journal writing would not hang a flyer about my journal workshop.  I have canceled journal workshops for lack of interest.  I have felt the breeze of doors slamming in my face regarding the idea of creating a National Diary Archive to preserve the thoughts and feelings and stories of the common person. 

Meanwhile, on April 14, Doug Gross of CNN wrote: “Twitter and the Library of Congress announced Wednesday that every public tweet posted since Twitter started in 2006 will be archived digitally by the federal library.”  Matt Raymond, the Library of Congress communications director, is seemingly ecstatic by what might be learned through this “wealth of data.”  And Twitter itself gushes: “It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming a part of history.” 

Jealousy washes over me.  Save imbecilic tweets and not the mindful outpourings of self-discovery, not the handwritten records of personal history, work, travels or relationships?   I wonder what wealth of information could be gleaned by saving all of our phone calls.  

How about if we save our “to do” lists?  Ah well, someone has already done that in the journaling world.  She collected her lists.  I suppose there was a revelation there, if nothing else it would have been that we spend a lot of time on things that are, in the end, not very important after all.   Given one hundred years our lists might be a fascinating thing…if you needed background for a novel. 

So, if tweets are valuable as part of the history of social culture, why not journals?  Or is it a matter of the ease with which tweets have been collected as opposed to the money and tenacious work of collecting handwritten journals?

Posted in American Diaries, American Diary Archive, Archiving Tweets Not Diaries? | 1 Comment »

What’s In a Name?

April 30, 2010

What to call the new baby?

National Diary Archive, American Diary Archive, National Diary Repository, American Diary Repository, Diary Archive of America, National Diary Library, American Diary Library, etc. , etc., etc.   A veritable mad confusion of choices.

“Journal, ” a term I prefer, is too often confused with newspapers and magazines  (i.e. American Journal Archive). 

I like to tell people I keep a “journal”  and not a “diary” as I think “journal” conveys something more serious, something with depth and reflection beyond  a smattering of daily notes.   Truthfully, not all my entries have that much depth. 

I’ll be blunt about using the word “repository” in the name.  It reminds me of “suppository,” an altogether repugnant association in my mind.

Someone suggested going with “American” instead of “National,”  to distinguish it from all the other diary archives in the world.  Does anyone actually know of any other official diary archives? 

Any name suggestions are welcome.  Voting is encouraged.  Please don’t do the American thing…you know, what we are doing with baby names…Amairikan Dieree Arkive.

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How Did I Get Into This?

April 30, 2010

                                         HOW DID I GET INTO THIS?

I think it all started when I began to consider the inevitability of my mortality…as in Death, it’s coming.  I marched out and made a proper “living will” for medical directives.   However, my primary will still consists of a few sentences of my final wishes scribbled out preceding each annual trek to Florida via air travel.  Not good enough.  The focus of my concern has always been “What will happen to all my journals…who will get them…will they fall into the wrong hands?”   And whose hands ARE the wrong hands? 

Anais Nin had the volumes of her diary stored during her lifetime in a safe deposit box.  If you hide them then who will get the key, and when?  Do you want your family to read your diary?  Your sibling rivals?  Your best friend?  Your grandchildren?  Strangers?  Who?

So, clearly, this is a question that needs to be addressed by everyone who keeps a diary. 

I had been ruminating on the idea for some time when I read A Diary of the Century, a published selection from the 70 year diary of Edward Robb Ellis.  This is one of the best I have read.  I was mesmerized.    After years of the discipline and meditation of keeping a diary the writer is led to profound insights.   He is highly quotable.  If you haven’t read this book, do so.  Ellis was a newspaper reporter and author of several books.  He lived most of his life in New York City.

In his final chapter Ellis advocates establishing an American Diary Repository for the preservation and use of the diaries written by the common citizen.  Ellis calls it “an untapped body of Americana—the life stories of all sorts of men and women as told in their journals.”  The idea set forth – which I shared – absolutely set me on fire.  I wanted to meet this Edward Robb Ellis immediately, but discovered I was a few years too late.

Nine years followed where I struggled to hold journal workshops.  In spite of decent advertising there has been limited interest. (I may be an unknown, but after 46 years of writing I do know something about diaries.)   This lack of response led me to shelve the idea of the diary archive. 

Then I came across a reference to  “The Power of Writing Journal Conference” held in 2008 in Denver.   Featured speakers were Tristine Rainer and Christina Baldwin, my favorite authors on journal writing.  Impossible to believe, I missed this conference.  Ms. Rainer  also hopes to see a world-wide library of diaries.  Through her Center for Autobiographic Studies she has encouraged me to take up the challenge.

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Are Old Diaries Worth Saving?

March 25, 2010

There are many reasons why all diaries are worth saving…not just the diaries of the famous. 

Have you ever wondered what someone else was really thinking or feeling?  Have you ever thought how intriguing it would be to know what was going on in someone else’s life, to tear away the masks we wear?  What is it like to be someone the same as you, or someone completely different – of the opposite sex, a different race or a different period of history?   What might it be like to be a mother, a single-parent, a handicapped person, a soldier, to have cancer, to be raped, or to be so angry you would take a gun to school?    

There are many voyeuristic fascinations in reading a person’s diary.   We want to peek, we want to know what it was really like. Dr. Irving Finkel, who has collected 1,000 diaries to begin a British diary archive, says we all have something of a “beastly sneak” inside us.    We want to see the naked truth that most of us suspect is not available in newspapers or public media, or in history books, or even in buffed up autobiographies.  

Old diaries are an alluring glimpse into the past.   What  were the triumphs and tragedies and even the mundane details and concerns of everyday life?  What did people do before television, computers, and cell phones?  We might not think our diaries are very interesting, but given one hundred years even the commonplace acquires a mystique.  

For a point of view that is unavailable in a standard history text, I love reading excerpts from diaries written about a historic event.  After all, history is usually written by the winners who distort things to illuminate their own brilliance.   A diary, however, is uncensored.   

Whether we should preserve diaries may become a personal decision when you are the diarist.   If you are like me, you never intended to write so much.  I began my diary when I was 16.  I just kept on writing and suddenly it was 46 years later.  At my age it is time to answer questions about what should happen to all of my stuff when I die.  Because I write with complete honesty, and often use the diary as a catharsis, I would not want the members of my family or my friends to read it when I die.   At the same time, since I have put so many hours of work into these journals, I would hate to throw them away just as much as I would be devastated today if they were destroyed in fire or flood.  

Offering them to an archive is a way to preserve my life’s work.  I would be giving them to future generations, for whatever purpose emerges, in all of their ragged uselessness or hopeful value.  I think it’s a bit  like donating your body to science, only in this case it’s like donating your soul.  

One never knows if it will end up on the anatomy table or in the woods of a forensic body farm.  That’s a chance I’m willing to take.    

To my future unknown readers: “Salut!”

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Posted in American Diaries, Are Diaries Worth Saving? | 2 Comments »

We need a national diary archive!

March 3, 2010

 In an age where blogging is de rigueur for the young, and we baby boomers are approaching the end of the road, we are in danger of losing an important part of our cultural history: the diaries, journals and letters of the common person. 

As I write this I imagine hundreds of such treasures are being sent off to ignoble graves in the landfills of America, flung in the trash by unappreciative or overwhelmed heirs exclaiming: “look at all this junk Mom and Dad collected!” 

 Many people before me have envisioned a National Diary Archive – a safekeeping place where all those “common” folk (those of us who are not famous) might bequeath their diaries for the benefit or entertainment of unknown readers and researchers of the future.  Who, how and where are the major challenges.    

 Besides acquiring funding it will be necessary to find a location safe from natural disasters, accessible to the public, and suitable for long-term storage.  The archive must be capable of storing the diaries unopened until all persons in them are dead and will no longer be hurt by the diarist’s blunt honesty.  There will be a need for someone to work on cataloging and referencing these diaries for research when released to the public and possibly publishing them on the internet. 

 As you might have guessed, I have a personal connection with this cause and do shamelessly present myself for the position.  I began writing a diary in 1964 and have kept one (not always religiously) ever since then. The more than 50 volumes comprise a large part of my life’s work.  No, they are not great literature.  Neither do I want them to end up as compost. 

 I have arbitrarily chosen Fort Collins, Colorado, my hometown, as the ideal location in the heart of the country, for a national diary archive.  We seem basically disaster free and have a dry climate.

 I believe there is enough interest in old diaries and journals to support establishing an archive.  Recently on eBay a policeman’s log book from 1941 and a teen-ager’s diary from 1905 sold for over $50 each.  A schoolteacher’s uniquely “emotional” journal from 1872 – describing whippings and discipline problems – sold for $378.  One thing to remember is that what is commonplace today will in a hundred years or less become intriguingly, charmingly vintage. 

 Ultimately, we cannot imagine what use these diaries and letters will have in a distant time or what impact the small tidbits or deeply examined lives will have on future generations.  But if we don’t save them now, we will never know.

For comments, ideas, or donations of diaries and journals, contact Cynthia at bluemoon47@qwestoffice.net

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Posted in American Diaries, American Diary Archive, Are Diaries Worth Saving?, Journaling | 3 Comments »

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