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REVIEW:
Keeping A Journal You Love
By Sheila Bender

Walking Stick Press: 2002
ISBN: 1-58297-068-8
214 pp., $14.95

www.writersdigest.com
www.sheilabender.com

Reviewed by Robert Yehling

I have an engraved Indian teakwood trunk in my bedroom that contains dozens of filled notebooks—my ongoing "Day In The Life" journals of the past 25 years. As a writer, journaling stands fourth on my list of daily necessities behind breath, love and food, and often above the latter. I write everything from daily diary notes to travelogue, natural descriptions, character sketches, the most intimate secrets, deepest fantasies, craziest ideas and most outrageous acts in my journal. I take wild ideas and play with them in my journal before they emerge as poems, essays, stories or articles. I've spent thousands of hours in my journal; it is the pipeline to everything I've forgotten about this life, and a constant source of "new" ideas I first thought of ten or fifteen years ago while sitting on some mountain.

Thus, it was with a mixture of delight and curiosity that I picked up teacher/writer/editor Sheila Bender's fifth book, Keeping a Journal You Love. As a long-time journal keeper, I was interested to see if Sheila could hold my attention as she navigated through the primary purpose of this book—to stoke the enthusiasm level for writers at all levels through a series of examples, exercises and personal anecdotes. Furthermore, I wanted to know if this book offered suggestions for more advanced and experienced journal keepers to plunge even deeper as they mined their waking and dreaming moments for fruits of various shapes and tastes.

Keeping a Journal You Love is constructed simply and efficiently. The author gives an overview of the journaling process and its limitations—there are no limitations, she emphasizes again and again. Instead, she cites three elements in keeping the journal you love: "1) a compulsion to get things down the way you experience them (or at least the benefit of seeing such a compulsion; 2) a desire to enjoy some solitude (or the vision to understand that you can learn the art of enjoying it); and 3) an understanding about how to incorporate the craft of creative writing into your entry writing." Later, she borrows from a journal entry of a 24-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson to underscore the importance of believing that your journal and voice do make a difference in your personal world, if not the world at large:

Even if you are too humble to believe that what you have to say or what journaling helps you find to say is a "particular tone of your mind" that "may be new in the universe," you must act as if you believe this when you journal.

Keeping a Journal You Love pivots on the seven cardinal points of observation (five senses and two techniques) from which to journal—and to live, for that matter. In a nice tip of the literary hat to the Pleaides constellation and her years of working with women writers throughout the world, the author identifies them as the "seven sisters": Write what you see. Write what you smell. Write what you taste. Write what you touch. Write what you hear. Write using anaphora (crafted repetition). Write using metonymy (body terms to describe abstractions). In other words, she admonishes, write from personal sensory experience.

The author then breaks down the text into seven core chapters. These include "day-tripping," "musings, meditations and tidbits," "passions for projects and processes," "write letters to your loves," "fishing for stories," "ten more strategies to use for making journal entries," and "creating journal-keeping groups and communities." Each chapter contains examples of journals and follow-up notes on the journaling, plus a series of exercises that refer back to the just-completed passage.

Here's the twist that makes Keeping a Journal You Live sizzle: The journal entries are provided by the author and fifteen other writers, most of them acclaimed authors of many books. The cast includes the late Denise Levertov, Maxine Kumin, Kathleen Alcala, Robert Helenga, Pam Houston, Al Young and William Matthews. Their entries offer up a feast of uses for the journal—as travelogue, as idea factory, as research developer, as confidant, as lover, as chronicler of days both busy and boring. Hellenga's journal entries are quite revealing, as they show the point of conception of his fabulous novel set in Florence, The Sixteen Pleasures. We also read Alcala's descriptive journal entry of an old family library in Mexico, and how she re-shaped the material for a scene in her novel, Spirits of the Ordinary. These are rare glimpses at the often gut-wrenching process of moving from raw ideas to moments in a book. They also show the journal at its high-flying best.

In culling entries from this esteemed group of writers, the author shows the unlimited nature of the journal: "There are no topics that must be covered and none that are forbidden, she writes." She also accomplishes a most daunting task for anyone who writes how-to books—hooking the advanced-level practitioners as well as the beginners. Anyone who journals, writes letters or wants to journal should buy this book. It also works for schoolteachers and parents who wish to broaden the writing and life observation experiences of their students and children of all grade levels. After all, as the author implies, the purpose of keeping a journal is synonymous with the meaning of life itself:

It now seems to me the word "journal" is more identified with the journey one takes by writing, day after day, in the hopes of finding better understanding and a fuller world.

Further Information:
• Excerpt from Keeping A Journal You Love
• Interview with the Author