I’m over at Tweetspeak today, dear ones. I’d love for you to join me as I talk about what’s in my journal. Here’s a taste:
I am nine years old, heading out for my first ever week away from home. Summer camp. I am terrified. For my birthday, the week before camp, a friend gives me a diary. It’s a small padded book, filled with thinly lined white paper and covered in pink cloth with polka dots on it.
I take it with me and fill its pages with my fears (I miss my parents, I want to go home, the other girls don’t understand, they make fun of me when I cry) and my feats (I went down the big water slide into the lake! I balanced a bugle on my fingers for four minutes! No one else did it even half so long!).
And I am hooked. I never stop writing in journals, though over the years I move away from padded pink polka dots to sleek black Moleskines with creamy blank pages.
What a wonderful post. I love the ideas you teased out of the kids, and I Ioved reading about your history with journaling. Last time we were in Seattle and visited our store room, I got out all my journals, a couple dozen of them at least, and brought them back to NZ. I’m looking forward to finding the time to read them all. At least I think I’m looking forward to reading them.
Thanks, Lynne! I had so much fun writing this post (not to mention teaching that session of our writing workshop). I’m so glad you liked it. And I hope you get a chance to read through those old journals. Much of the time, I confess, when I go back I find they’re a snooze, even to me (and I find myself almost endlessly fascinating)–or else I realize the stuff I think I’m just now learning I actually knew ten years ago 🙂