This post brought to mind memories of finding all my Nana's diaries, neatly packed into a box. Years and years of her life between the pages of so many notebooks. And the very firm instruction in her will that the box was to be burnt, unopened.
We honored her wishes but a tiny part of me really wished I could have taken a look.
A really interesting and open conversation with Amy. I really enjoyed it, fascinating. I actually didn't know about her work so thank you for opening up the opportunity to explore it further.
My diaries are where all the dark thoughts go so I can imagine having to make a decision at some point about whether to destroy them in case my children are shocked by meeting this dark stranger they never quite knew. Or maybe I misjudge them and they have actually know this stranger more than I have realised over the years!
It feels good to keep an unflinching, honest diary. It sounds to me that is what Amy did and it helped her to recreate that deep sense of herself on Orkney and in Berlin.
By contrast, the well-being industry's mania for people to produce 'gratitude journals' just seems a forced, false and self-congratulatory device for obscuring the darker stuff. Are those really 'journals' or 'diaries' in any real sense? I just can't imagine a novel ever deriving from one of those!
I love how you mentioned the different ways in which we all tend to journal or share our lives now: Instagram posts, blogs, calendar notes, meeting summaries or agendas, magazine or news columns. It helps show people the various forms of writing that still count! No matter how you capture it there’s evidence of the evolution of one’s identity through the bits of human experience shared or quietly reflected upon in one form or another.
I keep hoping my years of journaling will one day culminate into several books (as I’ve been sporadically writing for 34 years with that intention). I tend not to write daily, but often capture significant moments in time - like those life altering instances you can look back on and wonder how different it all would have been had things gone differently. Somehow I always come to the conclusion of acceptance and eventually make peace with difficult moments and how the events have shaped my unique being. Writing has become healing in this sense.
Rather than an account of my days, I find journaling has always been a way to make sense of my emotions in response to experiences out of my control - such as my mothers suicide or an emotionally abusive first marriage; but also the incredible things - like the birth of my children, a healing journey through the boundary waters of Canada, or when I travelled alone with my kids to Mexico to meet my second husbands’ family for the first time - not knowing any Spanish!
Journaling has also become a catalogue of intuitive inklings, as well as a place to empty my thoughts so they don’t constantly bounce around my head! It’s where I go most often to make sense of the chatter in my mind, I suppose.
My journals are a mess, though! I often wonder if my children will think I’m crazy if they ever try to read them! And it’s curious to note how much my handwriting alone changes from mood to mood, entry to entry, year to year.
It’s also curious to note the cyclical nature of particular themes in my live or periods of internal angst when comparing them year to year.
This reflective analysis also helps me to identify creative ideas that continually rise to the surface - the ones that obviously want more attention! The amount of dreams, book concepts, and creative projects that I entertain is overwhelming sometimes and I’d be drowning if I didn’t put them down someplace. (Now I’m working on the confidence to pull them out of my journals and actually post more to Substack!)
I also want to thank you for sharing this author and her books. I had not previously heard of them. And I love memoirs in which the natural world is a key character ❤️ Looking forward to hearing the podcast, exploring Amy’s books, and continuing my own journaling practice. 😊
It's definitely the dream, Alice! I've been writing Morning Pages for about eighteen months now and the fantasy that I could transform them into a book some day is probably what gets me out of bed every morning! What a wonderful interview. Amy's books are now firmly on my TBR list. Thank you for sharing!
Love this! I’m also not a huge diary writer, I’ll just scribble some mundane annoyances down to get my pen moving + the ball rolling on my fictional/nonfictional work. I get overwhelmed when I sit down and attempt to work on larger projects, so dashing something off about a silly or irritating moment in my life helps with the process.
I really enjoyed listening to this episode and will definitely be picking up Amy’s books! I also loved the mentions of writing diaries. Similar to Amy, I too have kept journals and diaries (on and off, I must add) since I was 7 or 8 years old. But I do hugely agree with your post here, Alice, about different ways of keeping a diary. Whilst a physical notebook can seem so romantic, there are so many different mediums to document our days and thoughts, they definitely shouldn’t be overlooked.
This post brought to mind memories of finding all my Nana's diaries, neatly packed into a box. Years and years of her life between the pages of so many notebooks. And the very firm instruction in her will that the box was to be burnt, unopened.
We honored her wishes but a tiny part of me really wished I could have taken a look.
A really interesting and open conversation with Amy. I really enjoyed it, fascinating. I actually didn't know about her work so thank you for opening up the opportunity to explore it further.
My diaries are where all the dark thoughts go so I can imagine having to make a decision at some point about whether to destroy them in case my children are shocked by meeting this dark stranger they never quite knew. Or maybe I misjudge them and they have actually know this stranger more than I have realised over the years!
It feels good to keep an unflinching, honest diary. It sounds to me that is what Amy did and it helped her to recreate that deep sense of herself on Orkney and in Berlin.
By contrast, the well-being industry's mania for people to produce 'gratitude journals' just seems a forced, false and self-congratulatory device for obscuring the darker stuff. Are those really 'journals' or 'diaries' in any real sense? I just can't imagine a novel ever deriving from one of those!
I love how you mentioned the different ways in which we all tend to journal or share our lives now: Instagram posts, blogs, calendar notes, meeting summaries or agendas, magazine or news columns. It helps show people the various forms of writing that still count! No matter how you capture it there’s evidence of the evolution of one’s identity through the bits of human experience shared or quietly reflected upon in one form or another.
I keep hoping my years of journaling will one day culminate into several books (as I’ve been sporadically writing for 34 years with that intention). I tend not to write daily, but often capture significant moments in time - like those life altering instances you can look back on and wonder how different it all would have been had things gone differently. Somehow I always come to the conclusion of acceptance and eventually make peace with difficult moments and how the events have shaped my unique being. Writing has become healing in this sense.
Rather than an account of my days, I find journaling has always been a way to make sense of my emotions in response to experiences out of my control - such as my mothers suicide or an emotionally abusive first marriage; but also the incredible things - like the birth of my children, a healing journey through the boundary waters of Canada, or when I travelled alone with my kids to Mexico to meet my second husbands’ family for the first time - not knowing any Spanish!
Journaling has also become a catalogue of intuitive inklings, as well as a place to empty my thoughts so they don’t constantly bounce around my head! It’s where I go most often to make sense of the chatter in my mind, I suppose.
My journals are a mess, though! I often wonder if my children will think I’m crazy if they ever try to read them! And it’s curious to note how much my handwriting alone changes from mood to mood, entry to entry, year to year.
It’s also curious to note the cyclical nature of particular themes in my live or periods of internal angst when comparing them year to year.
This reflective analysis also helps me to identify creative ideas that continually rise to the surface - the ones that obviously want more attention! The amount of dreams, book concepts, and creative projects that I entertain is overwhelming sometimes and I’d be drowning if I didn’t put them down someplace. (Now I’m working on the confidence to pull them out of my journals and actually post more to Substack!)
I also want to thank you for sharing this author and her books. I had not previously heard of them. And I love memoirs in which the natural world is a key character ❤️ Looking forward to hearing the podcast, exploring Amy’s books, and continuing my own journaling practice. 😊
It's definitely the dream, Alice! I've been writing Morning Pages for about eighteen months now and the fantasy that I could transform them into a book some day is probably what gets me out of bed every morning! What a wonderful interview. Amy's books are now firmly on my TBR list. Thank you for sharing!
Love this! I’m also not a huge diary writer, I’ll just scribble some mundane annoyances down to get my pen moving + the ball rolling on my fictional/nonfictional work. I get overwhelmed when I sit down and attempt to work on larger projects, so dashing something off about a silly or irritating moment in my life helps with the process.
I really enjoyed listening to this episode and will definitely be picking up Amy’s books! I also loved the mentions of writing diaries. Similar to Amy, I too have kept journals and diaries (on and off, I must add) since I was 7 or 8 years old. But I do hugely agree with your post here, Alice, about different ways of keeping a diary. Whilst a physical notebook can seem so romantic, there are so many different mediums to document our days and thoughts, they definitely shouldn’t be overlooked.
Mine is a forty-year layer cake. https://jopaoletti.substack.com/about