Leaving a Trace

For my personal book, I read Leaving a Trace, by Alexandra Johnson.

Some ideas she mentioned in the latter chapters of the book:

1. Keep a journal for the sole reason to have a resource for future writing. Think of it as a data collection device. She suggests keeping journals for different reasons, and to keep information separate and organized.

2. Journals can be great springboards for fiction, especially. As an exercise, she suggests going to a cafe, picking out three people, and trying to describe in detail one mannerism that they display. Virginia Woolf kept numerous journals and later used them as source material for her novels.

3. She writes at length about the places that people write or pre-write. She walks the streets of New York and "writes" as she goes, then later transfers her thoughts to her journal. She often carries a purse-sized journal to keep it handy.

The introductory chapter set the tone: the author had read the journal of a woman who had lived in the late 19th century and had recorded her daily life in a journal, though wrote in it from time to time that her life was mundane. The author's discovery of the journal set her on a journey to collect more journals, and to commit herself to journaling. Every life, she says, is worth remembering.

I would recommend this book to both of my parents. They have lives unrecorded. I would like to see them journal. Not for my sake, nor for my siblings. But for themselves. Neither one are reflective individuals. Perhaps if they kept a journal, they might find themselves free of past burdens.

Gallery Walk I. A. Keeping a journal keeps the mind engaged in recording a life, helps the writer to keep the craft alive, and provides a place for reflection, meditation and sheer pleasure. B. Tell the Censor Inside to go to hell.

Gallery Walk II.

The next book I will read with be either Writing Down the Bones, or Writing Toward Home, both of which seem to be extensions of the kind of reading I am currently engaged in.