A Year of Writing on the Road
On journal writing, the year's most-read letters, and an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress
In this letter, I’m continuing my reflections on the past twelve months. I left the U.S. on September 24, 2022, for a year of travel and writing. In my last letter, I looked at my year of travel, so this one is about my year of writing.
Journal Writing
I always wanted to be one of those people who kept a journal, because I knew that’s what it takes to be a real writer (the creative kind anyway). Virginia Woolf wrote, “the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.”
But every journal I started ended after a few entries. I was always too busy juggling the roles in my life—mother, professor, writer, wife. But, on a deeper level, I resisted what I knew a journal needed to be—a frank reflection on one’s life. I knew, on some level, that if I kept a journal in earnest, emotions and observations would come out of me that I didn’t want to see on the page. My inner struggles and dissatisfaction would become real once I wrote them down.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, about the woman writer of her day, “She stops in fear at the threshold of reality.” She wrote that in 1949. She might as well have been writing about me. I wasn’t ready to face the reality of my situation or the turmoil of my inner life.
During the pandemic, I started keeping a journal in earnest, because I finally had the time to do it. However, I approached it as a place to plan the day ahead and warm up my writing brain for the tasks I wanted to accomplish. Gradually, though, it became more personal. I feel like I can remember the precise moment that happened, when I finally wrote down the truth. Unfortunately, I can’t locate it in my journals, because the scans I made to bring with me on my trip are damaged for some reason, and I can’t open them. But I recall the feeling, like an electric charge that ran from my pen up my arm and to my heart. That was the beginning of everything. It was in the fall of 2020, when I began to unravel, first in the pages of my journal, and then gradually in my life.
I’m convinced that writing a journal can change (or save) your life. I’ve since learned that Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, feels the same. There are real therapeutic benefits of introspective daily writing, as studies have shown. (For me, journaling has been the most important practice of my healing journey over the last three years, alongside meditation, walks in nature, and talk therapy.) But there is also simply the practice of recording what is real—inside and outside—which is so crucial if one aspires to write creatively.
When I left the U.S., I brought with me three slim, lovely notebooks, made in Italy, that I stumbled upon at Marshall’s. (I just love the little birds and the creamy lined paper inside.) I thought I would fill them up, scan them, and then ditch them as I traveled. But I’ve managed to fill them and two more notebooks I bought in Berlin, and I still have them all. Now I have added two new slim notebooks that I picked up in here in Scotland. I carry one with me most of the time, so I can write down anything that comes up while I’m sitting by the sea or having lunch. I also do a lot of journaling on my computer. That is where most of it is now. I open a new file for each month, so I have 12 files for the year.
For the most part, my journals are full of the kind of mental sludge that Cameron says we can clear out of the way by getting it out on the page. But there are also lots of passages that record experiences and thoughts that have fueled my other writing projects. I periodically read through them and highlight or underline sentences in red ink or make stars in the margins for things I want to be sure to remember.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and feelings about journaling. Do you keep one? How? (A friend of mine writes things down on scraps of paper that she leaves lying around. After a while, once she has metabolized what she wrote down, she throws it away. I love that!) Or have you resisted journaling, like I did? Feel free to share photos of your journals too, if you wish. :)
“Letters from Anne”
My public-facing writing during this year of travel has been primarily this newsletter, which all of you make possible. Thank you for joining me on this journey and cheering me on! Writing these letters for you and receiving your emails and comments in return has definitely been one of the main highlights of this year. When things got a bit lonely on the road sometimes, sending out a letter was a great way for me to feel more connected. So keep the emails and comments coming! I love them!
Looking back over the year of letters, I’ve discovered that the most viewed letter, with 1.94K views, is also my favorite:
What a (Woman) Writer Needs
What does it take for a woman to become a writer? To devote herself to her craft? To turn inward and pull the words out of the murky depths that only she can plumb? This question has haunted me all of my adult life. It’s the question that sent me to graduate school, where I was determined to discover exactly when and how American women writers had found the space and courage to become that most selfish—and thus most unladylike—of things, an artist.
This letter initiated another theme for “Letters from Anne” about the lives of women writers, which I spent my career as a professor studying. I’m still learning from them as I recreate my own life as a writer. How exacty does a woman devote herself to writing is the question that I have always wanted to answer. I’m still looking for clues!
The second most viewed letter this year, with 1.83K views, is from last Christmas. I understand why. Who wouldn’t want to spend Christmas in Paris?
Hello from Paris!
Hello from Paris! I’ve been here for a week with my daughter, soaking up the Christmas season, which is, overall, more subdued here than in the U.S. The only place we noticed playing Christmas music was Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore run by Americans. But we loved seeing the lights around the city, the Christmas markets, and the extraordinary deco…
After those top two, a number of letters come in at 1.3K to 1.4K views. In the travel category, posts on Sicily, Berlin, and Edinburgh were the most popular. In the women writers category, recent posts on Women Writers and Solitude and Writing Memoir ranked the highest. You can view the entire archive here.
Writing for Publication
The only published writing from this year of travel was my essay on Dora Maar for LitHub.
I have also been working on a book-length project that I hope will be published someday. I’m writing about my year of travel as I figure out how I want to start my life over after ditching nearly all of my possessions and the roles by which I identified myself. For now, I’m writing it as a memoir, but sometimes I think about writing fiction instead. It’s still very much a work in progress, but as it develops, I will share more pieces of it with you.
Memoir-in-Progress
And now an excerpt from the beginning of the book I’ve been writing, where I’m trying to capture something real about my final days in New Orleans and what it was like to let everything go.
“I’ve done it a bunch of times,” a guy named Jason says as he walks through our house, stopping to take pictures for the estate sale.
The home that contained our family for sixteen years is about to be handed over to a young bachelor, a lawyer, who will, as we did, paint over every surface and fill it with the things that are supposed to make a life complete. Until that life breaks apart—and the house with it.
“Every time a relationship ends,” Jason says, “I just call up an antique dealer and have him haul it all away, and then I move on. It’s very freeing.”
It’s August, just a week before the closing, and two weeks before I take my daughter off to college.
He takes pictures all round, in closets, in drawers, in every room, no matter that piles of books obscure half the furniture. He’s recording what is left of the family I broke apart, our lives together reduced to a houseful of stuff—stuff that we no longer need.
I’ve watched everything go once before. But then it was all covered in black mold, water-logged, half of it upside down, and scattered all over the house. That was after the floods of Hurricane Katrina receded. Then we were the ones taking the pictures, to submit with our insurance claim.
This time, I’m letting it all go. The closet full of flowery dresses and lacy underwire bras I barely wore, bulky sweatshirts I forgot I owned, supposedly comfortable shoes that never fit right, and the polyester robe, mortar board, and expensive but useless academic “hood” I wore once a year to graduation ceremonies. The four large bookcases full of women writers—biographies, essays, novels, memoirs, letters—the connective tissue that brought them closer to my own dimly understood life. The supposedly Louis XV settee under a large painting of a Venetian canal. The sectional sofa, stained and lumpy from years of use. The kitchen full of gadgets—air fryer, crockpot, salad spinner, tea cups one grandmother brought back from Switzerland, a plum-colored, cut-glass candy dish from the other. All of it has accumulated since Katrina. Nothing remains from the first thirty-five years of my life.
It’s not so hard to let everything go once you’ve had it all taken away from you before. And seen a thriving city laid waste—house after house an empty, rotting shell. You know nothing is forever anymore. Absolutely nothing. It can all change in an instant. You’ve always known that theoretically, but not in your bones—not until you’ve seen it happen.
And then as you rebuild your life, everything that replaces what was lost feels temporary, including the house you are living in. But your husband is excited. He takes you out to look at houses in neighborhoods that weren’t flooded, and you find a Victorian shotgun with tall ceilings, gleaming hard-wood floors, and a vine-draped courtyard that would look perfect with a Grecian knock-off fountain against the far fence. He dives right in, picking out paint colors, hiring contractors, making everything new. You just watch, unable to care what shade of green he paints the family room or whether the light fixture he buys for the bathroom has three or four lamps. You just wonder how long it will all last.
Jason lifts the dining room tablecloth to take a picture of the scratched, mahogany stained surface underneath. He moves strategically placed pillows to see what condition the furniture is in. He walks toward the French doors that look out on the backyard. He stops. It’s too damn hot to bother going outside.
“What about the fountain?” He raises his phone.
“I think that stays.”
“Too bad. That would sell first thing.” He lowers his phone.
Jason talks about how relationships seem to come and go. I wonder how many times he’s done this sort of thing himself, but I don’t ask. “After a while, you know the signs,” he says. “I’m single again now.”
He turns to walk back toward the kitchen and says over his shoulder, “But it’s very freeing, you know. Feels good to just start over with a clean slate.”
I hope you enjoyed this excerpt and my reflections on my year of writing. And that you will share your thoughts with me via email or with all of us in the comments on Substack. I love knowing what my letters bring up for you!
Until next time,
Anne
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about journaling.
When I was immigrating to the United States from Canada to marry my American husband, I gave away most everything and stored a few things at my parent's house, but a year later, I came back to take stock, and I released the rest of it, taking only a white sofa, which I eventually gave away, too. It is freeing, in a way, and in another, it registered in my bones as deep loss. Personal loss. Loss of a life I had built the way I wanted, even though I was moving away to build a new wonderful life with another.
At one point, about two years into my marriage, I realized that focusing on what I had given up would not be healthy long term, and instead, I needed to shift toward who I was becoming in relationship outside myself. That felt right and positive and strong.
Now, 25 years married, I'm at the point of wanting to release everything we have and starting completely fresh. New town, new house, new belongings, new job. My retired husband is almost at the same point, but he'd rather have teeth pulled than move again. I tend to embrace change and he tends to hold onto the familiar. I like the familiar, too, but I'm SO drawn to starting over, and with a lot less stuff.
I, too, have been avoiding journaling because I don't want to complain or bemoan or fret or brag or rejoice on paper. I like the idea of journaling, but it seems like a lot of effort to create a tangible record rather than throwing it all on a white table in my head, moving the "puzzle pieces" around, and organizing them until they make sense. Putting personal words on paper seems to me to have too much energy, too much importance. It feels too much like holding on rather than letting go, which might seem like a contradictory statement. Ha! You can see that I have complex and unruly thoughts and feelings about this that I haven't yet sorted through. Writing fiction is WAY easier so I channel feelings and complications and joy into made-up stories. Fiction for me is about sharing rather than recording, which is what journaling feels like, but maybe I need a different perspective on it.
Anne, thank you for reminding us that stuff is temporary and can be taken away in a minute or a few days/weeks/months in a water-logged city. Then what's left? Does it matter that we replace it? You write that so poignantly. What is it that endures beyond the stuff? Who are we without it? I always return to the significance of Man's Search for Meaning. What baggage does our stuff symbolize?
I do keep a journal. Of sorts. Many days it's just what I did that day with an occasional kernel of something more. But I persist. It's the only regular time I write in cursive. There's something real about that. I use a regular At-A-Glance appointment book. The space for each day is tiny. I write in a tiny hand, very different than my usual sweeping one. I doubt that anyone finding it later would even bother to try to decipher the sentences. I don't try either. The most valuable record might be the books I have read and my response to them. Those I can find.
Occasionally, I don't write, but I try to be faithful to the process. I've just returned from Germany and brought two slim books to write in. I wrote only one day. After a week home, I think I'll just write across the days in this book, the pleasures and struggles of traveling at 88 and what I might have learned about myself and my ancestral German people.
Reflection never stops, does it? If I'm not learning, I'm not living.
Enough for now. I don't know if any of this makes sense.