On revisiting and revision
Keeping a journal, revisiting and annotating our past selves.
I just finished reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines for the first time. It’s a brilliant book that examines the experiences of the wives, mistresses, muses of famous male writers, many of whom were writers themselves: Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald. There’s also Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin and Louise Colet, there’s Anna Kavan and Djuna Barnes.
It’s devastating to read about how many of these women had their words stolen by the men they loved, how many of them were forced into psychiatric institutions by these same men who pathologized their anxiety and anger and intellectual desires. Some of them were limited to writing only an hour a day for their “health,” their husbands and doctors colluding with each other, and in face of it all still made their art.
The book asks who gets to create, who gets to be an author, who gets remembered, who gets pathologized. It ends with an ode to blogging and to writing ourselves in. “The decision to write the private in public, it is a political one… Why write one’s diary in public? To counter this shaming and guilt project.”
In my writing practice this year, I’ve been circling around ideas of existence, selfhood, composites, death. I’ve been participating in the Kenyon writing workshops over the last two months and last week we read Sara Heady’s Revision, where she takes a piece of writing from high school and annotates it from her adult self. Our assignment was to experiment with speculative nonfiction, leaning into ambiguity and meditation and the figurative over the literal.
I’ve revisited my childhood and teenagehood journals once before, in the thick of a reparenting journey. It was early in the pandemic, and I took myself on a camping trip for three days to get away from the chaos of the city and the oppressive feeling of the lockdowns. I wanted to be alone and uncontactable. Along with my camping gear, I packed the journals that I kept between the ages of 8 and 18.
I read them chronologically while looking at photos of my child self corresponding to the age that I was writing. Each entry struck me with the memory of feeling very mature at the time of writing, and each photo struck me with how much of a child I actually was at that time. The world too heavy, too dark. The surprising awareness of it all too young.
I made food over the fire, roasting kiełbasa and vegetables and baked beans and slices of sourdough. I ate in silence, sat in silence, read in silence. I allowed myself music only when I was painting, which I also did a lot of. It took a full twenty-four hours to calm my nerves and reduce my jumpiness at every unknown noise from the woods. The fear wasn’t of bears or bobcats, but of men.
I moved between a camping chair, a hammock, and a blanket laid on the ground, working my way through the handwritten accounts of my own life. Every day, I was flooded with events I wrote down but didn’t remember. I cried a lot.
It was my birthday, probably 3rd or 4th grade, when I made the decision to start keeping a diary. I asked all of the friends coming to my party to get me a journal. I received several, and the one I picked to start was a small sparkly blue diary, a puffed plastic cover and a lock. I wrote in it with sparkly gel pens. I started each entry with “Dear Diary” and ended each entry with my signature.
I continued journaling, off and on, for many years. Sometimes I would write every day, sometimes I would take breaks of several months or years. Every so often, I would try to transition to a digital version, using my notes app or a running document, but I returned each time to paper and pen, developing a strong preference over the years for the Pilot G2 Gel Pen 0.38mm, which I continue to buy in bulk. As Zambreno says, “Of course many of us don’t write every day. Sometimes there are long lapses of not writing or posting. That’s why I think of this form as a form of l’écriture feminine: a rhythm of silence and raw emotion, these fervent utterings.” Nobody else is archiving these scraps of our existence.
It was surreal to get to spend long days revisiting my self, and psychedelics were not a prerequisite. It gave my present self the chance to reach back in time toward all of my former selves, and I finally felt compassion towards the little kid that endured so much loss and pain.
It’s now been several years since the first revisiting, and this time around I’m not only revisiting but also revising. I found an entry in my journal at the age of sixteen, desperately trying to convince myself to live. After I typed it out, verbatim, I annotated it and submitted it for workshop. Reading it out loud to a room full of writers, serious writers, adults, I didn’t expect how much it would mean to have my teenage thoughts, those words written half a lifetime ago, to be taken seriously. But they were, and it’s the revision along with the revisiting that is healing. It’s the sharing of it all.
There is also a constant decision-making process: what to turn into a short story, what to put in my book, what to write in this newsletter, and what to “save” for a future project. I’m trying to do much less saving these days, future uncertain and all. I’m trying to remember that all of these are made up categories with permeable boundaries. I’m trying to remember that everything is everything.
Zambreno talks about making each other characters in our narratives, “referencing, linking to, and reading each other.” They continue, “We are relentless documentarians of our own quotidian, its gorgeous gasps and banalities.” In that spirit, here are some essays from writers I admire that I’ve read recently:
The deeper I get into writing my book, the less I have been working on my newsletter. But I’m reminded of how helpful and palliative it is to write in response to and with others in public.
Thanks for reading, replying, revisiting with me; more soon.
Your post inspired me to read Heroines, and so I did. Thank you for sharing it along with your thoughts on the craft (because it demands the same quality of attention and discernment as any other craft imo) of journaling.
It sounds like the Kenyon workshops have been a good experience? I’ve kept diaries since I was four. I’m struck by the idea that I could go back and revise, show love, revisit all those past selves. If I can get a moment tomorrow, the big bin will have to come out. Thank you for this.