Leaving A Trace
Chapter One
Starting Out: Getting
Lost on Purpose
Once I begin the act of writing, it all falls away - the view from
the window, the tools, the talismans, and I am unconscious of
myself ... one's carping inner critics are silenced for a time ...
there is always a surprise, a revelation. During the act of writing,
I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.
-Gail Godwin
JOURNALS. THEY BECKON everywhere. Stacked in neat rows in
drugstores, fanned in pale rainbow hues in display windows,
pyramided in bins at Wal-Mart, stocked near cash registers in
bookstores. On corners of almost every major city, specialty journal
shops have popped up overnight, as quickly and inevitably as
Starbucks. And at midnight in a speck of a prairie town, someone can
order dozens from catalogs. A single click on the Internet connects
another country - France for handmade diaries, Italy for paper the
color of fresh cream. Staring at the electronic images, a browser
tries imagining a journal's weight in their hand.
But consider the most familiar, those from the local stationery
store. Yesterday I ... read full excerpt from: Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal ebook
