On the Joy of Literary Notebooks
I am starting, today, a new Literary Notebook.
It sits on my desk: pristine, open, its pages untouched, save for my name and phone number on the inside cover. The “if found, please return to,” I hope is implied.
This one is hardcover. Gold detailing on the mauve fabric exterior makes the shape of a door, but the many inset lines also evoke a labyrinth: two different ways to think about writing.
When I was in high school I spent over a year reading a Modern Library hardcover of Les Miserables. I obsessed over Victor Hugo’s prose: his long, pendulous sentences; his meandering transitional passages; his penchant for lengthy contextualizing. An entire section of the book was dedicated to the history of convents, which Hugo evidently deemed necessary before he could inform the reader that Valjean and the little girl escaped pursuit by clambering over a convent wall and hiding from the rogue eye of the authorities. It took me so long to finish Les Mis for the same reason that I linger over books now: I was constantly stopping to scribble down snatches of language, particularly euphonic sentences or peculiar turns of phrase more than any discrete plot points. The post-it sized Renewal receipts I accrued from the library served triple duty: overdue reminders, bookmarks, and scraps of paper on which to save these clippings of Hugo’s writing. My handwriting grew tinier and tinier as the white space on my receipt paper shrank.
Back when I was in high school, Victor Hugo quotes spilled out of my mouth on every topic. A friend of mine chided me about it, begged me to please codify my own opinion on things, instead of constantly invoking the words of a long-dead male French novelist.
“Don’t you have your own things to say?” he asked.
After I returned Les Mis for good, I decided I needed to keep all my clippings in one place: a purple spiral-bound, seventy sheets, wide rule. Quotes from my next venture into Hugo—The Hunchback of Notre Dame—followed by notes and excerpts on everything from theological treatises (C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, as well as Rob Bell’s Love Wins and Francis Chan’s rebuttal, Erasing Hell [please note that inclusion in this blog post is not equivalent to an endorsement]) to pasted-in print-outs of poems I liked. The first piece I loved from Ben Lerner is taped in there. Now, the cover’s fallen off and the quotes I wrote in pencil have faded so they’re barely legible, but that purple notebook contains a genesis.
Next: the red moleskine-knockoff Becky gave me shortly after we returned from France. She was one of the other girls in my study abroad program, not particularly studious, but enthusiastic and thoughtful and generous. Once we got back to campus in the spring, she approached me on the quad one day to give me this red notebook, saying she knew I would use it more than she would. Its elastic closure band is too stretched out to be useful anymore, but I used the hell out of that notebook. This time, I instituted an organizational principle: excerpts of prose in the front, poems and isolated quotes in the back. The prose sections starts with Henri Nouwen and the poetry with Wendell Berry: appropriate literary representatives of my time at Christian college. I wonder now, flipping through, how many women’s voices are pressed into these pages, what lessons about representation and tone I was subconsciously accepting.
The first time I ever got drunk enough to throw up, I threw up on the messenger bag that held that notebook. My physicist friend—the one who dressed up as Einstein for Halloween—was driving us back to campus after another friend’s twenty-first birthday. We’d been mixing Jack and Cokes—or was it rum and Coke?—and the friend whose birthday it was didn't want to finish her drink, which was, by that point in the night, almost all liquor and barely any Coke. So Matthew and I split it between ourselves. I probably hadn’t eaten much (still, my Kryptonite) and didn’t know what my tolerance was like, and before we made it back to campus I was barfing out of the side of my Physicist Friend’s car. And all over my canvas messenger bag. I remember swabbing down that notebook’s cover in the sink in my shared on-campus apartment. Somehow, the pages were spared.
I filled up the last page of the red notebook the year after I graduated college. During my first year with the volunteer program in Houston, I switched to a slender black notebook. The first prose quotes come from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; the first poem in the back was read to me by a not-yet-boyfriend who brought a handmade chapbook over to my communal house for dinner. Notes about neighbors and creased newspaper clippings are tucked between the pages. That notebook holds far more prose than poetry: James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, Sue Monk Kidd, Harper Lee, Ta-Nehisi Coates. The books I read keep pace with what I thought about, what I was learning. I read about the history of blues music and interracial love and the Enneagram. But I was also slowly creating a compendium of beauty, of phrases that moved me, of strings of words that compelled some mirrored flutter in my chest.
My fourth Literary Notebook is floral-patterned and the jacket has completely separated from the binding. I still read for self-education (The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, Root Shock by Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Robert Farris Thompson’s Tango: the Art History of Love), but increasingly, the titles and texts pitch toward pursuits of pleasure and aesthetics. I copied down sprawling, dizzying, unpunctuated passages from novels by José Saramago, given to me by my motorcycle-riding tango teacher. That notebook holds all my quotes from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, whom I saw speak at Brazos Bookstore, interviewed by Houston author Bryan Washington.
Books were taking on a different meaning for me, tipping as portals into existence in a new way. I started graduate school, set about studying writing with a new level of intention and clarity, and the way that I read shifted.
You need to learn to read like a writer, professors told my peers and me. I read books not for my Literary Notebook but for the Reading Commentaries I turned in with every packet of creative work, chasing the question, what does this book allow me to do in my writing?
I read differently after my MFA program, but higher education hasn’t tempered my zeal. If anything, I’m even more enthralled by the possibilities of how to manipulate perspective, emotion, and the boundaries of a story world. Lately, I’ve been prowling around the house chanting under my breath, “I wanna be a critic! I wanna be a critic!”
And I am. Post-MFA, one of the avenues of writing/publishing I hope to focus on is literary criticism. I’ll concentrate on memoir and works about faith, particularly about evangelical backgrounds. I’ve become captivated with how a text works and what an author is doing to affect a particular response. A number of the books I read these days are pre-publication Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) of book I intend to review.
The first book I log in my new Literary Notebook will be one of these. These notebooks have been my companions for over a decade, tracking novel possibilities of language and expression and syntax and feeling. All the words pressed into them have become a part of me, the flakes and scales and shards of my aesthetic formation swirling around in the internal biome we call personality.
From the red Literary Notebook: “No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of the forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly…it begins to speak with all the treetops at once.” — Boris Pasternak, as quoted in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic
