Journals

I met with a group of good people and fine writers tonight at Lift Bridge Books in Brockport, NY. The names I remember: Bill (who seems a devotee of writing and apparently quite a famous poet), Frank, Dan (a Kerouac fan), David (who went to seminary school and is a psychologist, or something in that vein), Joe who also went to seminary school and who has published novels, Margay an anthropologist, some other nice lady whose name I didn't catch, Sibyl who was quite quiet, Joe (who runs the book store, but who was only there a short while), and another lady and man (John?) whose names I didn't catch. All were intelligent, all seemed into writing.

Today's discussion was about journal entries. People shared samples of their journal entries. They were quite good, surprisingly. (And it wasn't like they were trying to show off with their best stuff.) You'd think journal entries wouldn't be so ... clean and sensical, but I guess that is what constant writing does. Keeps you close to language, and as you continue to write, the first draft becomes better and better. And these people are writers. Not poseurs.

I did notice this about the journal entries. Most were narratives. Nothing wrong with that, except I thought there would be more meditative pieces. Are these the only two types of journal entries: meditative and narrative? Perhaps observational, but wouldn't that necessarily fall into one of the two mentioned types, unless it was strictly objective observational, like Thoreau might do at times, before an epiphany, when it then turns meditative.

The other discussion was about writing the journal. By hand or on the computer. Most people at the meeting tended towards the computer. By computer, I mean like in a text editor of some sort, Word, notepad, wordpad, whatever. Me, I'm kinda digging this blog journal entry writing. I like the flow. I like that I can access it from most places I go. But I still write all my poems by hand.