Book Review: Writers and Their Notebooks edited by Diana M. Raab

Diana Raab, essayist, memoirist, and poet, offers this collection of insights and insecurities by writers about their journals and notebooks. As Philip Lopate states in the foreword to Writers and Their Notebooks: “No one can expect to write well who would not first take the risk of writing badly. The writer’s notebook is a safe place for such experiments to be undertaken.”

Indeed, reading the personal thoughts of 24 well-known writers in this collection, we learn one compulsive notebook user, Peter Selgin, “scribbled on, frantically, furiously, piling up notebooks like a bag person piling up magazines and newspapers, sure that all this piling on would add up to artistic triumph.”

The overall emotion in this collection is a love of writing, and a celebration of notebooks and journals as the place to embrace our beloved art. Most of the essays include a sentimental regard for the many years of notebooks the writers have amassed, a memory of their first journal, and the value of old journals for recalling experiences and details from the past. More often than not, these details work their way into new writing. Author Katherine Towler notes, “My years as a journal writer were essential to the work I am doing now, and to the work still to come.”

In Writers and Their Notebooks, Raab describes words on the pages of a journal as “the music and voice of one’s true emotions. Whether the writer is expressing deeply held beliefs, recording snippets of overheard dialog, making observations, listing ideas for future projects, or copying a favorite poem, the notebook should be a vital part of the creative tool kit.”

There is the rare reference to blogs as “simultaneously a diary and a piece of performance art,” and the need for the computer when “what’s waiting is not a thread but a flood. The pocket notebook is for the hint, the computer for the deluge.” Rare is the lucky writer who is so inspired by the notebook that it must pour forth as fast as one can type, “the resonant data impinging deliciously on the mind,” as poet Kim Stafford discovers.

Article Author: Helen Gallagher

Helen Gallagher reviews non-fiction books and shares insights when attending author and publishing events on Chicago's North Shore. She is a national speaker on technology, writing and publishing. She's a member of American Society of Journalists & …

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