Join me for The Writing Ritual May — a 4-week creative writing program to explore your voice, strengthen your craft, and connect with a creative community. If you’re new to writing, looking for accountability, or want to sink into your creativity, you’re invited. All skill levels and time zones are invited to join.
Participate in weekly hour-long workshops — every Monday from 5:00PM-6:00PM EST (Google Meet)
Identify and set an intention for your writing goals for May
Receive a creative prompt every weekday morning (20 prompts total)
Stay accountable with a supportive & creative group (on WhatsApp)
Share your work and receive feedback on stories
Tap into your inner voice and sense of creativity
Receive weekly readings
Submit 1 longer piece of work for editor feedback
My home is filled with journals kept over the years—writing done on planes and trains, writing done at my desk or in my bed, writing done in the early mornings before work. Pages and pages of myself. Pages and pages that make sense to no one but me—which is of course the beauty of keeping a journal.
Journals are so much more than brain-dumping; they are a repository for who we are at a very specific moment in time. A home for our innermost thoughts when they have no place to go but the page. The contents are a mirror of one’s relationships, careers, happiness, grief, fears, anxieties, and pleasures.
Recently, I’ve been musing over Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti—a book made up of ten years of diaries, alphabetized to reveal profound reflections on men, children, art, money, travel, and being human. What’s most fascinating is the beauty of the prose she writes when no one is looking. Her sentences leave nothing to be desired. Of course this phenomenon of being intrigued by famous writers’ journals is nothing new; just look at ‘Getting Lost’ by the Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux or Susan Sontag’s Reborn, Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. We find within their pages maps of the mind, confessions, shapeless thoughts. Full works of art in the most banal form.
I’ve been meditating recently on the power of journal-keeping and the self. My decades of penning reveal the woman I am, and also, an intimate look—word by word—to the many versions of me that have existed. If I hadn’t kept a journal, I’d have lost many of the memories that I still hold close and forgotten parts of my identity that defined my younger self.
Drawing inspiration from Heti, I started my own project entitled “The Love Diaries,” in which I’m tracking every sentence I’ve ever journaled relating to love—conversations, intimacy, falling in love, intuition, breakups, heartache, marriage, and so forth. The results are illuminating; I see so clearly my devotion to love in its entirety. Every sentence points back to the fact that my life is driven by the desire to love and be loved. Nothing else besides journaling (and A Great Love) has provided me with such clarity. The project also renewed my desire to journal daily, not only for the sake of writing but for its essential role in helping me rediscover myself and identify patterns.
This concept of journaling may seem pedestrian, but when was the last time you wrote in a journal? Yesterday? A week ago? A year ago? Blame our screens for stealing our attentions, and for making it more difficult to tune into our deepest thoughts and carve out time to write them down.
But, if you’re like me, and serious about writing and self-reflection…you have to Protect Your Journaling. No one else is going to protect it for you and no one else is will reap the emotional and spiritual benefits. Of course, there are strategies you can employ to get your journaling fix — writing first thing in the morning, writing every time you feel compelled to pick up your phone, writing with an accountability group — but you’ll have to find what works best for you. Two essentials for me? The perfect journal and a sexy pen.
Make a plan for the next for the next week. Maybe that’s committing to 15 minutes every day or maybe it’s three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. When you’re journaling, practice being specific with your words instead of vague—Who did you see? What did they say? How is your heart? What did you dream last night? Who do you miss? Practice writing sentences you’d be curious to read in the future.
Then let me know how it goes for you. . . .