A Life In Hand by Hannah Hinchman

This is such a pleasant book to read straight through, skip around in, meditate on, and practice with. That's asking a lot from one volume, but A Life in Hand by Hannah Hinchman ticks all those boxes. 

Don't be alarmed by the second part of the title: Creating the Illuminated Journal. This is not one of those ubiquitous art instruction books with glossy pages and a multitude of exercises that, to be honest, one most likely rarely attempts. (Or maybe that's just me...)

Ms. Hinchman is a fine artist who is dedicated to deeply exploring and observing the world around her, especially the wild outdoors of her home in Montana. This book was published in 1991 and I do believe I once looked at it long ago thinking it was solely about keeping a written journal and I was thrown off by the sketches that she included. Now that I have discovered sketching and watercolors and art journals and lettering, oh my, this book has proven to be quite a find. 

First of all, it is the size of a 'normal' book and is easy to hold. Her sketches are rendered in pen and ink, are simple and clean, and cover subjects from a sleeping cat to a paint brush to her desk under the eaves. There are branches and birds and bugs — just everyday inspirations found outside the window or on the windowsill.

Even if you aren't interested in drawing, her thoughts on writing down what you see and feel, your memories and imaginings, are thought provoking. In just a few pages (150 to be exact), she offers instruction, advice on tools, a few exercises, and insight into the mind of an artist.

What really appeals to me is the way her drawings are presented right out of her sketchbook with no elaborate backgrounds and I find myself practicing using her examples. She also makes brief notes about what she has drawn that become part of the sketch itself. She shows the reader a non-intimidating way to capture the small details that make up a life. It is relaxing to be in her world.

the warm coat corner - HH

I have filled dozens of sketchbooks in just the few years since I took my first watercolor lessons before a trip to Paris, Florence, and Tuscany. Opening the sketchbook that I carried with me and looking at the awkward pencil drawings I made on that trip takes me right to the cafe or city street with its sounds and smells and hum of conversations. I wish now that I had spent more time recording with words what I was seeing and doing. I was so intent on not writing and just keeping a visual record of the trip that I failed to write at all. 

Be that as it may, A Life in Hand is a timely reminder that keeping a journal - whether written, visual, or both - is a worthwhile endeavor. 

ink bottles - HH

A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries by Thomas Mallon

The small cabinet over my refrigerator is full to the brim with those wonderful black-and-white school composition notebooks. They are the journals that I have been writing in for years. Interspersed with that lot are other spiral bound notebooks, a few 'pretty' journals, and even some loose-leaf pages kept from an ill-fated attempt to keep a diary using a three-ring binder. 

I also have a drawer that holds journals that were started for a particular reason and abandoned - perhaps kept on a short trip or as the beginnings of a commonplace book. 

All this leads me to Thomas Mallon's A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries.  I first read it soon after its publication date in 1983. It is a book that I have been wanting to reread and finally got around to doing just that last month.

I had been sporadically keeping a journal for years before I first read this book - I still have two of the little diaries with locks from high school - but Mr. Mallon introduced me to people who were like-minded in wanting to keep a record of their days. 

Here were writers, artists, preachers, politicians, crooks and even an assassin who felt compelled to make note of their thoughts, dreams, desires, and events happening not only in their private lives but in the world around them. 

So we have samples from the famous diaries of Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Degas, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Thoreau. There are also entries from a whole raft of everyday people. Mr. Mallon has gathered all these keepers of the word into sections: Chroniclers, Travelers, Pilgrims, Creators, Apologists, Confessors, and Prisoners.  

This is not a series of entries one after the other. Mr. Mallon entertains the reader with his own witty and insightful comments and connections on the entries and their compilers. This book helped me to expand my own journals into more than just whining about whatever particular inconvenience life was handing out at the moment. I found reading this book to be a fascinating look into the minds and lives of so many. Fascinating, even more so now, rereading it some decades later and after many hundreds of journal entries of my own. 

My own journal keeping has developed, or maybe I should say declined, in the past few years to more of a nightly list begun as a way to remind me that I actually do accomplish some things each day. But I was inspired by one of the diarists in Mallon's book, Toni Bentley, a corps member of the New York City Ballet who kept a journal for one Winter Season begun on November 21, 1980 and finished on February 15, 1981. She used it to assess her career in dance and her commitment to her art. 

So I hunted up this attractive journal that I had tucked away for a special occasion...

...and began keeping what I am calling A Winter Journal on November 1, 2014. 

Of a late afternoon, I sit at my desk overlooking my small front yard and ponder and muse and write about whatever strikes my fancy. It may be a page describing the items on my desk, two pages bemoaning my fate at the mechanical problems my Jeep is experiencing (and have thankfully been repaired), or it may just be a list of cities I still want to visit. 

I might also include observations on the weather, the light, the leaves piling up, or the red cardinal at rest on the rim of the French blue birdbath. 

I write with a comfortable Lamay fountain pen that I purchased on a trip to Savannah a couple of years ago. (Fountain pens are my one weakness!) The pages are smooth and lined and the book has a nice heft to it so I know I mean business. I bought this one and a red one like it ages ago. I only paid $7 for each one. Now I wish I had bought a few more.

I realize this post has turned out to be more about me than A Book of One's Own, but I highly recommend Mr. Mallon's look at diaries and the people who keep them. It just might inspire you to pick up a notebook and begin to write. 

On journals and diaries

In her first book about Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes:

I bought an oversized blank book with Florentine paper covers and blue leather binding. On the first page I wrote ITALY.  The book looked as though it should have immortal poetry in it, but I began with lists of wildflowers, lists of projects, new words, sketches of tile in Pompeii. I described rooms, trees, bird calls. I added planting advice: 'Plant sunflowers when the moon crosses Libra,' although I had no clue myself as to when that might be. I wrote about the people we met and the food we cooked. The book became a chronicle of the first four years here. Today it is stuffed with menus, postcards of paintings, a drawing of a floor plan of an abbey, Italian poems, and diagrams of the garden.

Her image of the book stuffed with her life is so very appealing to me. I am a fool for notebooks, journals, stationery. Just recently I bought for a dollar one of those tablets with the wire binding at the top and the faint red line running down the middle of each page. They were stenographers notebooks in my day. I doubt if anyone under 30 even knows what a stenographer is.

I have a cabinet filled with journals - 25 years' worth. Most of them are the sturdy black and white composition notebooks. Lines and pages filled with the thoughts that were swimming around in my head. Witnesses to the celebrations, broken hearts, weather, journeys, and random happenings that make up one's days.

One year I kept a nature journal and recorded, with photos, the ever-changing weather, the first daffodils of spring, summer's hummingbirds, the honking of geese overhead in autumn, and the wet snows of winter. I have travel journals, Books Read journals, journals filled with notes from writing seminars, poetry readings, and lectures. I have journals begun and abandoned.

A couple of years ago, when my mother's health began to decline, I made the decision to stop keeping a journal. The time was stressful enough living it without reliving it through a journal. I haven't regretted that decision. It is almost a relief not to be bound by my habit.

But that doesn't stop me from buying journals. Oh, no. I must have 10 blank ones waiting for me to open to the first page and put pen to paper. I have a small, green leather one with handmade pages that I bought in a tiny shop in Pienza, Italy. I had the son of the man who made the book write his father's name on the paper wrapping so I would always know who had made this lovely piece of art.

I also have a journal with gilt-edged pages, and just like Mayes's, it has Florentine papers and leather binding. I bought it in Savannah, Georgia. There are an assortment of moleskin notebooks - different sizes and colors - in my desk.

Right now, as a concession to the fact that I do have so many blank books that are sitting around not earning their keep, I started a journal this year on January 1. In it I just list the activities of the day. No complete sentences. No deep philosophical thoughts. No drama.

The book is made by Graphique de France and the cover is its Cityscape design (here). It has blue end papers, lined pages, and a gold ribbon bookmark. It is about 8 inches by 6 inches. I keep it by my reading chair and write in it every evening. I bought it from Borders when it was closing its stores. I have started to keep lists in it as well...names of cities in Italy, flowers I want planted in the garden this year.

So I guess I am back to journal keeping after all.