What's in the water?

Some notes on artist diaries

Happy equinox…almost! At a local garden recently, I noticed the leaves at the very tips of the trees beginning to change. All the lush green with flashes of gold or red. Also yellows, purples, and greens. Decay and growth alongside each other.

I’m reading Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, which is an A-to-Z arrangement of sentences curated from ten years of the author’s diaries. Each chapter, a letter from the alphabet with the sentences ordered alphabetically. I love how Heti lays creativity, intimacy, friendship, reading, longing, and more—in other words, life in all directions—on the same field. As the sentences accumulate, so do recurring interests, obsessions, preoccupations, and characters. The result is a mix of portraiture and creative meditation. Questions, relationships, and meaning clarify as the book progresses. Obsessions, thought spirals, delights. Not an info overload, but a crisp kaleidoscope of experience and thought infused with wisdom and humor. If I (still) underlined sentences in books, this would be gel pen paradise. I’m still reading, so what I’m sharing is a glimpse of a real-time read, rather than a complete review.

I also recently read Hurley Winkler’s 100 Swims: Last Summer’s Diaries. This zine arranges select diary entries from 2023, chronicling daily swims alongside novel revisions as Winkler moved toward a September writing deadline. Curation succeeds again here, the sense that each entry contributes to the larger picture: What is it like to live a creative life? To set goals? To adjust course as needed? How does it feel to get in the water? Amidst process notes, we catch glimpses of nature (the ocean, birds, shells), frustration, mentorship and receiving feedback on writing, a visualization of success. The specificity and clarity are refreshing as a cool wave (I had to!). I also appreciate the idea Winkler raises that a diary can be a tool. A practical way to know what you want and how you plan to get there, the disappointments, as well as the wins.

Each author adapts the diary form to own it. It’s both what is said and how it is said. Not an exhaustive log of life and thought, but rather carefully chosen and arranged sentences and entries that transcend the project of “here are some diary entries.” There’s a framework, an organizing principle.

I’m curious about how writers work. We can learn a lot from one another. Reading recommendations and revision approaches and classes, yes, the practical stuff. Also, the mystifying emotional undercurrents: overthinking everything you said at the literary gathering (check) or realizing, “I didn’t know ___ worried about money/publishing/where they live” (check, check, check). I feel a kinship with writers who admit we think about these things. We care about these things. What we make doesn’t appear like magic (even if that’s how it feels sometimes—to write and/or to read). So much surrounds how we make our art, bring it into the world, and take part in community.

What's in the water? Everything. Craft and life, a balancing act.

Also in the water for me lately: homemade vodka sauce, learning InDesign, Inside the Mind of a Dog and Inside the Mind of a Cat, these sentences from Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles:

“I have waited all my life for permission. I feel it growing in my breast. A war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light.”

…and this schooltime artifact from my youth. Please open up the pit for her…

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