Deanna Hershiser

After my post last month about journaling and blogging, I thought some further discussion might be helpful. There’s nothing like an eventful, thought-provoking few weeks to remind me how different chronicling life can look for myself from season to season, let alone for others.

I recall seeing pictures on a friend’s blog of her journals, the pages resplendent with doodles, swatches, poetry. This activity can have so many variations. My one-page entry style is rather bland in comparison to many.

But it works for me. Lately I’ve found myself, almost all of a sudden, on a journey with Eastern Orthodoxy. My journal, writing notebook, and blog have all been called into service as I process what’s happening in my heart.

Being my “published” venue, the blog lags in time compared to reality. In a post I try to put things together, condensing and shaping even though it’s still a rough form. For instance, the day I decided I really needed to consider joining the Orthodox church my husband goes to, I notebooked and then journaled many details that will never see the light of blog. Yet after I had gained a little distance, the explanation I gave on my site felt more satisfactory, more ready for a larger audience of family and friends. And the comments I received seemed to confirm that my quick work to edit and polish helped strike a genuine chord.

At some point I may produce an essay about this time in my spiritual life. That effort, however, will require much more real work and the openness to art, to contradiction. I hope I will give my experience the fuller attention it might deserve.

I would love to hear accounts of others’ journaling styles. Do you jot on napkins? Use your camera to capture meaningful moments? What form does your activity take as you process your significant turns and twists along life’s road?

Deanna Hershiser’s essays have appeared in Runner’s World, BackHome Magazine, Relief, and other places. She lives with her husband in Oregon and blogs at deannahershiser.com

Deanna Hershiser

Pondering some realities of journal and blog.

Recently I read through my physical journals. Again. Every year or so I get the urge, and usually I begin with the first journal I started since I haven’t stopped. My initial post was on March 3, 1989. A Friday afternoon. We rented a house in the countryside, where log trucks woke us mornings and deer spied us from the lawn after dinner. My daughter was three, and my son wasn’t quite yet conceived.

Nowadays it takes two or three weeks to finish my journals from ’89 to the present. I tend to journal about reading them along the way. Always new insights shine from the book(s) about my years raising children (and a dog, cats, rats, snakes, and mice, plus one mallard duck). I wrote discouragement and joy. I penned creative ditties. I jotted a gazillion ideas, a few of which became published articles and essays.

Sometimes reading through I’m impatient with my entries on writing. Blah, blah, blah, waiting for an editor, blah, blah, this title’s a winner!, blah, that rejection hurt, blah, I never expected such a nice response…

Other times I truly relish recalling the writerly process. I think it reflects the rest of my life journey well. Always the unexpected. New turns. Wow, I’ve really been through all that and lived to tell it.

I keep my journals in a metal file cabinet, and I imagine people reading them when I’m gone. In fact, I write with that in mind and don’t share just everything (a girl’s got to have some secrets). Rarely do I scratch things out. My basic post is one side of one page, and they aren’t super regular. Consistently, though, they’re there year to year.

After I started blogging nearly five years ago, my journal entries became fewer. Still, there have been weeks and months of needing only the grittier tools of expression: pen, ink, and welcoming blank pages.

I’ve enjoyed the similar yet different sensation of blogging, but I don’t know how long I’ll keep up my individual blog. With vague structure to my system, I find the best part of the experience reading other “journals” on the web when mine’s in play. Many good words are out there.

What bugs me about blogging is the nature of review. Blogs were made to be current, newsy. Their top-down, last-first nature makes it difficult to read somebody’s story from beginning to now. This may not bother anyone younger than 40. And I’m all for getting a sense of today’s happenings. But I don’t and won’t own an I-Phone. I live without a laptop, even. Instead I stick with my journal and my even more portable Moleskine. I carry books. Blogs could give me that booky connection to other author-type people, if they were accessible from first post to last without archive manipulation. (Maybe there’s an easy way to read a blog consecutively that I don’t know of…? Would love to hear it.)

You’re likely thinking, old woman, don’t fret over the way things have become. We read the immediate, we update each other’s thoughts all day, and what’s wrong with that?

You’re right, I’m sure. It’s a preference. After all, in his day Plato complained about the new technology involving writing things down, because it would take away the experience of remembering long passages. It would make our brains lazy.

I consider, however, taking my lazy brain off the Internet, though I like the other minds I connect with. I just want to read stories from the beginning. I’d like the chance to see where some bloggers were years ago, follow the flow of their journey, and see the contrast with who they’re becoming, to review and reflect on collections of the other me’s I’m reading.

Deanna Hershiser’s essays have appeared in Runner’s World, BackHome Magazine, Relief, and other places. She lives with her husband in Oregon and blogs at deannahershiser.com.

Deanna Hershiser

A few thoughts on writing very personal essays.

My own view is that, if anything, what is wrong with most memoirs and autobiographical poems is that they don’t go far enough in their confessions; they myopically fudge the details, the close nitty-gritty of self-observation.
~ Phillip Lopate, Getting Personal

My essay “Memorial Day” first appeared in Relief Issue 2.3. Recently it was reprinted in the anthology Saying Goodbye, released by Dream of Things. It’s a story that no doubt has confused some people — the writing is likely fine, having been edited capably by Lisa Ohlen Harris, but I tend to get a certain reaction. “You are so brave,” I will hear. Which translates in my mind to the unasked, “Why put this out there?” Or something closer to, “Could I, should I, share my greatest failures with the world?”

“Memorial Day” contains my tale of hurting my husband, Tim, in the worst way more than 25 years ago. The story of our near divorce is woven within a weekend of remembering in 2006, when Tim and I returned to the coastal town where our disaster had happened.

For better or worse I’m someone who tells these certain things — not all of my life’s private details, not even very many — but the intense bits I believe I have learned from. Usually in person it’s after I’ve known you a while. Doing so in writing is a long process; often it feels like bushwhacking a rough trail between my emotion-filled memories and the sense and sensibilities of readers’ minds. As creative nonfiction expert Dinty W. Moore says in his book Crafting the Personal Essay, “The private essay hides the author. The personal essay reveals.” I don’t wish to blather about private issues no one can relate to. Rather, I want to reveal something of the deepest truths that have invaded my being.

The eyes of the me telling my “Memorial” story now view life with a spiritual appreciation that the early-1980s me could only spot as a glimmer. Part of my continuing closure became releasing the setting of my great drama, letting it sink, so to speak, into the ocean. But there’s also a part of my ongoing way of life bound up in lessons from this past event. I’m a person of faith. For me that has come to mean putting together all the evidence I can regarding truth and seeing what it adds up to. Before I royally blew it that time in my twenties, I didn’t understand what mercy might look like. While I could see others’ need for forgiveness, I couldn’t grasp my deficit. I was basically good; I made mistakes. But bring push to shove, and, hey, sure — it’s me, remember? — I always chose the right path, the godly way. Until, of course, I didn’t. Excuses no longer held up in my own mind for my actions. I reached a clear fork in the road and to go forward with belief meant accepting that I needed something more.

Would I recommend this form of writing for very many? Not really. I should likely say run from the awkwardness. Turn to fiction; find some creative alternative. It’s certainly not a mandate for Christians. The style of “confessional” writing I’m striving to do isn’t bound to particular theological perspectives. Though it tends to be about finding wisdom and truth, its focus is individual, existential.

If you can go there, and if you have to, then read and write the very personal. You may find yourself involved in what the amazing nonfictionist Phillip Lopate speaks of when he says, “I am endlessly interested in the wormy thoughts and regrets and excuses and explanations that people have for their behavior. ‘Confessional’ is, to me, a descriptive term, not a derogatory one….Honesty has been, for me, the one lodestar to which I never stop aspiring in print. I don’t say I attain ‘honesty,’ but the very fact that I try to reach it gives my work, at least to my own eyes, a formal thrust, a dynamic, a topography.”

Deanna Hershiser’s essays have appeared in Runner’s World, BackHome Magazine, Relief, and other places. She lives with her husband in Oregon and blogs at deannahershiser.com/stories-glimmer.