Journals

Last semester I asked my students to keep journals, with four required entries per week.  I gave them some specific journal assignments to do (often drafts of things that would be turned in later), and they did some in-class writing in their journals too, and I collected them once at midterm and again at the end of the semester.   For most of the students, the journal was more of a burden than a learning experience; many of them had to cram entries at the last minute before the journals were collected; some of them even wrote entries (and a few were pretty clever) about how much they hated doing the journals.  It was, overall, pretty disappointing.

I don't know why I asked them to do it.  I have never kept a writer's journal myself and would almost certainly not like being required to do so.  I do keep scraps of paper with notes on them, and some of these have actually turned into poems.  Like a few years ago when the Dean visited the department and mentioned he'd been discussing squid tools with one of the science departments; I had a post-it with "squid tools" stuck to my desk for months before I wrote the poem.  So I guess that's a little bit like keeping a journal.  In fact, I have several big brown envelopes at home stuffed with notes and clipped articles and bits of overheard conversations -- god knows what's in there.  I should look sometime.

I did keep a dream journal, though, for a period of about four years.  I ran across these last summer and re-read them, and besides being evidence of how crazy I am, the journals are really image-rich and could be mined for some kind of dream-poem project, I guess.  It's easy to do, if you haven't tried it; you need just a few minutes of uninterrupted time as soon as you wake up. At first it's hard to remember much, but the longer you do it, the better your recall becomes: you can end up with whole plot lines, or a sequence of several different dreams, before you lose the thread.  I have recommended this to students from time to time; I would never ask them to do it for a class, however, let alone collect them.  My own dreams are disturbing enough; I don't want access to somebody else's.