I've been watching the "journaliing"* movement for a while now, from its early days as a strictly literary pursuit to its recent developments in visual or artist's journaling, and doing so with both amusement and bewilderment (would that be bemusement?). I'm a lifelong keeper of journals in their written form, and I enjoy reading other people's published journals. Journals often present us at our most unguarded, the most true to ourselves (although professional writers are almost always conscious of writing for an audience, even in their diaries). Reading Virginia Woolf's published diaries was one of the most fascinating and enjoyable reading experiences I've had in years. They offer, to my mind, just the right mixture of snark, gossip, history, personal observation, and craft.
I've kept my own paper journals since about 7th grade, with a long dry stretch when I first moved to New York, and eventually turned to blogging as a natural extension of that. I've taught my students to keep journals in classes, and finally, last summer, taught a class in "journaling." (If you want to see my syllabus, you can download it here.) Mine was a literary pursuit, though I encouraged my students to do whatever they wanted in their journals, without restriction or fear of penalty. For many of them, it was the first time they'd tried writing in a journal; many of them were really loathe to part with them by the end of the semester, not because they didn't want me to read them, but because they didn't want to stop.
I've always seen journals as a path to the interior life, a tool for self-reflection and self-examination, though people keep written journals for many different reasons. I'm a verbal person, comfortable with words as tools and as "art supplies," so visual journaliing does not come naturally to me, but I think it's vastly intriguing. I also think it can serve the same purposes written journals do, as well as serve as an outlet for creativity. On top of that, it appeals to the book artist in me.
But journals, those that survive, are also historical documents. Journals like these are useful not just for historical research but for scientific research as well, as evidence of climate change, for instance. I've read a number of historical journals, including one of the most famous, Samuel Pepys diary, and I'm always fascinated by the window on that particular world they provide. There is a common humanity in them, the same concerns we all share (food, clothing, shelter, love, security, peace, our children, our marriages) but the underlying assumptions of life are often quite different from contemporary ones. We worry about our 401(k)s for retirement; our historical counterparts were often far more worried about their immortal souls after death. Journals can tell you a great deal not just about the individual who kept it, but about the society of which they were a part.
It's this last aspect I was thinking about when I looked at Teesha Moore's visual journal pages. These are beautiful, strange, wondrous pages, full of pop culture references and images as well as vintage and original work. Say some historian digs one of these up in a musty attic 300 years from now. what is this, for instance, going to say about 21st Century Post-Modern American life?
I'm a little afraid to guess. But I think Teesha Moore will be having a good giggle somewhere, watching that historian try to figure it out.
[h/t to Paper Studio]
*As a side note, can I just say how much I hate the verb form of this noun? I understand the need for it, because "keeping a journal" or "writing a journal" is way too many syllables. It's just an ugly word. Blech.