by Erin Virgil
The question of why I write gets harder to answer as I get older. When I was a child I wrote all the time, stories and poems with elaborate plots and drawings, subplots and subdrawings. No motive necessary, I just did it and it was joyful and free from criticism. Unattached to school or work of any kind. I arranged my early stories and pictures in fat folders; I even had an office, a tiny desk in the corner of our dark, wood-paneled 1972 living room. When I was seven I started making whole books, with drawings, bindings and lamination. Also around this time, I started keeping a journal. Haven't let up since. I have three, maybe three and a half cardboard boxes full of journals. Some are hand made, some are fancy with leather book marks and painted covers, most are just ratty old high school notebooks. I recently started a new journal, the prettiest I've ever had and a gift to boot. The excitement of a new journal is as strong now as it was when I was eight. Touch the heavy blank pages, think about what will be written and sketched here or there. All of it, pure possibility. This is the central reason I started writing, when I was small: the urgent invitation of a blank page. For many years, journal writing was therapy for me; I would call this my jaded autobiography period. Writing in journals: pages and pages of catharsis, lists, caricatures. Sometimes it's hard to keep this separate from other writing, the projects that grow and are carefully sculpted, escorted along. Worked and reworked and given away. I never want to just open up my ribs and dump my guts on the page and serve them up. Like a festering pile of social entrails, a lengthy confession. Some writers, first to mind is Allen Ginsberg, can translate their journals into whole, finished works. "HOWL" came from Ginsberg's journals, a detailed collection of observations. I think my early attempts at poetry came directly from my journals because I was a disturbed teenager and couldn't see out of the maelstrom happening around me, beating me down. The journals were my dumping grounds. Many years of drugs and therapy later, I still love writing in journals, especially in coffee shops when it is raining outside. But they keep at a distance from my poetry now, like a current on the other side of a lake. Coming and going, felt and not seen...read more
