In 2003, I counted all my journals. Stacked high, they amounted to 432. I spent the next year weeding the collection down to about 200. So satisfied with my method, I turned it into a workshop I now present virtually called “Pandora’s Box: Managing a Private Journal Collection.”
I realize there are many new digital ways to preserve material, but I was interested in the way I did it, because all I did is get a blank book and pretend I was on a year long journey taking notes as if recording in a travel diary. I didn’t worry about chronological order, topics, or categories. By the end, I had one journal I titled “The Journal of Journals” that I could hand to any family member and say, “Here’s an index of my collection.” This spares them from the burden of reading 200 journals but still getting a good idea of anything they might want to read more about. They can even decide to throw out the 200 and keep just the index.
Then, I began to use this index to create new writing projects for myself. I started keeping new journals for people. And I offered this method to anyone willing to trust me with their collection, to produce a hand-written journal for them as an index to all the material they hand me in one shipment, or two.
This method is so much fun, I can teach you how to do this for yourself in a two-hour Zoom session. While I just told you the method above and it sounds simple enough, what I teach you is how to edit, how to discern, and how to discard. Most people cannot part with writing just as they might not with photographs. They get stuck in the reading process, become overwhelmed, and give up. There is an art to not wallowing in the past. And there’s a definite art to not creating a burden for your future readers. -ph
Soul Custody Press 