Editor: Diana M. Raab
ISBN: 978-1-57003-866-2
Publisher: The University of South Carolina Press

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Interested in knowing how writers use their notebooks and how important are notebooks to their writing process?

Diana M. Raab is an essayist, memoirist, and poet, as well as an instructor in the UCLA Extension Writer's Program. With The Writers And Their Notebooks, she has assembled thirty seasoned professional writers and academics that share their innermost workings and sage insights concerning the importance of their journals. As mentioned in the Preface, “as artists have sketchbooks, writers have notebooks. Whether they choose to call them notebooks, journals or daybooks, their motives are the same- to capture and document thoughts, sentiments, observations, ideas, ruminations, and reflections before these vanish.”

Representing a very broad array of genres that includes fiction and non-fiction, Writers And Their Notebooks divides itself into five parts covering the following themes: the journal as a tool, the journal for survival, the journal for travel, the journal as a muse, and the journal for life. Individually, each of these gifted writers present different views concerning their motives in keeping a journal.

Bonnie Morris, women's studies professor at both George Washington University and Georgetown, mentions that she has filled one hundred and forty-six 300-page journals since age twelve, and she is now ready for the conversation she longs to spark with other writers. According to Morris, “journal writing is like sex; do it in a public place and people can't help but stare, even as their attention suggests you are behaving in a socially inappropriate way.” Popular mystery writer Sue Grafton states that the journal is a record of her imagination at work, from the first spark of inspiration to the final manuscript. Kim Stafford, the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute in Oregon and author of dozens of books of poetry and prose, describes her journal as the first handshake with the infinite, a place that has no limit. Poet Tony Trigilio, who teaches in the Creative Writing-Poetry Program at Columbia College, Chicago, confesses that e-email and word processing has gradually taken over his writing life, where in the past, he would use a pen-and-notebook for his journaling, he now passes his days emailing friends and fellow writers. Fragments from his letters have found their way into his poems. He goes onto explain that “letters unambiguously presume a dialogue, an inerlocutor listening and reacting immediately to what has been written.” Rebecca McClanahan, author of nine books, one of which won the 2005 Glasgow Award for nonfiction, compares her journal to a compost bin where she tosses “scraps of organic matter that come her way-daily wonderings, newspaper clippings, quotations, drafts of poems and stories, sketches, dream records, song lyrics, jokes, weather reports, and the mundane details of her personal life.”

This is only a small sampling of the diverse collection of reflections that cover a swath of takes on the use of journals, wherein journaling has become a vibrant and important part of the authors' lives. All of these writers agree that there are huge rewards that can be reaped from keeping a notebook, and as the Preface mentions, “Even if life has gotten in the way of their own regular record-keeping, they advocate the practice to their students and colleagues.” After all, isn't journaling a way to express yourself without worrying about prying eyes? And as we notice with many of the comments made by the various writers in this book, an excellent form of brainstorming where we can focus and pay more attention to our ideas.