I started writing in a secret diary when I was nine. You know the type -- with the little lock and key. Unfortunately, I didn't keep it. I do, however, have two crates full of journals from the age of twelve to the present. That strawberry book is one of the first, from a stint at summer camp. It sadly begins:"I knew from the start that I wouldn't make many friends today."
Hannah Hinchman, from her lovely illustrated book A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place, writes:
"A long-running journal is an invaluable document, because it records something other than the time-and-goal-dominated anxiety that drives us through our days. We can tease out of its evolving narrative evidence of sub-lives, parallel existences, omens of shifts that won't be realized for decades, recurrences of themes glimpsed periodically through the years."
