Running for Your Life: Why a Journal?

Spied on an office desk of a goss news site where I swear to God you have be under thirty to be on staff: A journal with the title 1970s STYLE LAPTOP.

I can remember why it was that I starting running on a regular basis, going on forty years now. But I don’t remember precisely why I started a journal. Outside of two creative writing workshops, I’ve never been schooled in the literary arts. In college, I didn’t as much as take a single English course, having majored in journalism and political science. If I were going to write it would be for a job. Since 1979, I’ve had nine full-time jobs. Except for a bizarre five-month foray into public relations, I’ve been newspapering, editing and writing.

In June 1983, I went out on the road, planning to be gone from home until the following June. That’s when I started scribbling. On a trip that would take me across the US on a Greyhound bus and airborne to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba, before I hitched a right in a four-seater Cessna back north.

In Tasmania two lovely travel companions bought me a journal that they presented to me with some ceremony and with touching inscriptions. It was my first journal. Christmas 1983.

I’ve filled a sizable book shelf of journals in the past thirty-two years. Off and on for awhile, but since the nineties I’ve been writing regularly in a journal. Story ideas, impressions. Pretty much everything you read in this blog was first put down in longhand.

We do things for our mental health. When I haven’t written in my journal for a few days, I feel it. Like a bank of storm clouds. At times the writing is slow, at times just a few notes. But when it comes to getting to a place where I can create, to go beyond the workaday writing and editing of my newspaper life, I need to sit down with my 1970s STYLE LAPTOP. And write.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Burglary by Betty Medsger