![]() Though I didn’t know it at the time, what I had created was commonplace book. ![]() It wasn’t my journal-I had a separate notebook for that, and it wasn’t a writer’s notebook-I kept my writing projects, such as they were, in a binder. Though I did include some of my own writing in the book, these were pieces I either considered finished (that I’d revised and polished) or that were like the word version of those snapshots that seemed like a good idea at the time (you know the ones I mean), but now not so much. There are clippings from magazines and newspapers-and, naturally, no shortage of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Teenage Angst Poetry. Some fragments are typed ( how 2012!) and pasted in. In my book, I also copied out song lyrics (painstakingly transcribed while pressing play-rewind repeatedly), poems I read at school, bits of creative writing from English classes. Others seem more prophetic or insightful: scribe, judicial, introspective, and provocative (twice). My favorite of these is the one titled Words, a list of words I liked, often more for their sound than their meaning: eclectic, elfin, exquisite, eloquent crinkly, quirk, corrupt, cajole shimmery, psyche, sepulchral, sinuous. These lists weren’t created all at once, but compiled over years, added to one or two items at a time. There are also lists of Likes (cities, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, reading uncensored books), Dislikes (being serious, snow, people who borrow stuff permanently), Quotes (‘three can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead’), Vocab (made-up or repurposed words a la Urban Dictionary), amongst others. The first surviving page-there are several torn out at the beginning, evidence of false starts made before I figured out what use to put the book to-is a list of potential character names: first names on one side, last names on the other. Inside the front cover, she wrote: “It can be a diary, whatever you like!” It turned into whatever I liked. When I was eleven, my godmother gave me a hardcover notebook. I love commonplace books the most recent entry in my own is from the photographer Alfred Stieglitz: “Nearly right is child’s play.” - Michael Dirda
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