I always carry a little notebook in my purse. Just in case. Sometimes I’ll carry the same one for years, if it doesn’t fill up fast. When my kids were younger, there would be tic-tac-toe games or weird scribbles on the middle pages, if I’d handed over the notebook in a desperate ploy to entertain a child bored in a waiting room or standing in line. The spirals get bent or twisted, some of the pages pull out. Sometimes they’re prettier notebooks, souvenirs I’ve bought or conference swag I’ve gathered. For a long trip, I’ll start a new one. For expenses and addresses, for observations, for words overheard that I need to look up. Then I’ll be afraid my precious insights will be lost, so I’ll pull the half-full notebook (now a “travel journal”) and keep it on my desk, waiting for some risk-free way to use it up.
Or waiting for that day when I’ll read them again, flip through, looking for that title I remember writing down somewhere or trying to remember when I went where. This goes for the everyday notebooks and the travel notebooks: having a place to write things down, just in case, matters more than whether I’ll ever look at those pages again. Often I don’t. (I don’t throw them away, either. Our house sinks a bit deeper into the ground each year under the weight of little notebooks.)
Sometimes I do, and sometimes I find things I’m glad to remember. In April, during a session at AWP, I wrote this down, from Stephanie Elizondo Griest: “Give your piece a reason for being in the world beyond your being in the world.” Worth keeping in mind.