Ode to a New Journal
June 5th, 2026
I like words that are fragile like sparrow marrow. I tend to remember words in all their shame and glories when I am writing, when I am choosing which colored word will be best next to this or that other colored word. Some people collect bones, or bibles, or fridge magnets, or keychains. I collect sentences, pluck them from my heart and nest them on my tongue. Today, with its exceptional morning, has been remarkable for words. In less poetic terms, I’ve had a goofy smile on my face all day.
Things are moving forward now. I have a new journal to capture everything of this new path, this new journey. It has birds on the cover and lined pages. The only thing left for me to debate is whether to start with my red fountain pen or a blue stick pen. I want to dance around the pages; I want to live in its endless hope.
June 7th, 2026
My journal is my best friend. I call him Elk, and he calls me the Mountaineer. My first letter to him was October 1st, 2006. In our letters to each other, we write about what it means to be human in a vasty, wide world. God, I love humankind, and I love telling my Elk all about it. People are funny, challenging, loving, hateful, wide-eyed, gasping for literature, wrapped up in the stories that matter most to them. I thud some ink on the page about all of this because journals always listen, always.
My Elk will be there as I begin draft five of the novel. It is too early to share news with anyone other than my darling Elk, but I have reason to be hopeful over the summer, and not just because the way the freshly cut grass smells as I walk around my apartment complex. I have ideas for how to create in this next draft a coterie of misfit characters rather than the flat boxes they are now. I will tell all of this, my excitements and my considerations, to my Elk.
I wish I were a poem. I want to be something that moves like air, something that lifts off from the page of a well-loved journal. I want to travel the world with beautiful language as my mask, saying hello in Italian, goodbye in Japanese, I love you in Swahili. I want to sit alongsidie the canals of Amsterdam with my Elk, pen above paper, listening to the waters tepidly slap the sides of the canal. The Elk travels with me everywhere, even to Scotland three years ago, where I sat in, of all places, a Starbucks, working on this novel. I told the journal first, “It’s thrilling to be back in this world!”
I get my edit letter next week. I could not be more excited to pore over it with my Elk. In between writing, I’ve been reading, I’ve been parsing through textbooks on comptuer science, tone, mental spaces, viruses. I think about writing even as I do everything, my head stubbornly lodged in the clouds as I swipe a broom across my floors. I daydream far too much, and I tell that to my Elk all the time.
An ode to the new journal. One finds them in the back corners of small shops in Santa Fe. One finds them in stationary stores along the Rio Grande. One slips them into her backpack when she goes out for tea or dinner or even to work. One presses her thumb into their spines for comfort as the summer day swelters on, the sun bearing down like a yellow fountain pen making short work of the sky. It is so much to confide in a friend who stays stoic from one diary into the next, always patient, always fond of literature.
Because if you must create literature — and I must — then it is essential to have these gentle friends. To craft literature is only lonely if you do not have multitudes inside you already. There is room yet on these new pages.
