BY CLARISSA HYDE

Like many other students this summer, I spent extensive amounts of time confined to the limits of my bedroom and backyard. While my mom baked loaf after loaf of banana bread, I sat on my bedroom carpet journaling with my siamese cat. I’m a creative writer and keeping a journal is something that’s integral to the process. Daily life in quarantine proved boring and I had little to write about and even less to write about eloquently. I would lie on my floor, looking up at the ceiling, waiting for the next magical sentence or line to come to me. But, like all creative writers, I eventually came to the conclusion that to write anything good, I had to write anything down at all. I had to be bold enough to write absolutely horribly. So I started to thoughtlessly put pen to paper, to let myself cringe as my keystrokes spilled garbage out onto the page. Melanie Rae Thon, a writer and professor at the University of Utah in my hometown, Salt Lake City, coined the term “Trash Diary” as an alternate for journal. The idea being that every thought should be put to paper, that the least eloquent of ideas can metamorphosize into something great. Every pen stroke is a shovel full of dirt as we each move toward something so far unnamed.

When I’m writing, I find that half of my entries are aesthetically acceptable: “I could feel my every movement captured in a resin-cast still life/My toes leave no trace,” while the other half disgusts me to read: “To be alive/Is not to be complete/But to completely be,” which reminds me of a soccer mom Pinterest board. The Trash Diary lets my thoughts ferment in written form. Instead of sitting down with the intention to write good poetry, I will go through the Trash Diary, much like a collector at a flea market, and try to piece entries together into something coherent. Of course whatever Frankenstein Google Doc emerges requires at least a week of revision if not more time fermenting. The poems that do finally emerge months after the first lines were penned, however, are some of my best work.

After returning to campus I was reminded of how many Vassar students keep beautiful journals full of their thoughts and artwork. I decided to interview journal keepers to get their thoughts on their processes and styles. These books of wonder travel around campus hidden away in backpacks and desk drawers and I thought they deserved even a whisper of an exposé. Every journal I encountered during the interview process looked different: spiral-bound, hard-cover, soft-cover, lots of artwork, lots of collage, no artwork at all, words crossed through, words left untouched. I found that these notebooks are reflections of the self; invisible thoughts taking up physical space.

Eden Bartholomew (Class of 23): “I started my journal in a time when I was really feeling stuck and I didn’t value my own thoughts very much… I started journaling to try and document what I was feeling and to be more mindful in my everyday life… I can look back and see what I was trying to work on and see that I’ve grown in so many ways, you know?... There is this existential dread that’s involved in journaling where I want to document everything because I’m gonna die. So I want to document the happy times in my life too, the really small moments that I know I’m gonna forget if I don’t try and record them”

Norris Meigs (Class of 23): “I have tried to put as little pressure on it as possible and tried not to make it for one specific thing… Trying to take that pressure away from it has helped me sustain it and keep it going. It’s mostly a creative outlet so any time that I want to make anything, whether that’s writing or drawing or painting it goes in here… I drove across the country with this journal and then I left in the car as my mom was driving back home, and so for the first two weeks that I was on campus I didn’t have it… but in those two weeks I kept reaching for it, and I really felt that it wasn’t there which had never happened for any of my journals before”

Diary of Marge Carty, original artwork by Frances Cannon.

Marge Carty (Class of 23): “I’ve always kept journals, but I don’t have a lot of them because I would rip them out and burn the pages because I was so embarrassed, like “no one can ever see this,” a week after I wrote something like how mean my brother was. But since my sophomore year of high school I’ve started to keep a journal more regularly and in different forms, so I’ve had journals that I write in and scribble in and I’ll rip out pages. I’ve had this satisfying thing in the past few years of finishing two or three journals which was really nice. And those I keep, and I find them very reflective when I need space. I keep them in a box and sometimes I go back through them and it helps me process what’s going on”

Hana Stella (Class of 23): “It’s hard to put yourself out there a little bit. It’s just like very… There’s just always like a deep-down fear that someone is gonna find your journal. So that’s always something that I’m kind of wary of and I think it’s just because you are making yourself so vulnerable in a way that is only meant for you. So the thought of anyone else finding it is really kind of scary because it’s such a deep part of who you are”

Nellie Simmonds (Class of 23): “I notice that I do a weird thing where it’s like I’m writing to an audience that will never read it, and so it’s like I’m putting on this performance, kind of, for somebody. And that writing is about my experience and what is going on in my life, but it’s also dramaticized a bit, in a fun way, like a narrative. It’s like I’m writing a story”

After speaking with all of these writers, I found out that the hardest thing about keeping a Trash Diary or a journal in any form is that it requires us to be vulnerable in front of ourselves. We feel as though we are being watched as we cast our voices out in scribbles and eraser marks, paint strokes and smudges. Almost every person I interviewed mentioned or hinted at a personal standard for their journals even though no one would ever see it. These expectations more than anything convinced me that journals are mirrors. When our thoughts and feelings exist in physical space they stop being expressions and become tangible definitions. Journaling is essentially a notebook of first drafts. Trash Diaries, when written correctly, are collections of our worst writing, and yet, nothing can capture us better than our uninterrupted thoughts. Maybe our job as the keepers of Trash Diaries is to get out of our own way, to step into the light of the page. Maybe writing with eloquence only requires that we write with the voices that belong to us alone.