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Journaling
For 40 years I have been keeping journals. They are lined up by my desk. I have slowly gone through some of them and am letting them go. Looking at my journals is like looking into a clothes closet. There are worn clothes that I love. New clothes that hang without creases. And there are those pieces that are uniquely me. My PhD program in English Literature at Brown University was dramatically transformed into a M.A. is a worn pair of blue jeans that no longer fits. I did get a lot out of those years in Providence. Many hours were spent reading and studying the writings of Virginia Woolf. …
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Reader’s Block
When I began to write, I stopped reading. I did read some material related to researching my essays, but that was it. I read about crows, deer, Virginia Woolf, artists and of course about writing. I love novels, but every novel I picked up I promptly put down. I told a friend who recently retired from a long career in publishing about my difficulty and she said that she, too, found it easier to write than to read. She spoke to a local librarian and the librarian said that it was “reader’s block.” It is similar to writer’s block, but it involves an inability to stick with reading a…
