On Keeping a Notebook

A meditation on journalism, writing, & teeny tiny acts of defiance. Fueled, of course, by Joan Didion. Also--hi, Substack!

Hi! Welcome! I’m glad you’re here, if you are.

Did you know that the Venn diagram of Writers and Romantics is actually just a circle? If you didn’t, that’s probably because I just invented it (see below). But I feel confident about it all the same.

I decided to start this blog today, not because I think I have something definitive to say, but because I’m a longtime writer and a new-to-the-game journalist, and the Romantic in me is desperate to write without the constraints of deadline or audience.

I’d like to tell you now what you can expect from me in future posts, but I can’t with certainty and so I won’t. I’d also like to tell you future posts will not be as long as this one, and while that could be true I also can’t promise that. So I won’t.

Ok! Back to my little chicken-scratch Venn Diagram.

My point is that the urge to write something down is inherent to the Romantic. That’s not to say the writing of the Romantic Writer always oozes delight or idealism—it may even come off as cynical. (Kafka—yes, the guy who wrote about a man waking up as a giant bug only to discover the seriously questionable limits of family love—was, to my surprise, outspoken about his love of note-taking, not for any one purpose but simply for the pleasure of it.)

Because though a Romantic might be skeptical about institutions or realism, they believe deeply in something — even if that “something” is just the ache that comes with being alive. And that ache is the point! The Romantic is the part of the Writer who has to write—not to expose or explain, but to feel, to remember, to capture the world as it feels to the writer in a moment in time.

A favorite one of mine—the late and lovely Joan Didion—never explicitly called herself a cynic, but her writing, sometimes, seems kinda bleak.

Didion remains among our most incisive cultural critics. She wrote about counterculture, political illusion, and the quiet, slow unraveling of a collective—what she called “social hemorrhaging”. She had this way of peeling back what the layers of everyone else was pretending to see with a kind of poetic detachment and incisive skepticism. Which makes sense—to write about people/events so fragmented and chaotic, you’ve got to be critical. You have to stay a little cool. A little removed. And because she was a journalist, this served her well. But still—she was a Romantic. Maybe even especially so. Because Didion didn’t just write to document. She wrote to feel. In her own, clipped, half-lit way, she was chasing the ache too.

And that’s why I used to write. It made me fall in love more—with the world and with myself. Made me believe more, maybe? In myself or people or art I don’t know, but something!

But today—to be frank with you, dear digital reader—I find that writing as a journalist has made me hard, disillusioned, and, on the worst days, not chasing the ache like I used to.

Because while the writer survives on feeling, the journalist thrives on discernment.

I graduated with my Master’s in Journalism last May and, since then, the political and social landscape of my country has taken what I can only describe as a terribly awful shit. Naturally, themes tied to this—civics, climate, human rights—have become the focus of many of my stories today. Which, on the one hand, is awesome! That’s what I want to write about: important shit.

On the other hand: writing about systematic injustice, the erosion of hard-earned climate protections, about deliberate and calculated stripping of fundamental human liberties all the time…

I can’t say I’m doing, like, amazing in terms of my mental health.

I research these often disheartening topics extensively. Then, I interview. Then, I write my arse off until I have a draft I’m semi-happy with—then I send it off to my editor. And when the process is done, I feel…what? Sad? No, that doesn’t seem to cover it. Enraged? Like Didion, I often land in the in-betweens of any one feeling—stuck in that what-the-fuck-is-going-on-is-the-world-I-thought-I-lived-in-crumbling-or-did-it-never-exist-at-all lurch. I’m left feeling so spent, so disenchanted with everything. At some point, I guess that included writing, too.

This may be where some of you go, ‘Awhh, welcome to the real world, kiddo.’ Yeah yeah yeah.

Suffice it to say: younger Hannah would be stoked to know I write for a living. And I love what I do—no, really! Choosing what stories I want to cover, figuring out the ups and downs of freelancing…but—and I can’t stress this enough—it’s a tough time to be a journalist.

But! It seems to me that Didion found a way to do both: to write for audience, for journalism, for truth, and for herself. She even dedicated an entire essay on the value of keeping a notebook, of writing solely for oneself. “On Keeping a Notebook” has become a sacred text for those of us born with the urge to jot and scribble. Writing, not to uncover the truth of a thing, but the feeling of it. Writing, not to better understand the world, but one’s relation to it.

Natalia Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, believes in this, too. Not only this, but she ascertains that writing, or rather recording “the details of our lives is a stance against bombs…”

Whether these bombs are figurative or literal, we are living in a time in which there are many of them, all around the world. The bombs are important to record, document, analyze, share. But so are the lives and details of those in the line of fire.

So! Consider this blog-slash-digital notebook a way back—an attempt to heal my relationship with writing. You might also consider it my own small act of defiance (not unlike my dish towels with tiny ‘fuck Trump’s hidden in the floral pattern). My stance against the bombs. An act of defiance meaningful only in the context of myself—and I’m beginning to let myself believe that sometimes, that’s enough.

Thanks for being here—if you are here at all, that is. Not that it matters—this is for me and me alone, after all—but it is appreciated. See you in the next blog post! xxx