July 7, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2001 By Molly Dektar “Today I’m REALLY worried about death. I almost started crying. However, my new calligraphy kit is AWSOME.” “My dollys are so fun to play with. They bend and move and pose. : ) P.S. the police think that Peterson might be guilty because there was blood all over the scene of the crime and a used condom (EW!) and a bloody soda can with hair on it.” Read More
June 21, 2022 Diaries Solstice Diaries By Ellyn Gaydos Last night I hit a deer, a fawn actually. Just a ragged thing still with its spots, it could’ve been born that day. Its mother stood on the side of the road. I saw her first and only the fawn when it was too late, my own new child in the backseat. I was immediately seized with the guilt that I shouldn’t be there and the deer should, that I was in the wrong place throttling a car through the woods. The next day at the farm where I work the lettuces were missing their hearts, the best, sweetest part eaten by deer. It is getting to be summer when things like this happen. Read More
June 13, 2022 Diaries Cambridge Diary, 2014 By J. D. Daniels Photograph by J.D. Daniels. Saturday. July. 7:15 am Yoga. Translating Bayard’s Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse? from a Spanish copy of ¿Se puede aplicar la literatura al psicoanálisis? One word at a time. Speed limit, 25 mph. To Cartagena with Jamie this 22-26 September. Tonight Jamie, Josh and Ellen will come for dinner. Humid, overcast, drizzling rain, 60˚F but feels much hotter. Sunday. 6:10 am. 68˚F Beginner’s Orchids. Phalaenopsis, cymbidium, oncidium. Reconciliation with the father. Henry IV, Part One. Ideas for essays on films. Sorcerer at Brattle vs. Clouzot’s Wages of Fear. Or Stark’s The Hunter vs. Point Blank. A man who knows nothing about movies writes these words about a movie he enjoyed. Cycled yesterday with Jamie through green Concord, in preparation for 2015 in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Ran three miles. Read More
June 8, 2022 Diaries Jottings, 2022 By Diane Williams I did confide in a diary from the time I was nine or ten. I remember one diary well from this era—red plaid vinyl, with a strap and a fancy lock. The key was lost and the strap had to be cut. I gushed into spiral, lined notebooks in my twenties. Rereading any of these created massive disappointment, so I destroyed them—I am not sad to say. I feel anger toward them, about them. That little girl or the woman understood little or was unable say what she meant to say, and this is one reason I labor on with my fiction. Most of these daily jottings for stories in progress will remain forever lost or hidden, but this sketch work represents, for me, a purer form of diary. Here is one page from this morning. Diane Williams is the author of ten books of fiction. She has a new collection of stories forthcoming from Soho Press next year. She is the founder and editor of NOON.
June 6, 2022 Diaries Diary, 1999 By Sloane Crosley In 1999, I traveled around Europe with a friend from college, going from hostel to sofa to hostel, sharing a bath towel, both of us with $350 Eurorail passes in our pockets. These passes would cover seven cities in twenty days. Correction: eight cities. Who could forget the eighth city? I have no recollection of how it happened, but we boarded the wrong overnight train leaving Barcelona. We thought we were bound for Nice but woke up in Geneva. To be fair, there were no signifiers of our error in the dark. No, say, alps. When the train arrived, I checked the time and assumed it had simply run late. It had not run late. Read More
May 31, 2022 Diaries Diary, 1995 By Melissa Febos I’ve always kept diaries in the style of a catch-all notebook: flipping through them reveals poems, dated journal entries, to-do lists, quotes from books, phone numbers, and overheard dialogue. I found this page in the middle of my diary circa freshman year of high school. I was practicing my grown-up-style handwriting and forgery of my mother’s signature in order to excuse myself, and sometimes my friends, from school. I was failing pretty spectacularly to be convincing, at least to my eye now, but as I recall it mostly worked. I was fourteen or fifteen and immensely frustrated that my teachers insisted on droning about mathematics and the branches of government and books by boring straight people when I had my own reading list to attend to, as well as drugs with which I was eager to experiment. At this point, I had already known for some years that I wanted to be a writer. At the end of the year, I would drop out to pursue a different sort of education. Read More