What is Spiral Notebook?
Did you ever start a project with no idea where it’s going? That was me, back in 2022, posting my very first entry on Substack. I was looking for a new blogging home, having discovered that all the words I had left on other platforms were essentially stuck there in perpetuity. I was especially sad about 23 Sherwood Drive, a true labor of love. It was a silly little personal thing, my diary from 1965-66, transcribed every day, usually with a comment or explanation from my 2006 self. It was read mostly by my daughter and her soon-to-be husband. In November 2022, I decided that current me also had something to say, and so the new 23 Sherwood Drive began here on Substack. First, it was just the three of us (1965/66,2006 and 2022/23 Jo) but after few months other Jos joined in. (I have over 30 notebooks diaries, from 1965 to the present.) Eventually, I renamed it Spiral Notebook, which is jazzier, I think.
It’s hard to describe Spiral Notebook. It’s memories, not a memoir. It’s not in chronological order, at least not the way you think. It’s more of a core sample, day by day, drilling through the last six decades of my life. Some days there are just a couple entries; other days it’s eight or ten. I shudder to think that there might be a day when there are 34, but figure that’s as unlikely as a million monkeys typing Hamlet.
(ETA: It never happened, so we are all safe.)
So what is Spiral Notebook? It depends on who’s reading. Some of my subscribers are friends and family. Some are total strangers, or at least people I haven’t met in person; once you share your teenage crush with someone, how can they be a stranger? For me, it’s two things:
First, it’s a different way to see my life. If I read through each diary in order, year by year, it’s a series of stories. But when I look through the tunnel of a single day, I see patterns I never noticed. Seasons. Growth. Repetition. Echoes. Time becomes a spiral instead of a line.
Second, because I am a historian, I think of Spiral Notebook as a primary source for someone else to discover and transform. My professional work is almost completely based on ephemera. Sears catalogs. Baby books. Letters, diaries. I worry about future archivists and historians, trying to sift through all of our digital detritus for clues about daily life. I could donate my journals to some archive and maybe someone will stumble across them while they are researching Beatlemania. Or I can put them here, and so I am.
I am almost done transcribing. Then what? I know it will be archived. But I also like adding comments and updates, so I will keep doing that. I might revise it back into chronological form, but probably not. I think it would be fun to turn some days into prompts for flash fiction. (The only kind I am likely to write.) What do you want me to do?
I am destroying the hard copies, except the notebook from Mexico 1966.
In the meantime, thanks for noticing.
