February 29

Goodbye 23 Sherwood Drive, hello Spiral Notebook

1965

I almost wrote in for a day that wasn't - this isn't Leap Year

2024

Did you ever start a project with no idea where it’s going?

That was me 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 stuck there in perpetuity. I was especially sad about 23 Sherwood Drive. It was a silly little personal thing, my diary from 1964-65, 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. On November 24, I decided that 2022 Jo also had something to say, and so the new 23 Sherwood Drive began here on Substack. First, it was just the three Jos (1964-65 Jo, 2006 Jo and present day Jo) but after few months other Jos joined in. (I have over 30 notebooks, spanning almost six decades.) 

It’s hard to describe 23 Sherwood Drive. 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? I don’t need a thousand subscribers, but I do like to have company.

For me, 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. When I look back through the lens of a single day, I see patterns I never noticed. Growth. Repetition. Echoes. Time becomes a spiral instead of a line.

In few weeks, I’ll be done transcribing and then what? I have been destroying the actual notebooks as I finish them. (I need the space for my yarn.) But in these thirteen months, I have grown fond of looking at my life this way, so I’m going to keep adding entries. Some will be old (Facebook memories, snippets from other blogs) and now and and then I will comment or update from the present. It probably won’t be every day; I rarely journaled daily before, so why start now?

I am still trying to figure out out how to to this without encroaching on my other projects, especially the book manuscript my publisher thinks they are getting at end of the year. Next to deciding to stay on the journey, my biggest decision as been to change the title of this newsletter. “23 Sherwood Drive” made sense when it was mostly drawn from my original 1964-65 diary. But I’ve moved several times since then, and it just doesn’t fit the current incarnation.

So (waves champagne bottle) I re-christen this newsletter:

Spiral Notebook

It will continue to be free and public. Anyone can read, comment, and share. If you see the germ of a story, mini-series, or opera in my spiral notebook, go for it. I might do the same, now and then. Because I am a historian, I think of this as a primary source for someone else to discover and transform. I worry about future researchers, 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.

Back to work.