Happy Stackaversary to me!

So far, so good. In the meantime, thanks for noticing.

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

That was me one year ago, 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, my long-ago journal on Blogger. 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, 2022, I decided that I 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 and online diaries, spanning almost six decades.) 

It’s hard to describe 23 Sherwood Drive. It’s 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 59 years 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.

So what is 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? 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. When I look through the tunnel of a single day, I see patterns I never noticed. Growth. Repetition. Echoes. Time becomes a spiral instead of a line.

Second, because I am a historian, I think of 23 Sherwood Drive as a primary source for someone else to discover and transform. My professional work on dress history is almost completely based on ephemera. Sears catalogs. Baby books. Old photos, 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 do.

By sometime next year, I’ll be done transcribing and then what? I might revise it back into chronological form, I might not. I might use it for inspiration for a new project, I might not. I plan to destroy the hard copies, or most of them. (I need more space for my yarn stash.)

There’s a lot of discussion on Substack about paid vs free accounts. My own philosophy is aligned with Henry David Thoreau, who worked for pay as little as possible so as to have as much time for his intellectual and spiritual pursuits. As a retiree with a modest guaranteed income, I am more akin to Ralph Waldo Emerson than Thoreau; Emerson was supported in his work by a legacy from his first wife. So my writing is free.

There is also a lot of advice on Substack about how to increase your reach. I quake at the thought of hundreds of readers, much less thousands. I leave coffee hour at my church when it gets  too crowded. I have never taught a large lecture course. My books might have been read by thousands, but I never had to watch while they did it. It’s nice watching a few people stop by and - I hope - enjoy an entry or two. I have met some pleasant Substackers in the last year. So far, so good. 

In the meantime, thanks for noticing.

The authors.