Living Like a Writer

This fall I had intended to require my graduate students in the fiction workshop keep an artist's journal of some kind (physical, virtual, in words, in pictures...) but I never got around to it. Mostly because I wanted to try keeping one myself before requiring it of them and I never got around to that. I mean, I have notebooks for jotting things down willy-nilly, but I've never kept anything I'd call an artist's journal. But I'll be teaching a graduate workshop this summer, and I've decided to partially focus that class on inspiration's role in the writing process (I usually have an unannounced focus for my grad courses so that I don't just repeat the same old formulas every semester...I don't think the students ever notice, but so what? ... this past semester it was "avoiding the workshop story" in case you were wondering...). Now, anyone who's been in my physical presence within the past few days, knows I am about 48 hours worth of grading away from a semester-long sabbatical, so I figure I'll keep my artist's journal during my sabbatical as a prelude to the students' assignment. Which is all a way of saying, I'm refocusing, or perhaps unfocusing the blog, to include more than just my reading, and to be a part of, maybe all of, my artist's journal experiment.