Journey Home

At this desk I made some of the most consequential decisions of my life. I had just returned from three years living in Mainz, Germany, and rented this one-bedroom apartment at Five Points in Davenport. By the time this photo was taken in December, I knew I could not stay in my home town.

It’s not that I disliked Davenport. I was insulated from seeing how average the city was by a family that welcomed me and tried to do their best by me. As I returned after a long absence, There was little vitality running through the city. I didn’t fit in.

When I sat at the desk and wrote, I felt like a writer.

The early part of my post-high school intellectual development centered around Saul Bellow. “I want,” he wrote and I agreed. At Five Points I became enamored of Joan Didion. I bought The White Album from The Book of the Month Club. After it arrived, I went to the public library and checked out everything Didion had written. I read three of her early books in two weeks about when this film was exposed. I couldn’t get enough of her.

“Didion speaks with a voice, the voice of a person sitting in a sunlit room at a typewriter,” I wrote in my journal. “Her paragraphs seem well-written, her vocabulary is enriched with new words. I particularly like her image of the end of the 1960s. The spread of word of the Tate murders across the valley.”

Didion’s thoughts seemed to evolve before my eyes on the page.

She was from a military family. Her father was an Army finance officer and the family often moved. I found commonality in this experience. “She touches on something it has taken the four years in the military for me to realize,” I wrote in 1980. “It is a feeling more than anything else, but I suspect that it may be something peculiar to the military environment.” I saw how her experiences in a military family influenced her writing and in turn how my service would influence me.

During the following years, I sought out every book Joan Didion wrote and began reading them soon after publication.

I continue to think of Joan Didion while I’m writing.

In every place I lived, I had a desk on which to write. What makes this one different is it rests a few feet from the writing space I established after inheriting my father-in-law’s library table.

At university I struggled to find a path. I was on a trajectory supercharged by the death of Father in 1969. Didion’s writing was something I could look to and see myself. Being successful as a writer wasn’t meant to be my career. Yet Didion gave me hope in dark times.

I needed that at Five Points as the 1970s ended and I began to call myself a writer.

Writing autobiography is an American endeavor. I studied under Albert E. Stone who was my first advisor in graduate school. He edited an edition of J. Hector de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer.

We Americans, especially in this century, often seem completely self-absorbed. There is a native impulse to write or tell a single, brief narrative of our life. More accurately, it is a combination of essential, defining moments and multiple, broader narratives. At the root of autobiography, we must answer the question Crèvecoeur did, “What then, is the American, this new man?”

This new man, when it comes to journaling, was typified as a woman in the 1970s when I wrote,

Traditionally, it is the girl or female of the family who writes in journals. Sometimes it seemed nothing more than a way to keep a girl busy until she gets old enough, reaches the age of child-bearing, then her true work begins.

Personal Journal, Mainz-Gonsenheim, West Germany, Dec. 12, 1976.

This tradition of female-based diary or journal writing was something I was taught in high school. All I can say in 2023 is, OMG!

Journal writing has a purpose instead of marking time. It gets the writer seated behind a desk or table with pen or keyboard in hand. In such a posture one cannot help but write something. It may be gibberish, yet once in a while it may be profound. It is only through practice one becomes a better writer. Journaling serves this purpose.

Journal writing is a form of therapy in that its performance resembles use of an addictive drug — we take it when ill and continue its use until we are well. In some diarist’s cases the illness never left. My condition of restlessness and loneliness has been with me a long time. Journal writing helps me cope.

A foundational part of autobiography is journal writing. As I work through the timeline of my current book, I find the stories I want to tell were written before, many times over, during the last 50 years. They were often written in a journal, or since 1999, in an email or since 2007 in a blog post. In living life we find certain people, places and things stand out. Those are the narratives that can find their way into a journal. The more we write these stories, the better they can become. They become part of us. In the end, who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves living in society?

I am pleased to report the draft of my book passed 100,000 words today. The journals I kept, beginning in 1974, have been especially helpful in getting this far. Writing emails and blog posts served a similar usefulness. I have been mining them both. The lesson from this story is journaling is important to being a writer. It helps us cope and provides a record in case one is needed. From time to time we must rediscover who was are. Writing in a journal helps us do that.