I’ve been going through my old journals today, indulging in a bout of nostalgia. One notebook is full of starts of stories – I can tell which books or movies I must have been reading when I started writing these. My handwriting is still from elementary school – maybe early junior high. It makes me laugh to see how formal I was – how the heavy British influence started so young with Enid Blyton, Frances Hodgson Burnett etc. In some ways, I feel like my love of British literature makes it harder for me to be a writer today – what I want to write and how I want to write is in no way modern or North American.

A cut out of one of Thomas Merton’s poems – I’m forgetting which right now. Forgive the formatting, I’m copying this out of a journal I had copied it into.

I will try like them

To be my own silence.

And this is difficult. The whole

World is secretly on fire. The stones

Burn even the stones

They burn me. How can a man be still or

listen to all things burning? How can he dare

to sit with them when

all their silence

is on fire?