I was headed to a middle school in New Westminster yesterday on the Skytrain (to facilitate a dialogue session with teachers on their School Growth Plan as they explored creatively – with pens and paper – how to make the plan more engaging and meaningful in the classroom). On the train, I was chewing over my Potato Nose project and thinking about what a diary really is… Why are we drawn to keep diaries on paper, on scraps of paper, in jumbles in drawers and boxes, on our blog?
I didn’t come to any grand conclusion. I was searching for the WHY of Potato Nose. The why of the calling to tell stories through words and images on paper. Do I actually need to find the why, though? I jotted down a few unintelligible notes on my phone:
What is a diary? About me? Or about time and place? Why the need to deposit thoughts? Recall Burgess’s comments on Shakespeare’s laundry list…
[“Given the choice between two discoveries – that of an unknown play by Shakespeare and that of one of Will’s laundry lists – we would all plump for the dirty washing every time. That Shakespeare persists in presenting so shadowy a figure, when his friend Ben Jonson is as clear as a bell and somewhat louder, is one of our reasons for pursuing him. Every biographer longs for some new gesture of reality – a fingernail torn on May 7, 1598, or a bad cold during King James I’s first command performance – but the gestures never materialise . . . What we want are letters and a doctor’s prescriptions and the minutiae of daily life which build up to a character. It is maddening that Shakespeare gives us nothing.” – Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare, 1970.]
… To do’s. Receipts. Grief. To remember. Is the diary about me? Or removing myself from me? I am. Am I? The centre? Or is it about the joy of the pen and the paper? The paper and the glue? Pages not to be shared? But then who I am writing to? What about when I use the blog to keep a diary? It’s the storytelling. The innate need to tell stories. Then what is that about? Connection? To whom?
In honour of Halloween, I went back to a journal entry and sketch I posted on my blog in 2018:
“Shhh… shhh… can you hear it? That beautiful alone time? Shhh… shhh. Can you hear them? The quiet comrades? Shhh… shhh. Would you just stop for a bit and just listen? I can hear them sometimes. It is different from the inner conversations I have in my head. Or thoughts that churn in the mind. Sometimes an actual voice breaks through. A simple hello usually. And I mean an actual voice- a sound like someone is actually saying hello right in my ear. I feel the breath. It has happened a few times. Especially in this apartment. The other day, sitting at the kitchen table, I heard a garbled “lilla gumman” behind me. It was a Lynchian distorted voice but a voice nonetheless – not an imagined one. This was a SOUND. [And lilla gumman was a term of endearment my father called me. (Kind of translates to little lady).] It doesn’t scare me. It enthralls me. Then there is the welcoming peacefulness of the souls that reside with me here in this old apartment. There is a peacefulness and camaraderie as my cats hold space and at times seem to channel the energy/the soul of this building. Is that why it feels so right with animal companions and so utterly empty without them? I take a deep breath every time I wake to this place, every time I turn the corner walking home and I see her – this building. I feel enormous gratitude as I turn the key and walk up her stairs, aware of all the souls that walked up and down those same stairs since 1930. And I feel the energy of the ground beneath us, holding history, intense gratitude for its history and a connection to this massive Earth. Why this intensity of joy I feel when watching tiny birds in the morning as the sun rises while I walk to the bus? The 65¢ in my pocket is the start of a million. The smell of coffee, the sun shining through my window at sunset, the scratches in the hardwood, the musty smell of my books… I live among these ghosts and the energy that still swirls from events past and I find comfort in that magical thinking. Maybe I am a ghost. How do I know if I am not?”
The sheeted ghost is a fave poignant image to draw. It appears often in my graphic novel, Salt Green Death, Conundrum Press, 2025.
I think 33 times. If you have the book already, can you find them all?!🤍
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In memory of Squeak 🖤🤍, her round pink belly and rough tongue:
Check out my Potato Nose Kickstarter campaign at: POTATO NOSE, a graphic novel
