Some days I can think of nothing worth writing down. Fortunately, I am not alone. By my chair, I keep a small, revolving collection of essays, spiritual autobiographies, poetry, and other writers’ journals to inspire me. When I’m out of fuel, they pull me out of the creek and into a broader, deeper river. My own personal list of light givers follows, which may illuminate you or not. We are different people, on the lookout for different things. But if you want your journal to have any lasting value, for yourself or others, I can only think of one rule to follow: Lean toward the light.
Reading List
Karen Armstrong. The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
W.H. Auden. The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden. New York: Random House, 1945.
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.
Bernard Berenson. Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–1958. New York: Har-court Brace & World, 1963.
Wendell Berry. The Selected Poems. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 1998.
Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1997.
George Crane. Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia. New York: Bantam Books, 2000.
Robert Ellsberg. The Saints’ Guide to Happiness. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays and Journals. New York: Doubleday, 1968.
Hugh I’Anson Fausset. A Modern Prelude. London: Jonathan Cape, 1933.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.
John Howard Griffin. Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2004.
Carolyn Heilbrun. Writing A Woman’s Life. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988.
Marv and Nancy Hiles. An Almanac for the Soul: Anthology of Hope. Healdsburg, Calif.: Iona Center, 2008.
Etty Hillesum. An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1996.
Roger Housden. Ten Poems to Set You Free. New York: Harmony Books, Random House, 2000.
Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Stanley Kunitz. The Collected Poems. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The Leopard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
Lao-Tzu. Tao Te Ching. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Jacques Lusseyran. And There Was Light. New York: Parabola Books, 1998.
Rollo May. The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975.
Arthur Miller. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987
Henry Miller. Henry Miller on Writing. New York: New Directions, 1964.
Czeslaw Milosz. To Begin Where I Am, selected essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.
John Muir. “My First Summer in the Sierra” from Nature Writings. New York: The Library of America, Penguin Putnam, 1997.
Naomi Shihab Nye. Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1995.
Mary Oliver. New and Selected Poems. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
Blaise Pascal. Pensées. New York: Penguin Press, 1995.
Dorothy Berkley Phillips, Elizabeth Boyden Howes, and Lucille M. Nixon, eds. The Choice Is Always Ours: The Classic Anthology on the Spiritual Way. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1989.
Jules Renard. The Journal of Jules Renard, edited and translated by Elizabeth Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. Portland, OR and New York: Tin House Books, 2008.
Stephen Spender. Journals: 1939–1983. New York: Random House, 1986.
Henry David Thoreau. Walden and Other Writings. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.
Eckhart Tolle. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Novato, CA.: New World Library, 1999.
Anne Truitt. Daybook: The Journal of an Artist. New York: Random House, 1982.
Kurt Vonnegut. A Man Without a Country. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.
Gary Zukav The Seat of the Soul. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Postscript
At the beginning of my writing career, I used to prowl around bookstores, examining the back flap copy on book jackets, where an author’s brief biography and photograph are displayed. Maybe it was simply the fashion of the day to describe all those Vermont farmsteads and golden retrievers playing around the edges of these writers’ lives, and perhaps not all of them had a tenured teaching job at a major college or university, but virtually all the men and nearly all the women writers I admired had one asset in common—a devoted partner who could support them (presumably with cash money), should the writer’s wits get frayed. It was a bit depressing.
Newly divorced, with children to support and the economic know-how of a frog (I used to mistakenly think that the high interest on credit cards accrued to me), I feared for my own emotional and economic survival. But after a while I realized the obvious, that it was counterproductive and ungrateful to count other writers’ blessings, particularly when I had so many of my own.
Now my life contains a partner. He was a long time arriving, but worth the wait. During our courtship, most of my creativity went into trying to decide whether we were meant to be together, but once we arranged our coffee cups under the same roof, my writing life reemerged. This book is the first fruit of that new life.
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