When I taught English years ago at City Colleges of Chicago, I required each minority student to keep a journal.  Students were given extra credit points to put tickler questions on the left hand corner of the blackboard.  My aim was to create a community of writers as soon as possible.

The first day, I always started out with, “What fears do you have as you enter this class?” and “What is soul?”  (a slippery word to define.  Pen out a good one, Dr. Nash will award you 4 gold stars.)

Have journaled most of my adult life.  Along with my students, I read some of my entries out loud to the class, hoping they’d see how rambly and incoherent, emotional and wild, imperfect and downright nuts their professor can be.

I also included this first day of class journal rap.  They were similar to one that follows.  (Please forgive its religious overtones, for many of my students were born-again Baptists.)

Oh Yea of little faith, take heed in what my 3^rd grade teacher Miss Lawler said way back when dinosaurs were still roaming the earth, smoking Cools and lurking late at Fey’s pool hall.  My flame-haired teacher said, “Ronnie, why not tell Dear Diary your many problems?  Pretend you are speaking into the ear of God.”

Your journal can quick become your best friend.  Won’t cost you a hundred smaks an hour stretched out on some sigh-ki-ah-trist’s couch.  Your scribblings is garon-teed 144% to expand your head and heart and unmentionable private parts, rather than shrinking them to pigmy size.  Have pen will travel the darknesses inside your own heart, should you have blue ink enough.

Always seek someone you can really talk to.  Write your passed on mamma a letter, and tell her of the fine work she’s done.  Praise her for the fact you no longer wear stinky diapers, and went to school (even if you didn’t wear no shoes.)  She just wants to hear the flow of your emotions, the voices of your necessary angels, and she don’t give a lick about your speling, gremmer, or other dams that could stop your precious thoughts.  If mama don’t uncork your ink flow, why not talk to a photo, or have it speak to you, so as to develop your latent schizophrenia.

Write the next true thought.  If you speak honestly, everyone will listen.  Give up certainty.  Fly on the crow wings of mystery.  Writing is discovery. Go toward the roar.  Be a heat-seeking missal into the wilderness of your suffering, so that your thorn pricks can be felt by others.  Those insights may result in your best possible polished piece of prose.

And should you later develop altimeters or dementia, you can always read back over the life you lived.  Try to see the stepping stones in that twisting Mississippi river, which have led you to your destiny.  And praise be when you discover your glowing Gulf of Mexico.

©  Dr. Nash  1970 through 2000  Olive-Harvey College

Truly awful.  (Could be I’m a closet Baptist Preacher.)  Deduct 4 points from my mid term total.  But I’m hopeful it sent the right message.

And I try to heed my own advice, as I continue my revisions of Changing Colors  Book 1-The Long and Winding River to Kashmir’s Door.

Chapter 3, “Peeking through Kashmir’s Keyhole” requires me to “go toward the roar” with the hope, if I tell the truth about 45 year-old mid life mess Ron, everyone will listen.  (That saying came from a fortune cookie, which is tacked to my Anchor desk.)

What have I left out in the rift I just writ?  What Use do your make of your journal?  Whom are they written to?

Please comment.  Writers thrive on dialectics.  That is to say, I talk, you talk, and then together we arrive at a place we’ve never been to before.