This eclectic collection of essays illustrates what every writer and teacher of
writing knows to be true: prewriting prepares writers to write. Diana M. Raab
has assembled the work of more than twenty writers whose essays reflect on the relationship
between journaling and effective writing. Writers and Their Notebooks provides
a variety of perspectives on journal keeping, including the thoughts of such writers
as James Brown whose journal is a tool to mine memory, Maureen Stanton who journals
to survive despair, Bonnie Morris who journals to record and remember her world,
Reginald Gibbons whose journal feeds his muse, and Dorianne Laux who journals to
understand life. This collection offers a variety of analogies that will connect
with a wide writing audience and inspire many to start keeping notebooks so that
they, like Wendy Call, might “grab thoughts and anchor them in the world of
dust motes and molecules...so they don’t decompose, float away, sublimate—passing
like iodine into purple vapor.”