Kendra Kopelke - UB Professor and Editor of Passager
New Passager Book Opens the Pages of 150 Years of Journal Writing
I think it a funny
way to live out doors
who would have though it
washing cooking outdoors
eating in a tent sleeping
in a wagon yet happy
Oh well such is woman
Beloved and Loving her lifeSo begins an early entry, a small slip of accidental poetry, from Keeping Time: 150 Years of Journal Writing, the latest collection from UB's own Passager Books. As its title conveys, it's a book made up of private journal entries from dozens of contributors, many of whom found diaries from family ancestors, or rescued them from junk shops or worse. The entries, many co-mingled with personal photographs, works of art and reproductions of actual journal pages, reach as far back as 1867-the year in which the above excerpt from "The Diary of William Easterly and Margaret P. Wilson Van Slyke" originates-and continue all the way to 2008. In this span of a century and a half is a rare, unvarnished portrait of what it means to write something for yourself, about yourself and your circumstances, good and bad.
Keeping Time, edited by Mary Azrael and UB's own Kendra Kopelke and now available on Passager's web site, pays close attention to the details of the lives of immigrants, travelers and those who otherwise are in transition. Many entries, such as "Diary of a Teenager" by Liz Rhodebeck, a journalist and poet from Wisconsin, provide deep insights into the authors' perspective as they struggle with issues that at the time seemed all-consuming.
"I have often wondered if old people must get tired of each other after so many years or if love dies out for it is sometimes hard to see unionship between parents nowadays," Rhodebeck wrote on Feb. 25, 1970, when she was a 10th grader. She had been thinking about Theodore Dreiser's "The Lost Phoebe" and pondering her existence as only a teenager can. Assigned to keep a journal for English class, Rhodebeck poured out her emotions. Now, in retrospect, it's clear that she was doing more than that: she was exploring the writing life, learning to parse her thoughts as well as her sentences.
Keeping the journal "changed my life and set me on a path to being a writer," Rhodebeck said in her introduction.
Several contributors mined family lore for examples of honest self-expression and insight, while others simply found the diaries of strangers in antique shops and the like. Mary Pratt, a multi-talented person who has been both a teacher and an apple picker, submitted an entry entitled "Ella Fisher's Diary," from Vermont in 1900. In her introduction, Pratt said that she bought Fisher's diary for $12, and had only the first names of Fisher's husband and children in her search to find out who the author was. She used the Vermont census to discover Fisher's name. From there, she searched other records and discovered that Ella Fisher was a published poet who lived into her 80s.
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"Visiting her gravesite and seeing those familiar names on tombstones was quite a moving experience, as was returning the diary to the family," Pratt said.
Fisher's entries are minimalist, but they have a lyrical cadence that reveals a poet:
Children go to the farm for milk.
Henry goes to the lake.
The old cow has a calf
& we shall have milk soon.Other contributors, like photographer Stephanie Graham or Ann Zahn (both of Maryland), used the journal-keeping approach to tell stories about baby pigeons and the making of a quilt, respectively. Taken together, the written words, the photos, drawings and paintings of Keeping Time are an intimate, profound, occasionally tragic and arguably very American landscape.
