I have long believed that journaling allows you to alchemize isolation into creative solitude. As it happens, reading also enacts that shift. Rather than feeling trapped and alone with your thoughts, you’re in conversation. You’ve got company.
Suleika Jouad, a writer and artist of Tunisian heritage based in the US, has kept journals for most of her life – and she found the practice a lifeline when she was diagnosed with cancer in her early 20s. In 2021, she published a best-selling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, about her experience of illness.
During the pandemic, she created The Isolation Journals, an online journalling community, and The Book of Alchemy grew out of that project. It’s a selection of 100 journal prompts – all written by different people – on 10 themes, such as Memory, Fear, Rebuilding, the Body. There’s an essay by Jouad about each theme, and then a short introduction by a range of contributors. Some of them are famous (Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Gilbert, John Green, Oliver Jeffers, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie) – but most of them are unfamiliar to me because they’re American.
Actually, much of The Book of Solitude is, culturally, very American. Do I need to explain myself? A little quote from Jouad might do it:
Journaling through illness gave me a productive way to engage with my new reality. Rather than shutting down or surrendering to hopelessness, I could trace the contours of what I was thinking and feeling and gain a sense of agency over it. And once I figured out how to contend with my circumstances on the page, it became possible to engage with the people around me and to speak the truth of how I really was. In turn, they began to do the same, and together we accessed new depths of intimacy and love. It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.
Yes, there’s a lot of self-help, confessional therapy-speak here, from Jouad and her contributors. Many of them have suffered from addiction, alcoholism, illness; they’ve been in dysfunctional or co-dependent relationships or come from fractured families. Occasionally I found the language so cringe-worthy that I found myself muttering, ‘I’m too old for this shit’ as I settled down with my notebook and pen. But still, mixed in with the heavily introspective, inner-discovery/self-help/personal development stuff, there are some gems. I adored The Badder, the Better by Adrienne Raphel. The task was to simply write a (very) bad poem. Which I did. I wrote several. One of which – yes, I insist – I will share with you.
This
Is the torture of poorly-chosen words
That stick
Like toast crumbs, or those extremely large fish-oil capsules
In my throat.
This
Is the sadness of random, unbeautiful words
That fall
Like lead balloons
On my bare foot
Breaking my little toe.
This
Is the pentacle of my ambitions
Five points
Love, life, art, work and death
A little bit like a compass rose, but with one extra direction
Pointing
Down
To the grave.
I have more poems. I’d love to share them. No? Are you sure?
Your loss!
Ninety days ago, I challenged myself to follow all 100 prompts. And I’ve stuck with it. I’ve only missed one day. In spite of my occasional grumpiness with the prompts, it’s been a good discipline to write around 500 words each day. I’d lost the writing habit, and now I am itching to get back to some ‘real’ writing – which to me, means fiction.
Only ten days to go! I will then follow my very own prompts.