Journal writing

First off, "Journal Writing" is the name of a poem I wrote; you can read it on the online magazine Page & Spine.

The approach to journal writing it describes is the one I use myself, except with fewer pretenses of wringing liquid out of my heart or whatever. In a class I took during postgrad, I noticed something of my own journal writing in the approach to historiography known as the "history of mentalities." This sort of history isn't particularly concerned with looking at past events, considering events to be mere moments; it's more revealing to look at past ways of thinking, which lasted longer and would've surrounded the events.

A couple months before learning that, it was an interest in my own mentalities that led me to start a journal. I saw how my feelings about things in my life were changing with some rapidity and decided to record them. I occasionally write about events, but even then, I focus on how the event has embodied or affected my mentalities.

Combined with an evening walk near Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, particularly to this spot you see to the left with its tiny, shallow pool, the poem acquired the mountainous landscape imagery that it did.