As I moved through these old creative writing notebooks, I had a feeling that they were going to get less and less interesting as far as the content inside was concerned. The first few years were filled with random assignments, an entire conversation with an old girlfriend, and tons of cringe-worth and vomit-laded poetry (literally). …
Category: Personal Archaeology
Personal Archaeology 33: Adrift and Inane
My creative writing journals have a gap between 1998 and June of 2000. For the life of me, I don't know why I didn't have a notebook full of various ramblings and ideas for fiction, especially since I know I was writing quite a bit. 1998-1999 was my senior year of college, so I was …
Personal Archaeology 32: Creative Writing, The College Years
Sometime during my senior year of high schoo, I decided that I wanted to bea writer. That's com ewith its problems and roadblocks over the years, many of which are self-inflicted, but I was a determined teenager with enough of an ego to believe that my voice was going to be the next big thing. …
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Personal Archaeology 31: Love and Heartbreak in Creative Writing Class
The box had been sitting in my office closet for years. And even years before that, it was in our previous house and apartments. Like a number of other things, it just moved with me and was forgotten. But unlike the piles of senior year mementos and old letters and cards that I found easy …
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Personal Archaeology 30: Notebooks Upon Notebooks Upon Notebooks
If you have been reading the blog long enough, you know that I have done a good amount of journaling in my life. You probably also know--or at least guessed--that I have a writer's notebook that I keep with me or near me. I write a lot of drafts in longhand because it helps me …
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Personal Archaeology 29: Climbing The Tree
50 by 50 Item #4: Trace my family tree on my Italian side further back than my great-grandparents. My research binder, items from my seventh-grade research project, and a death certificate. When I was in the seventh grade, we took time out of our study of the first half of American history to research our …
Personal Archaeology 28: Personalized
As I was cleaning/organizing our office closet the other day (read: moving boxes around and not really doing much else), I found a hockey jersey that was one of my prized possessions when I was a teenager. A lot of my friends and I owned hockey jerseys and some owned what the NHL shop calls …
Personal Archaeology 27: Voices Inside
My "collection" of student newspapers from high school. The first one is from September 1992; the last is from June 1995. In my senior year of high school, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I figured that the easiest way to make that happen was to go into a career in journalism. Why that …
Personal Archaeology 26: Scrapped Books
It started with a class project. The scrapbooks as they originally existed. There were five albums total, all with essays and/or captions. Truthfully, it started with a trip to Europe in the summer of 1994--between my junior and senior years of high school--because if not for that trip, I wouldn't have had any pictures to …
Personal Archaeology 25: Pictures You Never Took of Things That Are No Longer There
It's September 11, which means that my social media feeds have more than one commemorative status. They're not as abundant this year as they were last year, which marked 20 years since the attacks, so I didn't find myself facing as many eagles, flags, and "Never Forget" posts as usual. That's made scrolling a little …
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The Uncollecting 