Digital Journal

The odyssey of my writing life started with my first journal in elementary school that chronicled the adventures of a two children called the Merry Twins. Their antics were patterned after my favorite series, The Bobbsey Twins. Reflecting on life as a child, I am amused by two facts. At a young age, I was using a mentor text to inform my writing practice and my characters' names took on a positive persona decades before the term positivity became popular. Because I still have not organized all of my professional, pleasure, and picture books, along with other mounds of paper from my pre-retirement days as districtwide literacy director, I have not found my first journal that marked my attempt at authorship. 

Today, if you enter my home office you will find paper scraps of edited poems strewn around my desk, marking the traces of my thinking. No matter how many times I try to organize the space around my computer, I still linger in what I call cluttered chaos. But somehow within the disarray I am able to thrive.

Since I am fascinated with Cloud storage lately and time is a factor when blogging I have turned to a digital journal. I remind myself that it is fine to move from the printed page to the digital space to capture my thoughts. The process is messy and often leads me to throw out my scraps of paper after my thoughts are saved in the cloud. 

DIGITAL NOTEBOOK

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is collecting notebook ideas at The Poem Farm today. When she tweeted me about the idea, I thought of my messy writing process and tried to imagine how I would replicate what I do digitally to bring a poem from its initial seed of an idea to fruition. What you will see below is an example of how I took the lyrics to a song about positivity, crossed out certain words, and then reshaped the lyrics into a poem. Going paperless may be a way to save the earth but it is also a way for me to organize my writing portfolio.

You can see the remainder of the lyrics here.

 Blackout poem created from a song's lyrics

Final Version

Please visit Poetry Friday that is being hosted by Matt Forrest today at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme. Matt has very good news to share with everyone and a poem that provides insight into what springtime looks like in New Hampshire. 

Additional Information regarding digital literacy:

An invitation to share one digital poem/photo combination for the newest online gallery that I am creating, Spring's Symphony, can be accessed here. I hope that Poetry Friday colleagues will be creative in their visual representations of springtime.  

Also, please peruse the Hall of #EduHeroVoices filled with digital images of #edusinspirations. If interested, create one and send it to me for the new site.