Val Dumond

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Glory Be! Even Old Opal Pickle is Writing Her Life!
by Val Dumond
© Copyright 2009

What! You don't know Opal Pickle? She's the marvelous creation of Brian Crane for his syndicated cartoon series.

In the comic strip that appeared recently, she tells her husband, "I find that I like writing down my thoughts and feelings on paper." She apparently has kept a journal for many years and continues to use it, much as pioneer women did, to fend off the loneliness found in isolated prairie life.

Women for eons have written in journals over their lifetimes to express their feelings, jot down their ideas, record their anxieties, and document events. In point of fact, this disposition may have been the reason they sewed large pockets into their aprons. Many such journals have formed the inspiration for writers to create novels. Authors can read first-hand and transfer the viewpoints - how it feels to live a dreary life of hard work, loss, and desperation, as well as how to discover the joys and merriment that made it all worthwhile.

The need remains for people to write down their lives, a need for the writers as well as for their descendents who will be able to grasp "what it was like back then". Don't you wish your parents and grandparents had kept journals? Don't you wish they had written down the important parts of their lives? Well now, don't cause your grandchildren to ask those same questions.

When America celebrated its bicentennial (in 1975), thousands of writing groups popped up among elderly people with the sole purpose of catching the history in their heads while they could. Out of that effort, much of early American history found expression.

Today women accomplish the same triumphs through websites and blogs, even twitters. Rather than jotting down daily life in an apron notebook, they sit before a computer and peck out their dreams and aspirations, their pain and longing, the daily events that keep them going.

Pull out a pen, pencil, computer keyboard, typewriter (are any still around?), and start your own journal. It doesn't matter what you write down. As with most online blogs, there's a lot of nonsense that gets written down before the hard (good) stuff appears. So it is with journals. The important part is to get started.

You may find, like Opal Pickles, that you'll enjoy the process of talking to paper. You may even find a desire to write your notes into a book. Lots of people have, you know. I don't believe a novelist could exist without a journal. Like Opal, we writers like writing down our thoughts and feelings on paper!

Val's two soon-to-be-published books, The JOY of Grammar and Ahlam, Story of an Iraqi Life, are the results of sitting down and writing out thoughts and feelings.

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