gathering myself in the Notes app
plus a pay-what-you-wish workshop
Before we dive in, I’d like to invite you to a cozy, pay-what-you-wish workshop, The Art of the Commonplace Book: Gathering Wisdom to Deepen Your Craft. (More info below!)
I’ve been thinking about collections.
Over the weekend, my daughter lost her first tooth. She proudly handed it to me on Saturday morning while I stood in the kitchen chopping carrots for soup. “I know you’ll want this,” she said. And I did. She stuck her tongue through the hole in her mouth where the tooth had been and giggled as I washed the blood from her tiny incisor. Together, we carried it to my desk to place it in what my kids call The Witch’s Collection.
The collection is housed in a Russian lacquer box, hand-painted with a red interior, given to me by my mother’s twin when I was a little girl. I used to keep adolescent love notes inside. Now, it is a collection of other things—lost teeth (now from both of my children), and locks of hair from first cuts, gold curls wrapped in ribbon. There’s also a pebble I picked up and pocketed on the day I knew I was carrying a girl and the dried coil of my son’s umbilical cord.
In my work as a mother and editor and writing coach, I do a lot of holding and collecting for others, gathering things they’ve said to me, sorting images, reflecting shapes and patterns back to the person in front of me. It is joyful work, work I love.
But sometimes, I arrive at the end of a day and wonder where I’ve gone. I feel strewn about in the laundry pile and grocery lists and Zoom screens. Gathering myself again usually involves a bathtub, Epsom salt, and a visit to my Notes app. There, I can see what I was thinking about, fascinated with, and troubled by in the quiet pockets of the day when no one was looking.
I saw a meme a few months ago—a woman unaware of an oncoming bus, preoccupied with drafting an essay in her Notes app. I’ve seen jokes about Notes app poets. I’ve made them about myself.
I love these memes because the acknowledge something I have found to be true. The Notes app has become, for me, a place of private reverie—quotes and poems, overheard dialogue, drafts of important texts, drafts of inconsequential texts, ideas for books and screenplays, scraps of writing that become essays. There are shopping lists and to-do lists, yes. But there are also lists of my obsessions, lists of questions, lists of words I love.
In this way, my Notes app contains secret bits of self, a collection of my creative preoccupations. It is fertile soil, birthing a practice of transcribing fragments into one private volume. In this collecting, I give myself the gift of a repository of ideas.
Gathering these disparate pieces is a creative act in itself and helps center me. I am reminded of what I’ve been thinking about and what I want. I can look to my Notes app, and suddenly I’m closer to my personal obsessions, to the heat that sometimes arrives and makes writing fun.
There is a line from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by
that I think of when I think of my Notes app: “Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”If I find myself standing at the kitchen counter, unsure of where the day has gone (or where I have gone), I can retreat to find myself among those notes. Secret parts of me are there in the private thoughts, secret goals, bad jokes, and seeds of books. There, I treat my curiosities as sacred. I pick up my phone, and I go, like Emily Dickinson, out with lanterns looking for myself.
Are you a secret Notes app poet? Let me know below. I’d love to hear from you.
P.S. In case you missed it, I'm offering a pay-what-you-wish online workshop on keeping a commonplace book. (Don’t worry if you can’t attend live. I’ll send the replay and accompanying workbook to everyone who registers.)
The Art of the Commonplace Book: Gathering Wisdom to Deepen Your Craft
Sunday, December 10 at 2pm ET (7pm UK)
You can register here. I’d love to see you there!
Oh, the notes list of middle-of-the-night book ideas! I wrote one that simply said ‘aliens’ (??)
It sounds like yours might be a little more coherent!
LOVE LOVE LOVED THIS!
My notes app is similar but nothing lives there too long. I treat it like a waiting room, where the thoughts live as they come to me before they get sent to where they need to go. Sometimes it is a Substack volume, sometimes the document that holds all my joke ideas sitting there marinating, sometimes the piece of paper that lists things I might like to draw one day, sometimes a scene in the novel, sometimes scribbled into the front of my recovery book.
When they start to live there too long in my notes with my admin and to-do's I get anxious "Where will this live?" and I force myself to find it a home or forget it and I do not know why I treat them this way, but I do.