Journals are one of the most helpful tools a writer can have, and yet many writers feel that journals are too tedious, difficult, or dangerous to employ. A journal can help you make sense of the formless stuff of life. It can be a low-stakes place to play with ideas, a format for experimenting with voice, a way to clear out the mind (a la Julia Cameron’s famous “morning pages”). The latter is maybe the most important — for me, anyway, if there’s something that’s happened to me that I want to write about, first I have to journal about it in the most unfiltered, unedited, artless, raw way possible, before I can even get close to making something like art from it.

I feel so strongly about journaling, in fact, that I’ve started offering this journaling workshop, for people looking to start (or restart) their notebook-keeping practice. Each session, I’ll share something from a published journal by way of an optional prompt. Sometimes we’re looking at something with visual components, like drawings or collages. Then we’ll write together. That’s it. It’s a journal you’re working on, no need to share out with the group. But at the end of the hour we have some space for discussing: what was this experience like? What came up?

This is a casual, generative writing space for writers of all genres and levels.

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, The Resort LIC, and the Yale Writers' Workshop. Amy's work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children. You can find her at amyshearnwrites.com or @amyshearn.

Journaling Toward Clarity with Amy Shearn