African Journal Club’s first online meet
Last night was our first online gathering, and I loved seeing people arrive from different places, carrying different experiences of journaling, but all willing to make time for their own words.
Thank you for writing, playing, sharing and asking such thoughtful questions. You helped make the evening feel warm, honest and wonderfully human.
WHAT WE DID TOGETHER
We wrote with the “wrong” hand
Using our non-dominant hands, we completed the sentence: The most honest thing I could say to myself right now is…
The awkwardness helped us slow down, loosen perfectionism and see what might emerge when we stopped trying to write something polished.
We made gloriously imperfect art
We drew blind self-portraits without looking at the page… a playful reminder that our journals do not have to hold only the deep, serious or difficult parts of life. They can also be places where we experiment, make a mess and do things simply for fun.
We looked from another angle
We physically turned our pages sideways and wrote about something we wanted to see differently.
Some helpful starting lines were:
If I looked at this differently…
What I have not yet considered is…
From this angle, I can see…
Sometimes we don’t need to solve something immediately. We just need to create a little movement in the way we see it.
We followed food into memory
After I read my piece, I Think I’ll Make Crunchies, we explored how a taste, smell, recipe or kitchen ritual can carry a person, a place or a whole season of life inside it.
Our longer prompt was:
Write about a food that carries a person, a place or a time inside it.
We used sensory details to return to the room, the table, the hands, the voices and then allowed the writing to move beneath the food to discover what the memory was really about.
A PROMPT TO TAKE INTO THE WEEK
If you’d like to keep writing, try this:
What did I once do just for fun that I don’t do anymore?
Then make two lists:
Things I would love to do on my own.
Things I would love to do with friends or family.
Choose one small thing and make a plan to do it.
THANK YOU
Thank you for helping to create a community where journal writers of every level can come to the page, find their own words and know that they belong.
