James: I have a box in our home that is full of ragged notebooks. All told there are over 50 of them. The oldest was purchased for 39 pence at a convenience store in Edinburgh, over 25 years ago, a day or two after my arrival in Scotland to complete the third year of my undergraduate degree as an exchange student at the University of Strathclyde. I know this because the price sticker is still on the back of that unassuming “Stationary Box Note Book”.
I filled those 50 sheets in the course of a few months, and when I ran out of room on the plane ride home for Christmas, I started into a new one with Dali’s portrait of Picasso on the cover. I picked it up in Madrid at his museum in November 1999 on a budget airline trip, sensing the start of a habit forming. Writing in journals that fit easily into my pocket became a regular practice – through my last year at Queen’s, law school at Dalhousie, a Master’s degree at Oxford, and my subsequent wanderings around the world while managing to hold down a full time job.
In one of those travel journals, you can find Mirriam’s phone number and email, which she scribbled down at a cafe in Cape Town the day after we first met in 2018.
I do a significant amount of reading and writing in my job as a lawyer, but one can only be so creative when writing up technical arguments. My interest in creative nonfiction writing stems from those old travel journals. Enrolling in the MFA at King’s back in 2019, I hoped to bring life to some old stories, supplemented with subsequent philosophical reflections and weaved into a broader coherent narrative.
I cannot sing, play an instrument, draw, or paint, but I have always felt a natural kinship with words. I will never cease being amazed at their simple power to communicate thoughts and emotions directly to other human beings across time and space, across distance and generations.
After the birth of our children, the thought of delivering a lasting, polished publication from those old journals became an even grander and important dream. Yet here we are. I’m still finding it very hard to process the reality that a physical book for posterity is off to the press.
