During the pandemic, I started a diary club, the way one might start a radio club if they were a radio enthusiast, inviting all their friends to come over and talk radio lore with them once or twice monthly. Since everything was virtual, this meant gathering online via a shared group Substack to contribute entries, and we used the platform like a semi-public forum, leaving long comment thread chains of feedback, raising academic points. I called it Assignment01. It can be hard to want to post up your deepest, darkest thoughts for group reading. Given this, I found the occasion to write curriculum of authors throughout history who had kept a journaling practice alongside their fiction or nonfiction. It was my hope that my friends—many of whom considered themselves artistic or creative types—would benefit from a class structure not unlike the college English seminar, without the pressurized environment of grades and papers. Instead, we would study the style and techniques each author used, posting our own interpretations of the lesson. The authors we studied ranged from Sei Shonagon to Jack Kerouac, and we began by examining listing as a structure, before diving into spontaneous prose and jazz-inflected rhythms. From Susan Sontag’s tweet-like epigrams to Franz Kafka’s explorations of the abject, Assignment01 was designed to fulfill the role of an introductory creative writing class, while also skipping forward to the fun part. There were no rules for how to write or what subject to take or what the writing was supposed to look like. Rather, we showed up every week to try our hand at imitating the masters, if only so that we could cop their style and apply it to our own creations gleefully, like children studying Georgia O’Keefe’s orchids before attempting their own. If anything, our orchids emerged fully intact, in variegated shapes and colors, resembling their progenitors in form only. The substance—the stuff of life—was completely ours.
The diary club ran through spring thaw before I discontinued it. In allowing for our vulnerability to find a home, in gradually placing our trust in each other for the duration of the club until we had reached a position of comfort, we were able to transcend the limitations of physical distance, using diary-talk to connect from leagues away. The journal had become activated, turning into a nexus for free thought and reflection, as well as the sharing of knowledge and experiences. Like my former college self, pouring my heart out into a document for class that held no meaning but what I imbued it with, I was writing myself into being. This time, however, I was in good company.
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Danielle Shi is a Chinese-born writer living in Berkeley, CA. Her writing can be found at ZYZZYVA Magazine Blog, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, and Common Forms. She is working on her first novel, The Shelter, about homelessness and mental illness in Asian America.