Mourning Pages 101: Get Yourself a Notebook
This is where we begin by building a home for the Mourning Pages to live.
This segment of Mourning Pages focuses on extended writing prompts and conversations, including my own (often messy) results. Please consider subscribing for paid content to help feed the writing.
Our Mourning Pages are (or will be) an accumulation of writing, collaging, drawing, and whatever else comes out during the process. Unlike the “Morning Pages” described in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I won’t prescribe writing of a certain length or mandate physical paper and pen. I am an early bird, but you don’t have to be.
You will need a place to store all your ideas and creative output, though. Get yourself a notebook or create a file or folder on your device. Either works.
This is where we begin. This is Step 1.
I have many notebooks for different purposes. And yes, I am aware of my notebook problem.
There are four notebooks in my arm’s reach as I edit this post. Spoiler alert: there are even more upstairs. I am not a notebook snob. Give me old school marbled composition books, spiral notebooks in whatever color. Lines or no lines. I love them all.
(Anyone who has a favorite brand of notebook they want to recommend can link in the Comments section. Please and thank you.)
Once you have a cozy little home for your Mourning Pages to live, I recommend dedicating that space to a guardian spirit. This may sound a bit fluffy and sentimental, but don’t bail on me yet.
The idea of a guardian spirit at the beginning of a notebook comes from artist/writer/creator Austin Kleon.
Kleon says, “I like the idea of starting new notebooks by stationing guardian spirits inside the front cover, to watch over things.” His guardian spirits range from Emily Dickinson and Salt-N- Pepa to fictional movie characters.
A guardian spirit to look over our Mourning Pages sounds about right to me.
The guardian spirit of my new notebook is Molly Brodak, who would have absolutely hated this idea, I’m sure. Still, she is often on my mind, and I keep her poem, “In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens” on the cork board above my working space.
I printed a photo of her (for the inside front cover) and a photo of her beautiful swan cake (for the inside back cover), then cut apart a few lines of the same poem.
I’m a messy worker and I generally don’t care about crisp, precise lines, as you can see in the images above. Permission to not always be a perfectionist is a gift I like to give myself from time to time.
This same practice of guardian spirits could easily work for a digital notebook or folder, as well. There’s no one right way to set up your Mourning Pages. Think about the muses or inspirations of what you’ve been writing lately. Give it some consideration, but don’t overthink it.
Once you have your notebook and your Guardian Spirit, I hope you will feel free to share. Pop into the comments to tell us more about what you’re working on.
And also, I’ve heard there are writers who skip the first page or pages of their notebooks. Is this a thing? A superstition? I’m going to look into it and report back.
Thanks for hanging out beside me as I explore this new journey. It is so much easier knowing that I’m not the only one out there with grief and loss on the brain.
If you want to know more about Molly Brodak, her life and work, you can read her memoir Bandit or see her on Great American Baking Show (the few episodes that are available to stream online). She died on March 8, 2020.