ever since the fabulous stacey childs of disco underworld fame wrote "writing is the new praying," to me in an email, i began to spread it through the blogosphere like a sort of life philosophy. the phrase, which resonates with so many of us, seemed to be begging to have a project attached to it. and somehow, behind the scenes (in this case, via email) - which is where so much of the good stuff goes on - an idea was born. it was inspired a little bit by the 1000 journals project, somewhat by this, a titch by a project at the brooklyn library, but mostly it was inspired by the notion that writing is the new praying. we got together with B from cuttings on a blog and the soujournal project was born.
the idea is this. we would each start a journal - written/art/whatever - and then exchange them amongst ourselves and continue writing/working in them - sending them off once a month. it is wide open what we want to write and how we want to approach it. eventually, the plan is to open it up and people can "apply" to receive one of the journals and be part of it. in so doing, they'll start a new one and put it into circulation with the group. it was a given that there would be a blog where we would share all of this.
originally, it was to be just the three of us. but the strangest thing happened to me as i was working on mine during the week between christmas and new year's. it kept popping into my head that i should pass mine on to polly. i tried to shake the thought, but it kept coming back, so we decided we had to loop polly into the initial phase of the project. you just can't ignore a feeling that strong, so i'm certain that there's some reason that polly needs to be the one i pass my journal along to. thankfully, when she came to blog camp a couple of weeks ago, she agreed and didn't (at least outwardly) find it too strange that i had this strong feeling about this.
we have all made our initial pages and are at the stage of sending our journals to the others. we have created the soujournal blog and we'll be sharing our pages and our thoughts over there. we have lots of plans for this, but we will reveal those as the journey unfolds. i hope you'll check in and see what we're up to. here's my first page as a teaser. it's also up over on soujournal.
