Dear Diary is a class on the diary as literary form and feminist practice. To keep a diary is to insist your stories are worth telling and you are the one to tell them. Participants will be invited to keep a diary for the duration of the class and will be encouraged to bring in diaries they have previously kept for the purpose of revising sections of them for publication. 

The word “diary” conjures an image of a notebook that can only be opened with a key—as if to say that it is for the writer’s eyes only. So, what happens when writers take this form and bring it into the public realm? Along the way, we’ll explore other questions, like what becomes possible when we introduce diaristic qualities or details into other genres? Why is “confessional writing” sometimes used as a pejorative? Is writing about one’s own life necessarily nonfiction? Why have women, queer, and other minoritized writers often been drawn to the form of the diary? And what does this all have to do with the genres of autofiction and autotheory?

Writers will leave the class with a week of diary writing, exercises for enriching their diary-writing practice, strategies for transforming private thoughts into public texts, and greater conversance with the diary as a literary genre.

We will look at excerpts from Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals; Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals; Joanne Kyger’s Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals, 1960-1964; Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book; and We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.