Diary of a book

10 years of trying to figure it out on paper

Hey y’all,

Earlier this month I talked to Jillian Hess about my four notebooks and shared the tour diary I kept on the road. I also showed a bunch of diary pages in my Don’t Call It Art book talks. I thought it would be cool to share them here, too.

I’ve kept some kind of notebook since I was in middle school, but I started keeping a bonafide diary late in 2016, after I read an abridged version of Thoreau’s journals. My boys were 3 and 1 at the time, and I was already thinking about doing a book about art and kids. I’ve chosen a spread from every year since then to try to show how my diaries helped my book Don’t Call It Art come into being.

2016: My diary has always functioned like a working notebook, with writing, drawings, collages, to-do lists, notes to myself, and clippings. In 2016, I was already playing with the idea that the boys were really the thriving artists in the house… not me! (You can also see some potential titles I was noodling on.)

This page from 2017 already contains the Picasso and Tweedy quotes that begin and end Don’t Call It Art. I used the story about artist Peter Chan’s dad and the recycle bin in my book Keep Going, which was actually me getting sidetracked from the art + kids book, so it contains a lot of art + kids material, like the “Your work is play” and “Make gifts” sections, where I talk about the boys and their drawings.