Please forgive my appropriation of one of Paul Simon’s most famous songs — but I’m feeling a bit giddy! Over the past few days, from my home down here at the bottom of the world in Aotearoa New Zealand, I’ve dispatched 50 hand-crafted notebooks to destinations ranging from Austria to Austin, from Switzerland to Shrewsbury, from India to Aruba, from Brighton in East Sussex to Brighton in Queensland.
Each of these notebooks is unique: no two share the same cover image, and their titles, likewise, are all different — some inviting their owners to work (Research, Meetings, Study Log), others to play (Serendipity, Ground & Sky, Desire Lines). Each individual notebook cover started life as a hand-made cut-paper collage, which I then digitized, printed onto adhesive-backed paper, and stuck onto the front of one of 50 lined booklets.
When these colorful Valentine's Day gifts arrive at their snail-mail destinations, I hope that their recipients will photograph them in their new homes and email me the images: digital boomerangs retracing their analog journey as they wing their way back to me through cyberspace.
To learn more about my lifelong love of notebooks and notebooking, you can read this delightful Substack post by Noted author Jillian Hess or log into your WriteSPACE and WS Studio Video library to watch a bonus video of my hour-long conversation with Jillian about All Things Notebooks.
Stay tuned for a raft of new initiatives involving notebooks, zines, and other colorful tools for bringing more creativity and joy (something we all could use a lot more of right now!) to the world of academic and professional writing.
I’d love to see you there!
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