Since writers think with words, there is enormous value to the raw and informal writing we do in journals. The ways we present short pieces of writing have evolved during the digital revolution.

As a teenager, I wrote sporadically in a diary with a tiny lock and key and a cartoon character embossed on its white faux leather cover saying "My Year and How I Shot It.

In college, I started a serious journal in a spiral notebook handwritten in a spontaneous voice that I have kept up to this day. It is about dilemmas and decisions. Events to remember. Meaningful moments. First impressions. Private perceptions. Ideas of all kinds. And for many years it was for my eyes only.

Eight years ago, I ventured into the digital sphere to share some of my personal writing. I regarded it as a place poised somewhat precariously between a private journal and published works. It was when I began a blog called Jottings that was posted from my website.

Three years ago, wanting to reach more readers via a newsletter, I moved Jottings to Mailchimp. It's the way I've been sharing it with all of you, and I've loved getting your responses to my monthly missles.

Now for the surprise mentioned in my last newsletter: I'm now moving Jottings to Substack, a rapidly growing platform that promises to be a place for writers and readers to more easily share their writing.

Along with continuing to write about the writing life on Substack, I'll now be writing about visual artists, too. I've been influenced and inspired by art and artists since childhood. After writing two biographies about artists, I married and have worked alongside another one, painter and printmaker Robert Kipniss, for more than three decades. The painting above is his "Landscape Near Millerton" of 2007.

I'm also excited that Substack will enable me to post longer essays, some written in the past and some that will be new, to share with you.

See you at Substack next month!

With warm regards,
Laurie

As I prepare to give a talk about the genre of memoir in a few weeks, I'm again reflecting on this compelling and challenging kind of writing that so many of us are tempted to undertake, especially as we get older.

After working for twelve years as a journalist and another twelve as a biographer, I began tentatively to write from my own experience as I was nearing the age of fifty, an age when women often become more outspoken about what they know.

Eventually, I developed a desire to read all my journals and make sense of the past, which resulted in Word for Word: A Writer's Life. It was not always easy to look back and remember, but it gave me astonishing moments of clarity about what had really happened in several family relationships.

In the memoir, I felt it was important to tell the truth as I understood it.

"Remembrance, or what is not written down, can be dreamlike--infused by imagination and fallible by definition. While memory and perception can be imperfect, what is remembered is what's most meaningful in the mind of the memoirist and is as important as fabrication in novels and facts in biography," I explained in the introduction to Word for Word.

Realizing that a memoir is an expression of one's own valid point-of-view, which we are legally entitled to publish as long as it isn't libelous, frees us to be honest as we work in this demanding genre as well as to read the memoirs of others with more understanding.

With warm regards,
Laurie

News

Life Stories With Laurie Lisle
Thursday, Nov. 16th, 5 to 6 p.m.
The Norfolk Library
9 Greenwoods Road East
Norfolk, Connecticut 06058

Surprise...
In the next month or so, there's a surprise coming for readers of this newsletter. I'm not going to say more at the moment, but its look and reach are about to change.

Unlike artists who typically render images of their studios with paint, we writers usually use words to describe where we work. Often, as non-visual artists, we write more about the aura of a writing room than what it actually looks like.

Virginia Woolf, who famously said that a woman writer needs a room of her own, stressed the importance of simply having a private place to work. Since words make sounds in our heads, some writers mention the need for a silent space. Other writers like to face a window while some prefer a blank wall.

We all like shelf space for our own published books or wall space for their framed jacket covers to remind us that our fragmentary ideas and rough drafts will also become finished books.

Writers use all kinds of desks. Ralph Waldo Emerson worked at a large round revolving table. I once had an ingenious Scandinavian desk that when closed looked like a wooden box and when opened displayed three sets of shelves, a drawer, and a pull-out typing surface. It fit into a small bedroom.

My first writing room was a tiny maid's room in a New York apartment; it had a big closet, a window, and a door that shut. The one I have now in my house is a large downstairs room with large windows that let in morning light. Besides bookcases, it has my grandmother's chaise longue, and my mother's antique desk.

Some writers opt for sheds or cabins to work in away from where they live. Michael Pollan wrote a book about the tiny hut behind his former Connecticut home titled A Place of My Own. He explained that he helped build it in order to work with his hands instead of with words all the time.

He called it "the house for the self that stood a little apart and at an angle, the self that thought a good place to spend the day was between two walls of books in front of a big window overlooking life. The part of me that was willing to wager something worthwhile could come of being alone in the woods with one's thoughts, in a place of one's own, of one's own making." Well said, Michael.

With Warm Regards,
Laurie

News and Events

Word for Word: A Writer's Life has just received a five-star review from Readers' Favorite, which called it "a poignant and in-depth look at one writer as she matures and defines herself."

Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe has been named the second-best biography of an artist in 2023 by Facts Chronicle, forty-three years after it was first published in 1980.

"Life Stories With Laurie Lisle"
Thursday, Nov. 16th, 5 to 6 p.m.
The Norfolk Library
9 Greenwoods Road East
Norfolk, Connecticut 06058

Artists have long worked in their own studios, and many have portrayed them in paint in ways that give us a glimpse at their attitudes toward their work, and how they go about creating it.

In "The Red Studio", Matisse bathed his workspace in blood-red paint expressing his passionate feelings about what he did there. Likewise, Gaugain's and Bonnard's paintings of their studios are infused with brilliant colors. And Dufy's "The Artist's Studio," with a window view of Paris, is bathed in euphoric sky-blue paint.

Many paintings of studios are also self-portraits, including Anna Waser's ardent "Self-Portrait," painted in 1691 (right), and Grandma Moses's peaceful "In the Studio," a 1944 picture of herself in a beautiful room with vases of flowers, antiques, her works on the walls, and windows letting in bright daylight.

Maddeningly, in his "The Art of Painting" and only known self-portrait, Vermeer depicted himself from the back as he worked from a model, but his focus and intensity are evident.

My husband Robert, an artist, and I debate about who has more fun: artists or writers. I usually admit that an artist moving about a studio while creating shapes and colors probably enjoys him or herself more often than a writer sitting at a computer manipulating black words on a white screen for hours on end.

So what to do if you're a writer? I've discovered that going into my barn room with all my rakes, baskets, stakes, shovels, and other hand tools feels like being in an artist's studio. It's joyous. And even better when I go out to water, weed, and deadhead the flower beds full of beautiful shapes and gorgeous hues.

"This is my color, my form, my texture!" I remarked to an artist friend in my garden one day. "At that moment I understood that gardening is my substitute for making art," I reflected in Four Tenths of an Acre. "And by giving me the easy enjoyment of creativity, it readies me for the writing room."

More About Artists and Their Studios

In 2022 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City devoted an exhibition to Henri Matisse's 1911 painting, "The Red Studio," which is in their collection. It measures 5 feet 11 inches by 7 feet 3 inches.
Click here to see the extensive exhibition catalog.

Women in the Act of Painting is a pictorial blog about the artwork of many women artists at work in their studios both depicted by the artists themselves and by other artists.

"Artists Caught in the Act" by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, Jan. 5, 2007