ELANA FOGEL
When I was in elementary school I wrote a 42-page novel about a talking dog named Cookie. It was written in a small spiral bound journal that had a light brown velvet cover with a picture of a dog etched onto the front. All the best movies were already using the whole talking dog phenomenon -- Air Bud, Good Boy!, Lady and the Tramp -- but I was determined to do something different. Something cooler. I have distinct memories of hiding it in my orange cubby during music class and pulling it out on breaks to add in a page or two. I kept it on my bedside table at all times at home and was so proud of my accomplishment. Writing this book was practically my first step towards following my dream of being a professional dog walker. Probably thought I was going to say author, right? I wish I could say this was the beginning of my illustrious writing career, but it wasn't. I just really loved dogs.
My automatic response to the question of why I write was that it didn’t really apply to me, because I don’t write. I’m not a writer. I opted out of AP English classes to instead take physics and calculus where numbers were the chosen language. I took to music as my form of expression, teaching myself guitar in one summer and blowing all my money on concerts and music festivals. I chronicled my life on social media instead of in a diary and I was under constant scrutiny about my writing from my dad. From 9-5 he edited and critiqued professional authors’ writing as a legal editor and on his off time he edited and critiqued mine.
Over Thanksgiving break I made it my mission to find this book. I had the feeling it would be in the bottom right cube of my bookshelf, probably hidden under one of the Twilight novels that I forced my mom to buy for me but never actually read. Instead I only found a series of four small journals that I had purchased at my middle school book fair. The pages were mostly blank. Next, I looked in the white boxes that sat on the floor next to my desk. There I found composite notebooks filled with journal entries on my vacation to Canada in 4th grade, poems about P.E class, illustrations of all the possible outfits I could wear to the first day of sixth grade and even a record of a dream I had on April 12, 2007 where superman flew through our livingroom window to save us from a house fire. I guess I did more writing than I remembered.
In a very basic sense, every instance of writing is about creating and archiving information. It’s about taking the thoughts in your head and putting them down in writing, as if they don’t count or the experience isn’t real until it can be read aloud. Just the act of being forced to articulate my thoughts in writing makes them more concrete and even the smallest diction choices have the biggest implications. Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep at night my thoughts keep me up, and my first instinct is to reach for my phone which sits right by my pillow to write it out in the notes app. I have the same inclinations that I did when I was younger, I just now use an iPhone instead of a composite notebook.
When I look back at these notes or at the journals I get a glimpse into who I am, or was at the time. What’s conflicting though, is I would say that my writing voice doesn’t necessarily reflect the way I present myself in person. I don’t have a loud personality, am not the first one to raise my hand in class and try to avoid confrontation. But if you give me some time to write down my thoughts I can be as articulate, outspoken, opinionated or imaginative as I want. It’s not that there are two version of me, there is only one, but different parts of me are manifested in different ways. And as I flipped through the endless pages of journal entries that I found on my search for this book I remembered what it was like to have the ability express myself without inhibition through writing.
I think that’s why I put so much emphasis on finding this book. I wanted to hear remember my voice through what I thought was the greatest piece of writing. I did end up finding the book, it was in a white wire basket in the back of my closet, and was just as I remembered.