It’s like doodling. With words.
A simple art form: catch the one moment that made today unlike any other, and hold it in a few honest lines. No rules. No supplies. Just your life—crystallized into joy.
A simple art form: catch the one moment that made today unlike any other, and hold it in a few honest lines. No rules. No supplies. Just your life—crystallized into joy.
Free form poetry.
Not weighed down.
Treasures full of what you know
and what you live—
without the weight of full descriptions,
without things making sense.
It’s like doodling. With words.
Appreciation. Anger. Loss. Beauty.
Emotionally laden experiences,
crystallized into joy.
Our brains group the repeated things together. Drive a road two hundred times and you don’t remember each drive—the brain keeps a single memory for that road. Cooking spaghetti on Tuesday. Making the bed. Filling the water purifier. So much of life is repeated, and little of it feels remarkable.
To expand your sense of time, notice what makes the similar things different. Every day, something makes that day unique. Every day, we’re a little further down the stream of life.
In Poetry Journaling™, we train ourselves to watch for those things. Every day we ask, what makes this day different?—and then we write a short poem about that one moment. The funny line your child said. The near-miss on the drive home. The verse that leapt in your heart.
For years I’d longed for time to journal. Poetry Journaling answered a cry of my heart—a way of keeping a journal both beautiful and manageable. Five minutes, and the memorable details are caught.
That moment would have been irretrievably gone. Instead it comes back into sweet focus, years later.
Each with the art, the craft, and twenty-some prompts and examples to start you writing.
Where it begins—the art, the craft, and prompts with examples to start you writing today.
On Amazon →
Poems from my youngest son’s months seven to nineteen. What I captured delights me still, a decade later.
On Amazon →
A year of poems about five boys—loose teeth, learning to read, moments that would have been gone.
On Amazon →
The original art and craft, plus bonus poems from students—and a cover made from one student’s own lovely notes.
On Amazon →Come, Friend.
Come and dine
on the feast
that is your life.
If you love words—if you want to catch the good moments but never have time to journal—this is for you. A few minutes a day. A paper and pencil, or your phone. If you can speak a language, you can do this.
Get the original →