I have an idea. I’ve talked to my publishing friends about it, but they just kind of smile and shake their heads because they know there’s no way to sell this idea to the people who really make the decisions. I picture paperbacks of the classics with the text on the left side and lined space on the right side. I would like to call them Marginalia Classics so that students can have some space to write down stuff — thoughts, definitions, class notes, emotions, diary entries, whatever — and not have it all be crowded in the margins, or just not have anything written at all, which is so much worse. If we could print the classics in spiral-bound notebooks, even better!!! Why this is not a thing, I’m not sure, but someone figured out to put the translations on the other page, so I feel like someone will make this happen eventually, and I’ll be glad to see it on the bookshelf even if I don’t ever earn any of the sales revenues. It honestly could be its own publishing company, but I just don’t have the time to build this educational empire one public domain book at a time all on my own.
Because, you see, I scribble all over my books — the good ones, anyway — and I think collecting those internal annotations on the page is a crucial part of reading like a writer. With a pen or pencil in my hand, I read more slowly. I mark sentences or phrases that I like. I put little hearts and smiley faces next to things that I love or instances that make me laugh. I will reread a sentence as I underline it and then read it again as I make sure my underlining captures the wobbly essence that shook something inside of me. And, as I look back through a book, years later or even days later, I can only hope I can decipher the thematic elements that changed me. Scribbling is my thinking. I’ve been using the term "active reading,” thought I don’t quite remember where I picked up that term. As I’m circling and connecting anything that’s repeated or unexpected or that speaks some shimmering truth to me, then my brain is making connections that I wouldn’t make otherwise. Like how they say when you walk and talk on the phone at the same time you’re using many different parts of your brain at once, which makes your mental connections stronger — especially anyone who is a kinesthetic learner. As an editor, I realized very early that when a story was being scribbled on — either one of my stories on the desk of my boss or one of my writer’s stories on my desk — then that meant the story was close enough to really get to work on the tiny edits. I had to learn the patterns of my writers, and I had to make sure I paid attention to my own patterns as pointed out to me by my editors. I learned so much about annotations at every stage of the publishing process when I was at the middle-level desk within a small publishing group. That bulky learning curve really taught me to look for more than just the words on the page; I’ve definitely noticed that as I pay more and more attention to my own patterns and the patterns of writers, I find more depth of truth behind writing. Now, as I scribble in a book, I am living inside that text and digging around in it to plant a half-grown idea that will grow or hibernate until I need it. I feel a need to learn more about other people’s experiences and to learn from their emotions and the specific moments that produced those emotions. I want to feel the impact of small decisions and small moments and unkind words. Because that’s a lesson we all need to understand more distinctly.
I feel like we are all struggling a bit right now to make sure that we aren’t all swept up into the stereotypes of politics and history, and it’s very easy to wave away certain ideas without thinking of the individual person behind every single moment of hate and awfulness. I am a huge believer in the idea that everyone’s story matters, and if we can just find a way to get those stories out so that perhaps we can crack through some of the emotional trauma that a large chunk of people don’t even understand is happening, then beautiful words can continue to be our secret weapon. Students need to know this and understand it.
And when I try to help my students understand how to edit their own writing, I make sure they have pencils or colored pens in their hands so we can make a ridiculous mess out of those pages, because my first real lessons in annotations occurred in my first creative writing class in college. So, active reading and I are pretty friendly. I think active reading helps me understand more about not only myself but also the mystic truths that occupy our entire existence, perhaps even the secrets of the universe in the form of a story that hasn't been written yet.
And perhaps it’s the misrepresentation of truth in the past that inspires me to dig deeper than what lies on the surface of many things. And there is so much contradiction in my own life about the contrasts of what people feel and what they think they feel versus how they present what they think they feel.
Single moments are truth. One phrase or sentence can change someone’s mind. So I look for those phrases. I underline them. I analyze them for their secrets to yield some notion of what I can write in the future that will hopefully chip away at someone’s ingrained mindset about what can actually change a life. And I will drag around these books with underlined sentences, images, phrases, and truths in my enormous satchel of poetic truth until I can find somewhere to spread it all out and make some sense of it. Until then, I’ll keep scribbling and reading closely. Analyzing and trying to understand. Collecting. Writing. Contemplating. Hoping.
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