Welcoming the Unexpected

Journal Collage Cover

By Shelley Burbank

One of the best parts of coming to the last page of a journal is starting the first page of a new one. No, it’s what comes before that. It’s picking out a new journal with a beautiful cover or, in my case, creating a collage cover that will inspire me over the course of filling the pages. I use no set dates. I start when I start. I write when I feel like it. I stop when I get to the last page, even if it’s a random day in February. 

Soft, leather books with wraparound ties. Pretty floral designs with gold-embossed letters spelling “Journal” and/or the year. Plain, black moleskine notebooks. Marble or other decorated composition books. I’ve tried all of these, but my preference now is to buy a spiral bound, college-ruled notebook with cardboard covers and make my own design from magazine cutouts, bits of pretty papers (even cocktail napkins), ephemera like ticket stubs or postcards, and even ribbons or buttons.  

This year I completed my last journal not long after Christmas. This wasn’t planned, but that meant I could create a new journal right at the new year, coinciding not only with my 57th birthday but also with a huge, life-changing move halfway around the world to Guam, a tiny speck in the Pacific barely 36 miles long and 12 miles wide.  

I’d been approaching this big move with a great deal of trepidation. Not only that, I’d become disenchanted with the whole publishing/marketing/PR side of my writing life, especially the social media aspect, at the same time. Here I was with some book projects started and stalled, another project planned, and feeling meh about the entire industry and unsure how to attract new readers and keep my writing career moving forward. A downward spiral seemed imminent. 

But I had a journal collage to create. 

Feeling cranky and uninspired, I gathered some magazines around me, grabbed my scissors and a gluestick, and tried to relax so that my subconscious could do its work.

At first, I couldn’t find anything I wanted to use for my collage. I cut out a few things, pushed them around into different configurations, testing the design. Nothing felt right, but then an advertisement with a clear blue-green background and butterflies caught my attention. I cut out a big chunk and laid it on the journal cover as a potential background layer. My mood lifted. That color felt like tropical beaches, far-off coastal skies, and luxury. It felt like something I could work with. Something appropriate to my adventures ahead.

Once I had the color, more images popped out for me. A dragonfly in golden brown hues. A ripped bit of cocktail napkin from a pack my friend gifted to me last summer. A turtle. A caftan. Sunglasses. 

Aha! My inner self knew I needed a different, positive approach to this move. Lean into it, my muse whispered. I cut out a starfish and a postcard and, most important, I spotted a writing prompt in Magnolia magazine reading: How can you approach each day open to the unexpected?

THIS, I thought, heart lifting. This is the attitude I needed moving forward. Openess to the new, the strange, the unfamiliar, the unexpected. 

Sure enough, not long after completing my journal collage and writing a few entries, a new story idea popped into my head, and I quickly wrote in the journal as the narrative formed. A character swam up from the depths. Who was she? What was her story? Why does she decide to go to . . . Guam?  

Everyone who said to me, “Well, this adventure should inspire some new writing,” had been right! 

I now plan on writing a series of stories set in Guam featuring my new character, a woman my age but not my circumstances (although she is a writer!) who decides to sell her home and move to that tiny speck in the Pacific. She (I don’t know her name yet. Katrina? Lindsay? Lynnie? Brooke? Marley? Tatum?) found a mysterious postcard from Guam addressed to her now-deceased mother, sent in 1973 from a man my character’s never heard of. Part of her journey will be discovering what this man mean to her mom, but really the postcard just gave her an idea of where to go when she needs a new start. 

Using long short stories, or novellas, I’ll be able to share my Guam experiences with my friends, family, and readers. How and where I’ll share them remains to be figured out, but I’m happy to be feeling creative again. In the end, I want my life to be about creativity and books and writing. 

Living your own “good life” is an art. I encourage you, my friends and readers, to be creative in your actual daily living. Find the things that make you happy and incorporate them into your life as much as possible. Be aware of the passing of your days. Make each day meaningful in little ways with your own rituals. Be deliberate in your choice of meals, music, books, collections, furnishings, and daily tasks.

How can YOU welcome the unexpected as we head into 2025?

Hitting the road

Barbara here. One of the great joys of being a writer is getting the chance to travel, whether it's into the head of a person very different from yourself or to a physical place you've always wanted to see. We writers can go anywhere, at least in our heads.

Each one of my Amanda Doucette novels is set in a different iconic location in Canada. I did this quite deliberately, because Canada is an extraordinarily varied country spanning seasides, forests, deserts, mountains, and northern tundra as well as charming villages and dynamic cities. I wanted the chance to visit it all, as well as the chance to share my discoveries with others. Canada is a modest place, inclined to say sorry and not at all inclined to toot its own horn. We have cultural, historical, and geographical treasures that we are too modest to brag about.

So the Amanda Doucette series began in Newfoundland, continued on in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec and to Georgian Bay in Ontario, an unsung paradise of thirty thousand islands in a bay big enough, but for a technicality, to qualify as the sixth Great Lake. During the writing of each book, I read books on history, culture and current events, consulted sources, and spent time visiting the location and walking in Amanda's shoes. I wanted readers to feel as if they were there, and I wanted each nuance to be as vivid as possible. The bonus – each book has enriched my understanding and love of the places.

Amanda is now heading west into the Alberta badlands for book #4, and I am having a wonderful time learning about Alberta. I am currently working my way through 13 books on the prairie province's history, politics, and people. Going to school in Montreal during the fifties and sixties, I learned almost nothing about the settling of the west, and everything I learned about the history of Quebec and the Atlantic provinces was heavily Anglo- and Euro-Centric. Looking at all this information through twenty-first century eyes, as well as the wisdom of over half a century of my own lived history, has been a gift that goes far beyond the writing of my next crime novel. It enriches me as a person and a citizen, and helps me interpret events in the world. We should never stop learning.

I still have not yet set pen to paper on this book. Nor do I actually know what it's going to be about, but all my stories are rooted in place and history, and this research, along with discussions with people who live there, will eventually yield up the seeds of a dramatic story. My next step will be to travel there in person, so that I can visit the places, fill all my senses, and see for myself the nuances that make the badlands unique. Maybe even hear the stories that the badlands themselves tell. I am planning this research trip for September– two weeks in a rental car visiting Dinosaur Provincial Park, the Royal Tyrell dinosaur museum, horseback trail riding, Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, and reconnecting with my cousins in Lethbridge and my writer friends in Calgary.

By the time I finish the Amanda Doucette series, I hope to have visited most corners of Canada and stood in the shoes of people from all different places and walks of life. If through those journeys I can share a bit of what I've learned with readers, I will be delighted. Imagination and empathy are two priceless qualities that writers bring to a world much in need of both. And travelling opens the way to both.