On my nightstand:
For years now, I have been keeping small, special notebooks
into which I write passages that strike me hard
as I read the work of others …
I hadn’t known, when I started this practice,
that these are sometimes called commonplace books.
—Dani Shapiro, Hourglass
I wish you could have seen my eyes widen in surprise when I read the passage above. I’ve been filling a commonplace book for decades without knowing it had that lovely name or, more to the point, any name at all! Like Dani, I hadn’t known! Oh, oh, oh!
I’ve tutored students who’ve been asked to create a commonplace book for their humanities class at year’s end, and I knew they were copying out favorite passages and yet, even so, until I read Dani’s words above, I never made the connection that my practice of copying out passages was the same thing my tutees were being asked to create: a commonplace book!
Perhaps I missed the cues because I’ve never actually made entries in a book of any sort. For years I copied out words onto whatever scrap of paper I had at hand—an envelope, the back of a to-do list, an appointment reminder card. I don’t even remember where I then kept them, but I must have kept them somewhere accessible because I later entered, categorized, indexed, and continued to add to the collection—my commonplace book!—on my computer.
On my easel:
2 x 6″; acrylic, ink, and collage on paper canvas
abstract bookmark
2024
*title extracted from a passage in my commonplace book : )
dottyseiter: now playing 
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