Origins

I can’t talk about Parallel Entries without talking about my grandmother. The image above captures one of her many diaries, which I inherited in November of 2016. These notebooks, these tidy leather-bound parcels, these ribbon-tied stacks of looseleaf paper, are time machines. They are solid, irrefutable proof that one Pattie Anne Watkins Simpson was once very much alive, and all the people around her were, too. In conversations with herself, she said to the world that her life mattered. Her diary-writing was her pure attempt to recreate that life for herself, so she could sit back and look at it. And so one day, others could sit back and look at it and say, “Wow! What a fascinating thing is life!”

I became obsessed with my grandmother’s diaries, and then with diaries in general. I’d always enjoyed reading them (Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin), but now I adored them, and began to seek out archived material, discovering the diarists Henry Scadin, Columbus Turner, Cornelia Henry, Samuel Pepys, and Abbie Bright, among others. My collection of published diaries also grew by volumes: Renia Speigel, May Sarton, Theodore Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy and his wife, Sofia. How refreshing it was to read words that, upon being written, weren’t really intended to be read by anyone but the writer! (Except in the case of the Tolstoys, who communicated with each other via their diaries.) I loved the casual brilliance that could happen in a diary or journal entry. The savagery they could contain. The stark simplicity of their non sequiturs, which could by turns be devastating and hilarious. And I loved being privy to strangers’ thoughts and thrills and worries, and to the details of a world long gone.

Endurances

But is any given world ever really gone, once it’s captured in words? In my compulsive diary reading, I have been filled again and again with the feeling that no moment ever ends. My grandmother is still twenty years old, a college sophomore at the University of Rochester, laughing in a boarding house bedroom with her friends. Sylvia Plath is still “whipping white sugar into white egg whites to make meringue.” Henry Scadin is still listening, helpless, to the “little mourning cries” of his dying infant son. Abbie Bright is still crossing the Kansas plains by horse and buggy to start a new life with her brother Philip. Virginia Woolf is still sitting baffled by the prospect of “what goes on behind faces.” Every moment is charged with all the lives that have ever been.

Diaries can evoke this feeling via vivid physical descriptions of people and places, and via the writer’s exploration of his own thoughts and emotions. A few simple details combine with unadorned honesty, and the diary reader is with the writer in a way that cannot be achieved among the flesh-and-blood living. For this reason — being with someone but unable to actually see, hear, or touch that someone — reading diaries can be exquisitely painful.

Semantics

A word on “diaries” versus “journals.” Parallel Entries differentiates between the two, inasmuch as diaries are typically written every day, as a discipline, while the frequency of journal entires is more determined by whim. Diaries include the mundane details of the day and sometimes never explore the writer’s emotional or cognitive realms (although they certainly can), while journals tend to be more personal and revealing of the writer’s inner world. Many diarists aren’t necessarily writers, whereas most journalers genuinely enjoy building sentences and painting word pictures, using their private notebooks to practice their craft. Parallel Entries values diaries and journals equally.

Aspirations

With this website, my goal is to preserve as many diary and journal entries as I can while still having the time to live and write about my own life, in my own hand. I hope that people who have old notebooks lying around will see them, not as embarrassing proof that they were once adrift and ignorant, but as holy artifacts of the human condition. And I hope that those who possess the old notebooks of deceased family members will take the time to read them and feel more connected to the ones who came before, to whom they owe their lives. My hope is that people all over the world will send me entries, and that people all over the world will read them and feel closer to their fellow human beings.

-Sarah Brown Simpson, creator & curator