A Writer's Notebook

I'll never forget standing in line at the passport counter at Rockefeller Center in the spring of 1960 with a man in front of me writing notes in his notebook--literal notes, the man, whom I recognized almost immediately was the then rising jazz giant John Coltrane...who spent the entire twenty minutes in the line composing...though try as I might I couldn't recognize a title, and I couldn't read the melodic line...
Keep a notebook, I always urge my writing students. Painters keep a sketchbook, you should keep a notebook.
In it you can jot down snatches of speech you hear, dialogue that comes to mind, images, titles of prospective stories or novels, you can add to your reading list--the writer reads and reads and reads--Walking across a dusty Spanish street the narrator of Don Quixote notices that the wind has blown a scrap of paper onto his boot, and, addicted to prose, he leans down and reads it...
Right now I've opened to the first page of an early notebook of my own, dated July, 1992, Squaw Valley, California,where I acquired the book in order to make notes for a talk I was scheduled to give at the beginning of the conference. Even on the title page I made a note that said "notes for novel--
"Biography of an Unknown Woman", a novel that I would write soon thereafter but put aside without publishing it--on the first page of the notebook I copied Shakespeare's sonnet "My Mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..." and on the second page I began to compose in long-hand that talk I had to give, on what I called "The Elusive Question of Form"...The draft of this talk goes on for twenty hand-written pages...(with a copy of D.H.Lawrence's great lyric poem'
"Piano" copied opposite page three...
And then among other things, about fifteen pages of notes and interviews for a piece on Mexican Jews that I was writing for the San Diego Reader, which I eventually published in my collection of travel pieces "A Trance After Breakfast"...
and then a few scattered notes for that novel "Biography of an Unknown Woman"...and ten pages of hand written text of a talk I was invited to give at the ground-breaking of an assisted living facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland...
and some miscellaneous notes for stories
dated from around 1995-1997...
So, nothing really focussed, except for those two talks, but the rest, the titles of stories or brief notes for stories, serve as reminders of what I had been interested in doing at the time,
though the most interesting to me now on just looking over these old notes, is the
title "The Gihon, Flowing Out of Eden",
a little burst of possibility that came to me when I was visiting writer at the then quite new Vermont Studio Center" in Johnson, Vermont...where I stayed for a week, writing and giving talks...while living in the ground floor of the old barn that still stands as this art center's main building, in a bedroom that extended out over the Gihon River which in melting season flows with a great roar that became part of my night time meditation before sleep...though I don't recall any dreams that came of that proximity to such a noisy stream...
All this in one old notebook...
I have filled a few others since then...