The Benefits of Journaling in Writing a Travel Memoir by Trish Nicholson
Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Trish Nicholson/@TrishaNicholson
“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” ~Gabriel García Márquez
I am very pleased to feature memoir author Trish Nicholson in this guest post about the benefits of journaling in writing a travel memoir. Her memoir, Inside the Crocodile: The Padua New Guinea Journals is currently available on Amazon USA in Kindle Format. It will be available in paperback on October 25. 2015.
Trish and I met on Terry Britton’s blog, The Creative Flux in 2012 and have been following each other on Twitter ever since. It’s amazing to me how we can travel and learn about different parts of the world through our stories. As a social anthropologist and world traveller, Trish has twenty years of experience of international development in the Asian Pacific. The journals she kept became the seeds for her memoir so let’s hear how journaling helped Trish bring people and scenes alive on the pages of her memoir.
Welcome, Trish!
Memoir Author Trish Nicholson
The Benefits of Journaling in Writing a Travel Memoir
How often have we experienced an episode in our lives that has touched us deeply, and thought, ‘I will never forget this’? But over time, the memory becomes like an old sepia photograph, the finer details foxed and faded. It is especially hard, I think, to recall raw emotions.
And because these incidents are often life-changing, when we review them later, we see them from a different perspective. ‘How I remember it’ is the essence of personal memoir. Yet the insights we gain are greatly increased if we can also recapture our original feelings, recorded in a letter, diary or journal.
I experienced this myself. As I lay in a remote health post in Papua New Guinea suffering acute malaria, it became clear that no one expected me to recover. From the brief scrawl I was able to write, I know that my emotions swung erratically between fear, gratitude for a life lived, and numb acceptance brought on by extreme fatigue. Each day I survived was like a new life.
As we live each moment we seem gripped in a static reality, unable to see beyond our current loss, failure, or success. Encased in our ‘present’, it is easy to overlook that life is a flow of moments ever in transition. The subtle transformations that take place within us, and in the ways that others respond to us, are lost if they are not written down at the time.
Keeping a journal can also be therapeutic. My Papua New Guinea journal grew to 600 pages over the 5 years I worked there. Letters to family and friends excluded events which might worry them, but everything went into my notes. I wrote every day, relieving in the process the anger, joy, and sadness that mingled freely in those challenging days.
But the greatest value of a journal emerged when I came to write Inside the Crocodile. Memoir reveals experience through creative writing that draws the reader into the author’s life. The role of a well-kept journal in achieving this is to provide the fine details that stimulate readers’ senses and engage their emotions. Such details can also be used to generate a sense of time and place, for example, by indicating external events, or even what songs were popular, all of which add to a work’s authenticity.
For travel memoir, a journal is essential to grasp the essence of places, people and events among the multitude of sensations we receive.
As illustration, I share below a few brief extracts from Inside the Crocodile:
After three months on leave, during which I had felt detached from my old life but unsettled in my new one, I returned with some uncertainty to the chaos of Papua New Guinea. But when I woke on that first morning back, all doubts had gone.
A hornbill plodding on the roof woke me. The sun was up; warm, moist air wafting in between the open louvres smelled of green, of prolific vegetation teeming with life, and my skin was slick with sweat. With a sleepy smile that became a long yawn, I recognized the familiar sounds, scents and sensations of home in Vanimo.
I had recorded enough dialogue in the journal that I could let readers hear the voices of people I interacted with, such as the friend in Vanimo who struggled bravely to survive marriage with a violent husband.
I received a message that she was in the hospital and went down to see her. The maternity ward was basic, providing only metal bedsteads with bare boards; patients brought their own bedding which was probably more hygienic anyway.
Chrissie had lost her baby, born premature and tiny.
“Bebi i liklik tumas.” She reached for my hand and held up the little finger. “Lek bilong em olsem pinga bilong yu.”
“Sori tumas, Chrissie. Yu stap long haus sik?”
“Nogat. Mi orait,” and she asked me to take her home.
And amusing little details in description helped me to relive a scene as well as depict character. After a long trek I arrived, unexpected, at an isolated mission station, and met the only inhabitant:
Outside the mission house, his cropped white hair vivid against tanned skin, a short, elderly man stood watching my approach through startlingly blue eyes. Despite his crumpled shirt and obviously home-made, flared canvas trousers – purple cloth sewn with long stitches in thick white thread – there was something venerable about him, an aura of other-worldliness.
He turned out to be a Polish priest who had been in Papua New Guinea for over forty years and lived on green mangoes and dried coconut – monsoon rains stranded me there for a week, much to his consternation and my hunger.
I had even made notes on Frisbee – the dog I inherited – and that enabled me to focus on her actions and avoid the trap of imposing human emotions on her. After being away for a couple of months, I was unsure whether she would remember me:
As I got close to the truck, she saw me, her paws up at the partly opened window, scratching at the glass, and when I opened the door she tumbled out in a tizzy of wriggles and wags, weaving round my legs, sniffing and licking my hands. Riding back to Jim’s for lunch, she sat between my feet in the front, gazing up at me, her tongue lolling with the heat, dripping saliva onto my toes.
It is never too late to begin a journal. For example, if you have already begun your memoir, you could record your feelings each day as you research and relive episodes of your life. Such reflections on the process could yield a fascinating prologue or epilogue to your manuscript.
“We soar above our memories to gain new perspectives.”
Book Synopsis:
In the wilds of the most diverse nation on earth, while she copes with crocodiles under the blackboard and sorcery in the office, Trish Nicholson survives near-fatal malaria and mollifies irascible politicians and an ever-changing roster of bosses – realities of life for a development worker. With a background in anthropology and a successful management career in Europe, five years on a development project in the remote West Sepik province of Papua New Guinea more than fulfils Trish Nicholson’s desire for a challenge. In extreme tropical conditions, with few only sometimes-passable roads, travel is by a balus – an alarmingly tiny plane, landing on airstrips cut with grass knives and squeezed between mountains. Students build their own schools, babies’ weights are recorded in rice bags and women walk for days, carrying their produce to market. Physically tested by dense jungle and swaying vine bridges, Trish’s patience is stretched by nothing ever being what it seems and with ‘yes’ usually meaning ‘no’. Assignments in isolated outstations provide surreal moments, like the 80-year-old missionary in long friar’s robes revealing natty turquoise shorts as he tears away on an ancient motorbike. Adventures on nearby Pacific islands relieve the intensity of life in a close-knit community of nationals and a cosmopolitan mix of expat ‘characters’. Local women offer friendship, but their stories are often heart-breaking. More chaos arrives with Frisbee, the dog she inherits when the project manager leaves, along with other project expats. Tensions increase between local factions supporting the project and those who feel threatened by it – and stuck in the middle is Trish. Her emotionally engaging memoir Inside the Crocodile is full of humour, adventure, iron determination and…Frisbee the dog. It is beautifully illustrated with colour photos of Trish’s time there.
Author Bio:
Dr Trish Nicholson is a writer and social anthropologist, and a former columnist and feature writer for national media. After an early career in regional government in the UK and Europe, she worked for twenty years in development aid in the Asia Pacific, including five years in the remote West Sepik province, Papua New Guinea, where she was also Honorary Consul for the British High Commission. A shifting lifestyle she survived with a sense of humour. Her other published works include books of popular science, travel, management, and writing skills. She lives in New Zealand.
http://www.trishnicholsonswordsinthetreehouse.com
Twitter @TrishaNicholson
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Thank you Trish for giving us a glimpse into your story and for sharing the importance of journaling in recalling vivid details. You make us feel like we are right there with you and for most of us, that means on the other side of the world.
How about you? Does journaling help you in writing your stories?
We’d love to hear from you. Please leave your comments below~
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