“Phyllis Theroux is a rare writer’s writer, a title reserved for those special people who are revered by their peers.   She’s an essayist, author , teacher, and natural story-teller who goes right to the heart of everything she writes.  Her new book, The Journal Keeper, is a personal memoir penned during six years of her life.  She takes on all of life’s ups and downs in such a relatable and introspective way that the book becomes your friend. 

I was fortunate enough to meet Phyllis at Book Passage, a bookstore in Marin County, California.  She was speaking to a group about the wonder of the journal–”a flashlight” as she called it. 

I’m a big believer in journals and found Phyllis’ so engaging that I had to track her down to learn more about her genius for words and so many other things.  She answered the phone at her “Writer’s Cottage” in Ashland, Virginia.”

Read the full interview on The Women’s Eye.

June 2-5, 2011

The Art of Journal Keeping: Creating Your Own Inspiration, One Day at a Time
Santa Sabina Center

Join writer Phyllis Theroux, whose recent memoir illustrates how a well-kept journal can be a powerful source of illumination for yourself and others.

Many people begin journaling but find it difficult to sustain. Phyllis offers a perspective to the art of journal keeping that is as easy as reaching up and replacing the bulb in the lamp above one’s head. Over the days we are together, she will help us explore that art, share our daily reflections, and come closer to seeing how our personal journal can be both a lantern and a legacy.

Phyllis Theroux is the author of seven books, including The Journal Keeper, Giovanni’s Light, The Book of Eulogies and California and Other States of Grace. She is the founder of Nightwriters  and The Writer’s Well. 
Fee: $400
For more information, please visit the Santa Sabina Center website.

I ran across this book in an unusual way. Near the end of a packed flight to Atlanta, my seatmate, a lovely woman in her 60s, and I got to talking about newspapers (my living) and books (hers). As we deplaned, I expressed regret that we hadn’t started chatting earlier. As if to provide her half of that lost conversation, she pulled a book — her brand new book — out of her purse and pressed it on me as a gift.

She was Phyllis Theroux, a writer and teacher from Ashland, Va., and the book was “The Journal Keeper: A Memoir” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 281 pages, $24). When I finished reading it, I had marked more than 20 passages that I wanted to return to, or even copy out into my own journal.

To create this book, Theroux went back through several years’ worth of her journals, starting in 2001, and excerpted her best thoughts and stories, the epiphanies from what her revered Emerson would approvingly call a well-examined life. By themselves, those impressions are bookmark-worthy; together, they tell the story of an interesting woman of a certain age — hearing less and less from grown children who live far away, caring for aged parents (Theroux’s mother, who lived with her during her final years, is a captivating character) and coming into a kind of early elderdom where, despite the inevitability of aging, almost anything is possible if you’re blessed with reasonably good health — peace, travel, the best friendships, even romantic love.

Theroux, who in a wise afterword cautions would-be journal writers that being honest does not mean telling everything about everybody — is not one for platitudes. She writes frankly of her doubts, fears, vanities, of her “failure to be consistently generous.” Occasionally she has footnoted the excerpts with wry, abashed explanations written later.

Veteran journal keeper and author Phyllis Theroux offers these tips for getting the most from your own journal writing.

Don’t use your journal as a “garbage can” for bad news and everything that goes wrong. Think of it as more of a “light box” or “cheering section.”

Use your journal as a tool for solving or understanding dilemmas in your life.

Write down whatever glimpses of truth you glean while sitting quietly or walking while you think.

Let your journal be a treasure chest where you keep small pieces of beauty. Look for examples in nature, and be particularly observant so you can record them.

Store anecdotes, phrases and stories that you’d like to remember, such as funny or touching things your children say while they are young. These will bring you joy years later.

Protect your loved ones by being thoughtful about what you put in writing. If someone you loved came across your journal years later, you would not want to hurt them.

Consider buying cheap, durable journals rather than fussy, expensive ones. This way you won’t worry if you spill coffee or a glass of wine, or decide to take your journal to the beach and get it a little sandy.

Remember to date your journals.

For days when you can’t think of what to write, you might want to keep nearby a few books that provide you with inspiration. Some possibilities include poetry, other writers’ journals or essays.

Theroux’s most important rule: “Lean toward the light.”

Phyllis Theroux’s new work, “The Journal Keeper, A Memoir,” is her seventh book, and her most personal, unveiling of the life she has led for the past 71 yearsHer tales of raising and then letting go of three children as they left the nest, her struggles caring for her mother during the last three years of life, the financial strain of trying to make a living as a writer and a late-life marriage draw readers into the rich, often heart-wrenching milestones that many of us have faced or might.

In anticipation of her visit to the Bay Area for a Tuesday talk and reading at Kepler’s in Menlo Park and a Wednesday reading at Books Inc. in Burlingame, Theroux discusses by phone from her home in Ashland, Va., how she came to write the book, and what she learned along the way.

Q Growing up, did you know you wanted to be a writer?

A If you are born in San Francisco, raised in Marin and then migrate to Carmel, you are going to have a rosy view of life. I wanted to be a child saint. That was my first choice. Then a saintly child movie star. It never really occurred to me that I had to be anything. Making a living was what one’s husband would do.

When I was about 35, I got out of bed one night because I was very unhappy with my life. I couldn’t make it work. I didn’t have a happy husband, and I was doing all the things I thought you were supposed to do to have a happy life. I wrote this piece called, “Getting the Hang of It.” I literally put a note in a bottle and sent it to New York.

Q Did you have a plan for your life?

A No plan. I do not come from a family that makes plans. I come from a family that says, “Let’s wait around and see what the day brings forth.” I have pretty much backed into a lot of things. I haven’t waited for life to happen, but I am unlike a lot of women with a plan.

Q Why do you think keeping a journal is so important?

A I think it is invaluable to keep a journal. It is to keep company with the best part of yourself on a daily basis, and I think that is an important thing. You don’t lose track of your life if you do that. I know women who call their best friend every morning and check in. In a way, that is what you are doing with your journal. It is not just about you; I use it as a light box to save the things I think are the most beautiful, poignant or funny. It all qualifies as life. You wake up in the morning in the dark, and you have to create your own life. Keeping a journal is a great way to do it.

Q Has journal keeping helped you get through hard times?

A It is a powerful tool to use in a crisis to clarify thinking. Or to vent. Then you can go back and read it, and you have solved the problem. Sometimes, if it is sad, you think, I don’t want to keep this around. Well, don’t keep a journal that way. The darkness is always with you. You don’t need to immortalize it.

If you want to write about your problems, it is like the little knots in your life, and you are trying to untie them. Write about your pain or problems as a standpoint of seeking a solution. You will find you will love rereading it later.

Q Don’t you ever worry about someone finding a private entry and reading it?

A I would never write anything down if I am upset, say, with one of my children. I will allude to it in an oblique way. The journal is a way for me to let off steam, but it could be taken very hard if they found it after I could not explain it — I mean, after I am dead.

You take normal precautions. I would not write about the affair I was having with my best friend’s husband! (Laughs.)

Q Why did you decide to write “The Journal Keeper,” and who do you think will enjoy reading it?

A Partly I published this book because other people with whom I’d shared portions of my journals over the past, and had been nourished by it, made me want to publish. I also knew there were universal observations that would be of use or valuable to a reader.

I guess my audience is women. I’m a woman, and I am writing about that experience. I certainly have had men read the book and love it, but women in middle age and older are the most natural audience, because I am dealing with things women who are thoughtful would agree with.

Q You write a lot about struggles with aging, your own and your mother’s. Is there anything you think is good about getting older?

A The main thing I like about aging is it is the best part of the book (of life). It is like you’ve been reading “Middlemarch,” because every life is a long novel if you are lucky. Now I am in the last quarter, and I am finding out how it turns out — not just for me, but for everyone I knew and loved. It is fascinating stuff. You have a long lens, and you have perspective as you age. You don’t want to put the book down.

Q What did you learn about yourself and life by caring for your mother in her final years?

A I learned mothering. I didn’t know I even needed it. She mothered me. It’s not as if I woke up every morning thinking I needed mothering. I didn’t. But I remember the odd feeling of driving her somewhere because she couldn’t see very well. She said, “If I gave you your brush, would you comb your hair?” She reached into her purse and handed me a brush. Then she said, “Did you get the back?” This woman is 84, and I am 62. I thought, “This is ridiculous.” But it gave me such a good feeling. To be with your mother at that age was such a happy thing for both of us.

Q What advice would you give to younger women that you wish someone had given to you?

A Get an accountant. I came from a family that had no money sense. I haven’t made a lot, but I haven’t been prudent. I still have a teenager’s mind: There has to be more there. There always has been. As a writer, you can’t think about how much money you are going to be making. Then when the check comes in you have to think, “Oh, this is nice.”

Q With your mother gone, do you worry much about mortality?

A I believe in life after death. It may be the leavings of a very Catholic upbringing that was pushed aside. We’ll find out, won’t we? If it is not meant to be that we live on, then we have to be fine with that, too.

One of the reasons why people resist keeping a journal is because they assume it will quickly become a garbage can for all of the spoiled plans, bad news and other dark developments in their life. The journal I keep is the spiritual equivalent of a personal light box or cheering section which I create as I go along. This isn’t to say that the pages are without pain or perplexity. The dilemmas in my life were one of the main reasons I began to keep a journal in the first place. But I use it as a tool for solving or understanding them. Whatever insights or glimpses of the truth I glean when sitting quietly in a wing chair – thinking, reading, or simply gazing out the window at a neighbor walking her dog – is what I write down.

There are other, less self-involved motives for keeping a journal. Knowing I have a place to save them keeps me on the lookout for beauty on display, even in a checkout line in Safeway, or on the other side of a grimy train window in the rain. These are my butterflies, halted mid-flight on the page. Then, there is the “Journal As Ragbag” use, where I store stories, anecdotes or phrases that please my mind and ear. When my children were small, they would often say something so heart-breakingly astute or funny that I rushed to preserve it – sometimes for tomorrow’s essay, which used to drive my children crazy. “Nobody else I know has this problem” wailed my daughter, Eliza after she found herself trapped in a car full of other Brownies listening to her mother read an essay on the radio – about embarrassing her children!

Should you censor what you say? I think that should go without saying, unless your intention is to finger the person you think wants to murder you, or make someone who hurt your feelings hurt, too if they read what you say. Children, of any age, should be protected. Messages from the grave can too easily be misconstrued or considered the final verdict on their worth, when all you’re doing is blowing off steam.

The type of journal you use is important. My advice is don’t get anything too fancy. The cover might intimidate you, the paper seem to expensive to “ruin” with your humble observations. For the past twenty years I have used the same 5 x 7 black cardboard journals with red binding that come from the Pearl River Market in Greenwich Village, New York. They are cheap, durable and fit easily into my purse when traveling. To date I have filled up at least three dozen, all neatly labeled with a pair of dates on their spines. It is the only organized thing about me.

Keeping a journal for posterity should be a minor, even inconsequential reason. The one place you want to be unselfconscious is on the pages of your private diary. That being said, there is a public dimension to writing – even if it is a laundry list – and I am not a fan of those who urge you to dump whatever comes to mind upon the page. No, no, no. Your journal should be the one wise friend who helps you create your own enlightenment. Chose what you think has some merit or lasting value, so that when you re-read your journal in years to come it continues to nourish you.

Some days I can think of nothing worth writing down. Fortunately, I am not alone. By my chair, I keep a small, revolving collection of essays, spiritual autobiographies, poetry, other writers’ journals to inspire me. When I’m out of fuel, they pull me out of the creek and into a broader, deeper river. I have attached my own personal list of light givers, which may illuminate you – or not. We are different people, on the lookout for different things. But if f you want your journal to have any lasting value, for yourself or others , I can only think of one rule to follow: lean toward the light.

Mentally, I took a ball of string and wound it around everybody there, from the little boy playing cards on his suit-case, to the couple kissing in the corner, to the rabbi leaning against the wall reading. By the end I had created a cat’s cradle of connections between everybody in Penn Station. When one person moved, everybody else moved, too, in a kind of string dance. I think, on another level, that is really what happens. We influence each other, but so subtly that we cannot trace it back.

Now back in Ashland, I am exactly where I would want to be if I weren’t already here. Last night, reading Wendell Berry’s poems, I could feel an old theme—the inseparability and connectedness of everything—reemerge. Everything— from the books to the sofa to the game of Chinese checkers on the table—is intimately related, like my past, which echoes in my head as I walk down old streets and remember being young with a mop of curly hair, in a blue coat, searching through the racks for my future and a dress to wear in it.

Reading a great poet acts like a rope that pulls me out of the weed-choked creek into the broader river. Suddenly I feel cold water around me. I am in the depths again.

This may be as good a place as any to say a few words about my attitude toward money, a topic that surfaces frequently in my jour­nal, usually when I’m about to run out of it. As a freelance writer it helps to be independently wealthy, married to someone who has a regular job, or—failing that—have a regular job yourself. None of this has ever been true of me, at least for very long, and when I was getting divorced my lawyer kept asking me about assets I surely must have forgotten when I was making up the list. “No,” I said, gesturing to my blue-jean skirt and thrift-shop sweater, “what you see is what you get.” My lawyer, who was sitting beneath a plaque that read ASSUME NOTHING, smiled. “In my experience, women who look like you are often worth millions.” But the facts are that while I have lived around wealthy people all my life, my own family consistently bought high and sold low until we had nothing but a bunch of scuffed-up antiques and some scrapbooks full of photo­graphs of houses that were no longer ours.

On the subject of money, here’s what I have going against me: an inability to sustain my interest in it for very long, a deep-seated belief that there is nothing I can do to better my economic position, and a relationship with my bank account that is akin to the relationship I have with my refrigerator. I rarely know what is in either one.

Here is what I have going for me: a belief that if I am doing my part to use my talents and lead a meaningful life the universe will play ball with me, and if it doesn’t it’s not my fault; a mother who once said, “If you take a step toward life, life will support you,” which I have found to be true; and the ability to take a piece of chalk and draw a smaller circle around my feet when the old larger circle falls apart. I trace this last back to a sentimental childhood book, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. The Pepper family was poor but merry, and if the lights got turned out they rejoiced in finding a candle to hold while they stood around the piano and sang songs in the dark.

More than once I have awoken from a fitful night with my hand clutching the windowsill above my bed. But this is simply my subconscious asserting its right to be heard, at least when I’m asleep. Awake, I have what my friend Ellen Papoulakos says is a teenager’s view of money, that is, there is bound to be more on the way from somewhere. And I have something else: a keen awareness of death, which tends to put everything short of death in perspective.

An example: once I was sitting in my kitchen reading the newspaper. Suddenly, all three of the wooden shelves I had re­cently installed to hold my china and glassware crashed to the floor by my chair. (Screwing in brackets is not one of my strong points.) What did I do? I gazed down at the shards of crockery and glass on the fl oor—and turned to the editorial page.

There’s a history to this book cover that isn’t alluded to in the video, namely, that the original Journal Keeper jacket was a lovely, softly-lit  photograph of our local train station in the snow.  Everybody, including my publisher, liked it alot, particularly with the  golden light of the approaching train shining down the tracks.  Then, a friend called to tell me that she had recently been in a San Diego bookstore  where she asked the owner if a memoir by an older woman writer about her life would appeal to her book buyers.  “Absolutely,” the owner replied, “as long as there isn’t any snow on the jacket.  I don’t know why, but I’m always sending back books that feature snow scenes.”  We decided that maybe we should re-think our options.

Theroux is a lovely writer, but she doesn’t publish often. In her latest book, The Journal Keeper: A Memoir, Theroux suggests that writing without a tenured job or a supportive spouse presents special obstacles. She also confesses to writer’s block. When a writing project about Theroux’s mother hit a creative impasse, a fellow writer suggested that Theroux put the project aside “and work on something a bit easier – like editing your journals.” The result is “The Journal Keeper,” which distills six years of Theroux’s journals to detail her life from 2000 to 2005.

Although the premise might sound expedient – personal journals, by their nature, tend to read like rough drafts – Theroux succeeds at arranging her entries, “like puzzle pieces in the sofa cushion,” into a sustained narrative. She is also such a polished stylist that the daily jottings on display here seem to anticipate a wider audience than the solitary diarist who first wrote them.

It also helps that the years chronicled in “The Journal Keeper” were, for Theroux, at least, particularly eventful ones. We’re introduced to a household that includes Theroux and her mother, “who came to live with me at a time in my life when we both qualified for senior citizen discounts at the movies.” As her eyesight fades and her general health deteriorates, Theroux’s aged mother comes to enjoy casual walks in the graveyard, which she cheerfully accepts as a reminder of her near future. A sprightly New Age mystic who’s equal parts curmudgeon and Kahlil Gibran, Theroux’s mother proves as memorable as the title character of Bailey White’s “Mama Makes Up Her Mind.”

After her mother makes a final trip to the cemetery, Theroux, a divorced mother with an empty nest, finds consolation in the community of Ashland, Va., a small town where she regards her neighbors “as characters who wake up every morning in an ongoing story and position themselves onstage for another sixteen hours of walking, talking and doing. Our scripts are mostly in our heads, although underlying the action is the question, ‘How will we make our mark upon the world today?’ For the most part this is an illusion. It is the world that makes its mark upon us.”

Like Henry David Thoreau, who famously professed that he had done a lot of traveling in Concord, Theroux finds a world of possibility in Ashland. While she records trips to Italy, California, New York City, and Washington, D.C. in “The Journal Keeper,” Theroux notes “something mysterious but obvious about the importance of staying put. The soul cannot do its work when we are in constant motion. It requires the knowledge that it won’t be asked to move too far from home.” Although she embraces the benefits of travel, Theroux revels in being “back in my wing chair, listening to the language of my old house as its pipes ping and creak in the winter cold.”

Through Theroux’s prose, we come to hold Ashland as closely as a snow globe village clasped at eye level. During a rare appearance at a church service, Theroux realizes that “my pleasure comes from enjoying the faces as they take their places in the pews and march back from communion. Like speed-reading a lot of books. It catches me up on the town.”

The promise of such neighborly intimacy becomes newly urgent in a journal entry shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. “Thinking about how our country was taken unawares by the terrorists, how we had no idea that we were going to be attacked, reminds us that the demand for human intelligence depends upon human community,” Theroux writes. “This is where America is primitive and the third world is sophisticated. We are a nation of isolated people, living in planned communities slashed by six-lane highways. We do not know who our neighbors are.”

While visiting an Internet dating site, Theroux discovers that one of her neighbors is also a suitable husband. “This book is the first fruit of that new life,” she tells readers. With any luck, there will be more literary fruit to come, and soon. The best thing about “The Journal Keeper” is the way it leaves us hopeful – and expectant – about what will happen next.

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”