Bianca Phillips, communications coordinator for Crosstown Arts, says she kept a diary when she was about 11 or 12. She wrote in it every day until the exercise eventually petered out. Then, she says, she kept another diary in college, “but I can’t talk about it.”
That’s the thing about diaries — they hold our dearest secrets. You picture a young girl with a diary with a little lock. The diary is stuffed under the mattress. The mom finds it while cleaning, debates with herself about whether she should read it. She does, of course, and the betrayal is thick.
The folks from the storytelling event Spillit and the local Pecha Kucha, in partnership with Crosstown Arts, are collaborating to tap into the thicket of this surreptitious activity. This is the third “Dear Diary” event at Amurica, the first being in 2016.
The event had a happenstance start. Leah Keys, founder of Spillit, participated in a Pecha Kucha event. (For Pecha Kucha, participants talk about a topic using 20 slides, with 20 seconds per slide.) She read her diary from when she was a kid, and it was … Well, in it, she fantasizes about her neighbor making out with objects she had given him. The concept was given its own event, naturally.
Six women — Joy Arwood, Megan Ryan, Eryka Jackson, Sara K Larson, Emily Thomas, and Jana Wilson — will bare it all during this week’s event. And, it’s been all women so far, sharing their sweetly funny, adolescently embarrassing entries or their shocking and life-changing, later-in-life events.
Are diaries for remembering or are they for venting? Do little girls even keep diaries anymore? Are they necessary nowadays? Does diary-keeping give way to journaling and then to blogging and on to micro-blogging sites like Facebook and Twitter? Phillips posits that Instagram could be the new diary.
In any case, she says of “Dear Diary,” “It’s free and it’s fun and there’s booze.”
