Valerie Mangion         

There seems to be an element of synchronicity to my Journal Project. The way I choose a journal volume to select an entry from is totally random. But over and over I happen upon a passage that has special relevance to something going on in my current life or in the culture at large. Like the one below. Sexual Harassment has never been in the news the way it is right now. Every time I see #MeToo I think, wouldn't it just be a lot easier to have those few women who have never b

Saturday, December 8, 2012 Cats degraded my quality of sleep all night. In the morning, though, I finally dreamed. I dreamed that my old boss, Jim R, was alive, and desperate. He’d committed a crime, or crimes, and wanted me to harbor him. Ellis wasn’t home. I tried to keep Jim out but he put his fist through the screen door and forced his way in. We looked at each other. I just didn’t know if he was harmful or not. “Jim,” I said, looking searchingly into his eyes, “it would

August 12, 1980, Tuesday Yesterday this old man — a white guy with white hair and three teeth (each about 1 1/2” long) got on the bus I was on, yelling “Keep your prayer life going, Folks, keep your prayer life going!” Then he stopped right at my seat. He was leering down my shirt, peering at me through little beady eyes, blind with their own self-satisfied “knowledge.” “Everything’s a puff of smoke…a puff of smoke. Do you know what a puff of smoke is? It just disappears — li

(I moved from the city back home with my mother in a Chicago suburb soon after my father died. I lived with her for almost a year. I was going through a horrible, drawn out break-up and making week-end trips back into Chicago to see friends and maintain my Chicago ties.) Sunday, March 14, 1982 I thought we were going to his apartment, but we ended up going straight to the movie — or to that area (Rush Street) so I’d have to carry it [my sketch book] all over the place. I made

(This volume covers part of my second year of graduate school and the summer after. I spent much of that summer back in Seattle, helping care for my first husband, Pat, who was dying of cancer. We had finalized our divorce almost two years earlier, right before I moved to Wisconsin to attend UW- Madison in pursuit of an MFA degree.) March 27, 1992 Today Larry took us on a creative visualization journey to receive a gift. We travelled a great distance by boat, train, then on f

October 1, 2002 Part of my mad stint of socializing included lunch with Dawn Kiefer, “my” reporter from the Richland Observer. Her e-mail address is donkeyfur@ something or other. Get it? don keyfur? I didn’t at first. We had lunch at Café Fiesta Fé. She told me an anecdote weeks ago that cracks me up every time I think of it. Her dad, seventy-seven, almost deaf, likes to be apprised of what Dawn is up to at the paper. Dawn referred to him as “deaf in one ear and can’t hear o

Thursday, November 5, 1998 Ellis is losing it. The financial pressure he's under is making him weird and mean. He picked a fight today, which he rarely does - going on and on about how I'm destroying him, making him crazy, because of the way I criticize everything he does. What precipitated this outburst is that I said, "Aren't you going to put a return address on it?" as he was carrying my VISA bill to the mailbox. He gave me the bill, angrily, and I said, offhandedly, "It's