Writings by Joan Barfoot

These beautiful words are from a novel by Joan Barfoot:

At some point that winter, I began to keep a journal. It seemed in the beginning there was something important about the writing of things, something that might hold onto the reality of events. I guess I thought a journal would give a kind of coherence there hadn’t been before, so that when I read back over it, what it contained might come together in a pattern that I would see and could experience again.


I wrote about the drawings and my body and what I saw; I wrote about breakdowns and becoming sane, and the mysterious awesome moment of knowing; and I wrote about the squirrels and the cardinals and the unbroken snow in the mornings. I wrote that when an act was right, it was preceded by a sense of rightness. The instincts, I wrote, could not be wrong. I learned that words were not adequate for describing what I was understanding that winter; and that it was useless to go back in search of a pattern. I would write what was happening clearly, I thought, and later when I read it again I would find the words flat, for they could never keep up with the changes.


Still understanding that at last, I wrote for the pleasure of it, randomly, no longer trying to keep pace, immersed in the words that would not say what I wanted them to say, and that I would never read again. There was so much that was new during a time that I have thought might be simple or peaceful or dangerous. I tried to put something of that into the journal, tried to explain the joy. I was consumed, so that I saw vividly everything there was, and at the same time noticed nothing around me.


Until one day I realised that the day was longer than others had been, that I was writing more without lighting the coal oil lamps, and for the first time in –how long? – I looked outside. Then I walked outside. There was a difference in the air, a knowledge that winter was coming to an end, and that it was almost spring.

Gaining Ground - Joan Barfoot