Mary Panttaja

I wanted to write about how I use and keep my travel notes. Of course, not all travel is noteworthy or note-requiring, and I don’t always keep notes. But this trip, as many others, is also about research—being in a place that my characters are going, or finding subjects/stories/illustrations for other writing. Here, as previously noted, we are following my characters John and Sara to a places that I haven’t been or places that I haven’t been in a while.

I take notes in a variety of formats:

• I type when I can, as now when we are driving and I have power. I’m known to pull the computer out and type three sentences and put it away.
• I write in a notebook when I can’t have power, as in my trek in Nepal or our raft trip in the Arctic. I have a medium size one and a tiny one depending on how much weight I want to carry. These notes are fun because you can discern my travel modality by the quality of my script. Driving in a car in Nepal gives one level of readability; riding an elephant through the jungle gives another. I love the physical visceralness of the marks on the page. I always smile at the notes I took riding the elephant Santi.
• Often writing is impractical and so when it’s a vision or an object I want to note I’ll take a picture with my digital camera. I can usually recreate my thoughts from the image. I have a couple of photographs of a wonderful girl in Kagbeni and some experiences of her life and how she might/will relate to Sarah’s coming trek. (Next book.) The photograph is all I need to pull it all back.
• I have been known to call home and leave myself a message. I own a digital recorder, but can’t find it. I would really want a system that transcribed it, for when I did a lot of dictation the transcribing part was too tedious to make it worthwhile. This is an area that would be useful to research as the technology is changing.
• Some moments all I can do is try to remember. This works about half the time; the other half of the time I lose whatever it was. Sometimes I make little numbered lists of thoughts to remember, hoping that a structure will help. Again, it only works sometimes. But sometimes you just have to trust that if the idea was useful, it will come again.

What’s the point of being anal about capturing notes? There is the obvious answer—so I don’t forget things that I have considered. But it feels a even more organic than that to me. I feel like it is part of the process of nuturing the updraft. All those ideas and images that are flowing to me are a part of something being created. Attention on my part is necessary. My part in the process is to bring these ideas and inspirations into form and the form they take, in this case, are words. I find that the more I work this edge of flowing ideas by being present and attentive, the more it flows. And forming them into words or images is the beginning of my work with them.