Gen Z: Confessions in the Cloud

From deccanchronicle.com

By Rochelle Crasto

Many youngsters take to digital journaling, but few have the energy and drive to consistently translate their thoughts and emotions into words and write

Earlier, pouring your thoughts and feelings onto paper meant owning a diary — a tangible little book that held your secrets under lock, key, or more realistically, under the bed. But those pages were never truly private. Anyone could stumble upon them. Enter Gen Z, who’s found a sleeker, safer alternative: the Notes app. Password-protected, always within reach, and discreetly tucked behind a screen — it’s the modern diary you don’t have to hide. Your secrets are now just as digital as they are secure.

Earlier, pouring your thoughts and feelings onto paper meant owning a diary — a tangible little book that held your secrets under lock, key, or more realistically, under the bed. (DC)

The After Hours 

This generation has been called many things — anxious, self-aware, over-sharing — but perhaps the most accurate is emotionally literate. They’ve grown up in an age that values mental health conversations, therapy memes, and vulnerability. Digital journaling fits right into that framework. But here’s the thing — after a long day of work, few people have the energy to unpack their emotions, let alone articulate them. Journaling, whether on paper or screen, demands not just honesty but also emotional bandwidth. To write means to process, and processing requires energy that most people don’t have after hours. “I find writing to be quite therapeutic,” says Ayesha Sharma, a senior UI/UX designer. “It’s a form of art, just like design,” she adds.

Maintaining a journal is equally tough. It’s not something our parents teach us to do diligently since birth. Instead, it’s one of those rituals that surfaces during emotionally charged seasons of life. In those moments, writing becomes less about discipline and more about release — a quiet form of distraction, reflection, and de-stressing. “You need to be in the right state of mind if you want to keep your journal alive. It has to be the dedication and the drive to work on yourself and improve for the betterment of your health,” says Dr Shreya Srinivastav, a psychologist.

The Fine Tuning 

There is also the question about effective writing and how much time you should spend at the desk. Platforms like Stoic or Journey are quietly replacing traditional diaries. Why? Because they fit right into the pocket-sized rhythm of our lives. A thought strikes mid-commute? Type it out. A wave of sadness at midnight? Add it to your Notes folder titled “Maybe feelings.” No pens, no pages, no risk of someone finding it under your mattress.

For a generation that broadcasts everything — playlists, selfies, step counts, even Spotify moods — digital journaling offers something radical: privacy. The Notes app is the anti-Instagram. It’s where you say what you really mean, without filters or captions. “There is a sort of peace that you find within words. It’s something that can’t be compared too even if you speak them out loud,” adds Shreya. 

Think of it as the digital equivalent of a whisper — soft, honest, and safe. These digital diaries capture what never makes it online: the ugly crying, the confusion, the little self pep-talks. It's a vulnerability without validation. 

Feelings, But Bite-Sized 

Journaling could be a single line, a short list, or even a fleeting thought typed before bed. There is no need for long paragraphs, no point to be made on purpose and of course, no pressure. 

The beauty of digital journaling lies in its security. Passwords, biometric locks, and Face ID make these private entries feel safer than any paper diary ever could. “Unlike my old journals that my cousin once found,” says Riya Mathew (23), “my Notes app is my fortress. It’s my most honest space.” 

There’s irony, of course. These deeply personal thoughts live on the cloud — vulnerable to data breaches and software updates — yet feel safer than ever before. Maybe safety today isn’t about secrecy; it’s about control. 

The Notes app isn’t just a tool — it’s a mirror. It reflects what’s often left unsaid in group chats and social media posts. And in that reflection, many find clarity. Gen Z may joke about “Notes app apologies” and “Notes app breakdowns,” but underneath the humour lies a profound truth — this is a generation learning to cope through documentation. To write is to release. 

Future Of Feelings 

As journaling apps evolve, AI is slowly stepping in. Platforms now analyse tone, detect emotional patterns, and even suggest prompts like “What are you grateful for today?” or “How did you show resilience this week?” The digital diary is becoming part therapist, part data analyst. 

But while algorithms can detect sadness, they can’t feel it. The essence of journaling — whether in ink or pixels — still lies in the human need to be seen, even if only by ourselves. In a world where everything is shared, digital journaling is the last unshared space. It’s our reminder that some emotions don’t need an audience — just an outlet. 

The Write Approach 

• 8% of people currently keep a journal or diary regularly 

• 22% have kept one in the past (HabitBetter survey) 

• Studies suggest consistent journaling significantly improves mental well-being 

• In a study of online positive-affect journaling, an adherence rate (completing at least one session • per week) was 66.4%. 

• Reports citing up to 25% boost in mood and emotional clarity (Gitnux, 2024) ( Source : Deccan Chronicle )

https://www.deccanchronicle.com/tabloid/hyderabad-chronicle/confessions-in-the-cloud-1922132

Cold Moon, Hot Kitchen, and The Great American Hustle (New York Diary)

From newyorksocialdiary.com

Social Diary• BY: David Patrick Columbia

Thursday, December 4, 2025. Colder nights, last night and tomorrow. And the last of this Moon is over us out there. This is notable. This week brings “the Last Supermoon of 2025,” which is the last of a trilogy of bigger, brighter full moons this year. This moon is called: “Cold Moon.”

I do have political opinions just like everybody else, and over the years I have volunteered in elections from local to the Presidency. What I liked doing was calling on people in a neighbourhood and hearing how they were doing. I’ve never engaged in debates about candidates. Furthermore, the “Vote” you cast is your most personal business, whatever the description.

Over the past few decades I notice that campaigning is very financially (to the voter) related. In both parties. Every bit of information that is sent to potential voters ultimately ends asking for money. And a second time, a third, or…. That never happened before.

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Vote Woof!

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Yes, campaigns always seek backers, but any message I get from a candidate these days ends (or begins) with a request for a donation, immediately followed by the tiered chart to make expressing your generosity clearly expressed. As it happens, I get a lot of these requests every day from both sides, and from all over the country — often multiple identical solicitations. Given the very hard times for the American public, which are obvious when you read about the effect on people’s employment, I’m left wondering how much a lot of these candidates truly know about the American voter’s wallet.

Trump. The NewYorkSocial Diary.com five days a week, now in our 25th year.

Donald Trump, Melania and Barron at Trump Tower in 2009. Donald’s evolution was just beginning. And Barron now towers over dad.

I’ve watched his “career” as it turned out, like a spectator, since he first came on the scene in Manhattan, circa 1960s. What was notable to me was how this kid (early 20s) who grew up in Queens where his father was successful in the real estate business in the Queens piece of New York, and went out into the world of New York called Manhattan. And became a young man’s version of a real estate tycoon. And a family man.

You could imagine that happening to anyone under those circumstances. No. Not in New York. In New York everyone of success has their own path. I have never really known him personally except everybody kind of knows Donald Trump, or think they do.

I have been observing his career since the beginning, more than a half century ago. I  always liked Donald Trump and I — having been, like him, a Democrat — will always like him. I am, however, surrounded by those who do not like him even though they know next to nothing about him. But because I have a daily public voice with the Diary, I STAY OUT of any public reference to the current politics today, as everyone has a right to his or her opinion.

I’ve worked in several political campaigns over the years as a Democratic volunteer. It all began in the late ‘60s, inspired by the impression JFK (and millions of others) made on me on one dark, cold evening in early November of 1960. That night in Lewiston, Maine, Senator John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts was traveling through the New England area in the very last days of his campaign for the Presidency. He was making brief speaking appearances in the New England states just two days before the election of 1960.

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I and other classmates, fraternity bros, had made the hour or so trip that night down the highway from Waterville. Senator Kennedy’s appearance (outdoors on Bowdoin campus) was slated for 10 pm.

It turned out to be just a bit after midnight when he finally arrived. The scene was set outdoors, lighted only by lanterns and spotlights in the dark, cold Maine night. He made his entrance with a deep, frozen grimace, squeezing his way through the deep crowd that pressed as close as possible to the stage. He was essentially pushed through the young, pressing crowd to the platform where he would speak.

This was the first time I’d ever experienced being in a “politically oriented election type” crowd. Senator Kennedy, who looked exactly like his photos — a young man of 43 — was dressed in a grey flannel suit and tie, speaking at midnight midweek on a freezing cold night in Maine.

And we were all awestruck by the man, his presence; the Harvard-educated speaker with a heavy down-home Boston accent. On dark cold midnight in down Maine at this time of year.

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Kennedy inspiring us on that cold November night in 1960.

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It was a quality of personality that you felt very at home with. He exuded authority but also intelligence, and frankly, I’d never heard a politician running for office who was so attractive in presence yet commanded such attention with his broad Boston accent.

Of course he was murdered three years later while in office. It’s the nature of the game of the New World that has grown darker by the year. We are a very ignorant “people.” I don’t refer to it as an intent; it’s nobody’s fault; we’re all learning.

It was no doubt the result of our astounding progress beginning with the electric light and the telephone, followed by the auto, the plane, the rocket, the camera; it all burst, like a flower in Springtime over the last century. And mainly out of the men and women of the United States of America.

That time has now passed but The great progress always included the darker tunnels which can lead to the thoughts that total destruction eventually occurs.

These last dozens of decades have transformed the civilization of Man for the first time in recorded human history. Or at least it has restored what existed in ancient times which are referred to vaguely since next to nothing is known about their existence when learned about. Rome is a perfect example.

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Now, onto something a bit more fun. They say you can’t be in two places at once, but clearly, they haven’t met Michael Della Femina. If you don’t know the man, he’s a real worker, and is in the midst of launching not just one but two new NYC culinary spots in the same week.

It’s been a long time coming for those of us who have followed him and his various projects, and the anticipation is understandable (he counts fans like Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford, and Kendall Jenner). JH and I first ate at his LA hot spot, Croft Alley, on our last trip to the West Coast and were sold on the really good food (classic comfort food but elevated) and the vibe. We thought at the time, wouldn’t it be great if we had one in New York? And now we do!

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Chef Phuong Tran, Madison Bright, and Michael Della Femina outside “Croft Alley” on Melrose and North Croft in West Hollywood when we stopped in for lunch in 2018. Michael credits partners Bright, Tran, Adam Rubin, and Andrew Shanfeld for making it the success it became and now the East Coast phenomenon it’s about to become.

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The New York debut of Croft Alley is opening its doors this weekend, trading the glamour of Beverly Hills for the grit of downtown (at 210 Sixth Ave between King and Prince). His second spot, Lily Pond (183 West 10th Street), slated to open next week, is a new West Village bistro and an entirely family affair.

The design and concept — which Michael and his wife Laurie started as a supper club — is their personal homage to the great, gone haunts of Old New York (think Florent, Elaine’s, and Mortimer’s). The full team bringing this vision to life includes Laurie, Jack, Allie, and William Della Femina, alongside Annabel, Jodi and John Kim, and Daniel Benedict.

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This whole operation, of course, is part of the Della Femina family legacy. Michael’s father, advertising legend Jerry Della Femina, famously owned Hamptons staples like Della Femina Restaurant (now the popular East Hampton Grill) and The Red Horse Market, and the next generation is equally busy: son Jack owns the popular café Bravo Toast, while William recently launched the wellness brand Just Juice LA.

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Lily Pond on West 10th Street sketched by artist Ria Sim.

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The real challenge now? Michael is reportedly working hard to pry his dad, Jerry, away from his weekly lunch table at Michael’s, where he’s lunched with his best buds for over 30 years. The goal? To get him to lunch at the new Croft Alley instead. (“Not Happening!” says Michael’s GM Steve Millington).

All the while Della Femina is busy juggling two restaurant openings — a state most chefs would describe as being deeply “In The Weeds” — he has simultaneously been on set for the mini-series of the same name. In The Weeds is a hilarious spiritual successor to the cult comedy Ivy League Crimelords (which has been described as Curb Your Enthusiasm meets GoodFellas).

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Ivy League Crimelords shooting on Sullivan Street: Michael Mailer, Jonny Friedman, Michael Della Femina, and Jason Hirsch (JH’s brother — we told you it was a family affair) making a cameo.

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The plot is a sharp dose of art imitating life: Della Femina plays himself, conned into being the subject of a fake “restaurant rescue” show, all while trying to convince his fake director/producer friends to invest in his very real restaurant empire. He reunites with the original “Crimelords” crew: director/producer Michael Mailer (the oldest son of the great American novelist Norman Mailer), seasoned hedge fund manager Jonny Friedman (who also happens to be JH’s cousin), and actor Adam Storke.

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Adding to the buzz, Michael is also fueling the growth of his secret, speakeasy-style cocktail club, Martini Confidential, which continues to pop up in undisclosed locales in both LA and New York. This secretive operation is often run with his crew, including Nicolo Rusconi and actor Adam Storke, pictured here.

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So, how do we know all this? Well, our very own JH ran into cousin Jonny, Della Femina, and their good friends last week in the West Village, and during a vital “research trip” — a small Pizza Tour hitting Mama’s TOO! and L’industrie — Michael happily spilled the details on his double life.

Stay tuned. And definitely stay hungry.

https://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/cold-moon-hot-kitchen-and-the-great-american-hustle/

The Guilty Pleasure of the Anti-Memoir

From provincetownindependent.org

By Lauren Hakimi 

Seven diaries you don’t have to sneak-read

I remember vividly the day I read my sister’s diary. I don’t remember what she wrote, but I remember the anxious urgency with which I turned each page, determined to cram as much reading in as possible before someone discovered my crime or before my mind summoned the requisite guilt to make me stop.

Illustrations by Antonia DaSilva.

I still love reading people’s diaries. In her guide to memoir writing, The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick wrote that memoirists are obliged to “lift from the raw material of life” a tale that constitutes literature. Diaries, then, are anti-memoirs; whereas memoirists are supposed to control their experiences, diarists can embrace their neuroses and spill their guts. They are the “raw material,” unlifted and unshaped. By being so raw (and often very long) they can achieve better than memoirs the literary ideal of dissolving the reader into the life on the page.

The delight the books on this list bring is that of the somehow ever-surprising fact of another human being’s consciousness. Two of them begin while their authors are still children — Plath was 17, Lou Sullivan was maybe 13 — and four of them end just before their authors’ deaths. That these are life stories means they offer plenty of dramatic irony.

These selections are all either available at libraries on the Outer Cape or can be made so through a CLAMS or Commonwealth Catalog interlibrary loan request.

 

Captain Scott’s Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott

In 1910, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott set out to become the first person to lead a team to the South Pole. About a year later, he arrived at the pole only to realize that another explorer had reached it first. Weeks after that, he died of starvation. He wrote in his diary right through to the bitter end. Before that, though, he manages to capture the joy of scientific inquiry and the peculiarities of traveling with a small team of like-minded men. He describes sensations that most of us will never get to experience, like skiing over sheets of floating ice, being vastly outnumbered by penguins, and eating hoosh, an Antarctic stew made of snow, biscuits, and pemmican. (Cape Libraries Automated Materials Sharing, CLAMS)

 

We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

Here is a personal history that seems especially important at a time when there is so much misunderstanding about the act of questioning one’s gender. Sullivan’s diaries begin when he is just a little kid and continue until just before his untimely death from AIDS in 1991. Throughout his life, he displays supreme self-awareness as he contemplates his feelings about gender and the benefits and drawbacks of medically transitioning. His diaries are full of romantic scenes and amazing one-liners. “I wanna look like what I am but don’t know what someone like me looks like,” he writes at age 13. “I mean, when people look at me I want them to think — there’s one of those people that reasons, that is a philosopher, that has their own interpretation of happiness.” (At the Provincetown, Truro, and Eastham public libraries and through CLAMS)

The Andy Warhol Diaries

Yes, there’s the Netflix documentary, but still, if you read one book on this list, let it be this one. The pop artist’s diaries, which weigh in at over 800 pages, hearken back to a rich person’s idea of an earlier New York, where limo drivers don’t know how to get to New Jersey, your favorite restaurant charges you double if you dare ask for the menu, and the best reason to hate Donald Trump is because he doesn’t buy your paintings. Warhol’s close attention to the news lends gravity to his book, and every page oozes with celebrity cameos (Patti Smith and Jean-Michel Basquiat both have bad B.O., Warhol claims) and stylish turns of phrase. There’s even a Cape Cod connection: in 1981, Warhol visits Falmouth, where he eats a lot of seafood and listens to friends complain about traffic. (CLAMS)

 

Baghdad Diaries by Nuha al-Radi

Al-Radi’s diaries about life during the Gulf War and its aftermath are vivid, horrific, and full of bizarre, dark humour. At one point, the author’s friend, who washes her hair with Tide because she can’t afford shampoo, assures her that her chickens are committing suicide. At the same time that her family struggles to obtain food, oil, and water, they also celebrate birthdays, create art, and take up new hobbies. “I must say I don’t feel there is a risk of death, at least for myself,” she writes on day 13 of the aerial bombing. “I know that I’m going to survive this somehow.” Al-Radi died in 2004 of leukemia that she thought might have been connected to the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium that was exploded into the environment during the war. (Commonwealth Catalog, ComCat)

 

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962

Two things stand out about the famous poet and novelist’s journals: her overpowering insecurity about her writing and her amazing writing. She describes vividly what it’s like to be a young woman genius in the 1950s. It includes a page-long, X-rated rant about how much she loves picking her nose. To Plath, there’s simply nothing quite like those “soft, resilient, elastic greenish-yellow smallish blobs of mucous.” (CLAMS)

 

The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1999, by Thomas Mallon

A novelist and literary critic, Mallon writes like a weatherman reporting from the scene of a hurricane, where the hurricane is himself. Lots of books get written in the present tense so that the reader experiences them more intensely, but Mallon’s hilarious diary is in the real, earned present tense. The possibility that he might contract, or already have, HIV/AIDS terrorizes him, forces him to confront death, and also, miraculously, enhances his awareness of being alive. “I look at a portrait of FDR & think of his monumental life versus my little one & feel that I’m the one who matters because I’m alive, now, this second — & for however much longer,” Mallon writes. Spoiler alert: he survives. (ComCat)

The Notebooks and Diaries of Edmund Wilson

I haven’t (yet) tackled this series of diaries organized by decade from the 1920s to the 1960s, but David Keller, a friend of the Indie, persuaded me that the five books warrant a spot on this list. That’s because in them, Wilson, the journalist and literary critic who bought a house in Wellfleet in 1941, wrote about something other than big ideas. This collection “is about the people he knew and the parties he went to,” says Keller. “He would be very unabashed about describing people quite negatively,” which means some parts of the notebooks are “cringy” and “problematic,” but for people looking to learn more about how the author lived, these books are important reading. (At the Wellfleet Public Library and CLAMS)

https://provincetownindependent.org/arts-minds/2025/12/03/the-guilty-pleasure-of-the-anti-memoir/

Decoding an Ancestor’s Scandalous, Encrypted Diaries

From electricliterature.com

In “Cipher,” Jeremy B. Jones uses the nineteenth-century life of his forefather to better understand the present

It was more than five years ago when I first heard Jeremy B. Jones talk about the journals of William Thomas Prestwood. By many accounts, Prestwood might be considered a nineteenth-century everyman—except for a handful of facts. First, Prestwood recorded daily accounts of his life, and those journals miraculously survived almost two hundred years. Second, some of the events Prestwood recorded were a series of sexual relationships that seem scandalous even by current standards. Third, Prestwood attempted to keep his journals secret by encrypting them in his own invented code. But the final fact that drew Jones to this man who almost disappeared into history was that Prestwood was Jones’s great-great-great-great grandfather.

From Prestwood’s salacious appetite for women to the fortuitous way his code was deciphered,  the narrative in Jones’s new memoir, Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries, is fascinating. So, too, is the sense of place that’s integral to much of Jones’s work. But what resonates even more is the unique way Jones holds his forefather’s life from the nineteenth century as a mirror to better understand his own existence in our also complicated twenty-first century. 

Cipher is especially timely in this moment that finds our nation so deeply divided. Prestwood lived during the tumultuous time between the founding of the United States and the Civil War. Using Prestwood’s journals as a catalyst, Jones reflects on how questions of masculinity and racial equality still drive our politics and culture. And yet, Jones’s journey is intensely personal as he seeks to be a good father raising his sons into good men. 

Jones and I connected over a series of emails, in which we discussed the process of journaling, what it’s like to be haunted, and whether the past offers any hope for our current times.

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Denton Loving: Cipher is an exploration of history—your personal history, your family’s history, and the history of our country. But you also approach your subject from a host of different angles such as science, genetics, and encryption. How do you juggle all of that, both when you’re drafting and when you’re revising?

Jeremy B. Jones: You take ten years to write a book, that’s how. I struggled for a long time to find a shape for Cipher. It started as a long epistolary essay. Then I converted it to a collection of essays. Then I tried dividing it into thematic sections. A lot of the work to find a suitable form was, of course, also me trying to make sense of the content. I needed to figure out what I thought in order to figure out how to arrange it. Ultimately, I found that the more I researched, the more a potential shape appeared, and in the end, the idea of a double helix took hold for me. I conceived of the book as a winding together of my ancestor’s story and mine, each of our strands wrapping around the other. This structure began to tease out connections and parallels between our lives and other subjects that I only sensed at first but then began to find a way into. And because his story is naturally vulnerable—he never expected anyone to decode and read his diaries—my story was pulled in that direction, too: I figured I owed him to be honest and forthright about my life.

DL: What would William think about your extensive interest in his life? What would he think about others reading about his life two centuries later?

I felt compelled to chart possible futures of American masculinity.

JBJ: I’d like to think I know him pretty well after all this time with his recorded life, and yet, I’m not sure what he’d think about the attention. My suspicion is that he’d think it a waste of time. In a list of advice to his sons he writes, “There is more pleasure in private than public life.” It’s clear from his diaries that he never tried to make a name for himself, not in any major way. It is, in fact, a frustration that the codebreaker has. In the codebreaker’s notes, it’s clear he thinks that William is a “remarkable human . . . who never put himself forward.” After all, William spent his days dissecting animals and experimenting with atmospheric forces and charting planetary orbits and reading texts in Greek and Latin and inventing new surveying tools. In the codebreaker’s view, William could’ve been an important historical figure had he made an effort. I think, however, that William understood the value in living a contained, simple life. A private life. Because of that, I think he’d have shied away from too much attention on his life, but I also think—I hope—he’d be glad that I didn’t try to make him into something he wasn’t. He was both a “remarkable human” and, as the codebreaker also claims, “an everyman,” and I tried to capture both of those truths.

DL: When I first heard you talk about this project, one of the hooks was about the scandalous nature of William’s journals. Was it always evident to you that William’s sexual exploits were a way to write about masculinity?

JBJ: I’m sure the book would have always moved in that direction, but it became inevitable that masculinity would be a central thread of the book because of the moment in which I started writing. I began work on the book in earnest in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, when I was home on leave with our two small boys, and after the votes were tallied, I grew worried about what that outcome said about the nature of masculinity in America. What was this place I’d brought my kids into? I had one answer in the past—in the laid-bare life of my adulterous ancestor—and another apparent answer in the present—in the election of an open misogynist—so I felt compelled to chart possible futures of American masculinity. For me and my kids and everybody who comes after us.

DL: In the process of writing Cipher, you discovered white, Black, and multi-racial cousins, many of whom were also seeking answers about their genealogy. How has your family responded to reading and learning about William, who is also their ancestor? 

JBJ: Most of my family saw the diaries like I did initially: as a curiosity. They’re interesting in their strangeness, but because they were written two centuries ago, no one seems to feel any real connection to William Prestwood. I’m anxious to see if that shifts for anyone once they finish the book. I have heard from a number of distant relatives who’d stumbled across the essay I wrote for Oxford American, and now that the book is out, more far-off kin are emailing. Most of those interactions have been comparing notes on historical and genealogical research.  

The most wide-ranging and compelling conversations I’ve had have been with relatives connected to me by slavery. I write about some of this in the book, but as I encountered Black Americans with whom I share DNA, and we tried to pinpoint our 19th-century shared ancestors, I found so many of my initial questions splintering into more complicated and revealing questions. I continue to think about those conversations. 

DL: Towards the end of Cipher, there’s a place where you write that the past rarely stays put, and that there is always more to uncover. How is that idea shaping your new work?

JBJ: I think place and all that it entails—including family history—will forever be a subject I’m exploring. I consider my first book a “memoir of place,” and Cipher is in many ways about how we inhabit spaces over time. I’m working on a novel now, and it’s nothing like Cipher or Bearwallow—it’s contemporary and leaning into conventions of detective fiction—but it’s still exploring unexpected connections to place and history and people. So, I suspect I’m simply tilling the same soil but with new tools and waiting to see what grows. 

That said, I’ve been writing some essays (in Garden & Gun and Our State so far) about our house. It was built in the 19th-century, and while we didn’t know it when we moved in, it was built by my fifth great uncle. This discovery isn’t quite as scandalous as William’s diaries, but I do continue to turn up surprising bits of family history in the walls and deed books of our home, and I wonder if I’ll find a book in there somehow.

DL: You’ve described Cipher as an American story precisely because it exposes early America’s complicated history with slavery and racial discrimination. What do you hope William’s story—and even more so, the stories of the enslaved people who were a part of William’s life—can contribute to the discourse in a time when museums like the Smithsonian are being criticized by conservatives for focusing too much on the “negative aspects” of slavery?

JBJ: One of the wildest hypocrisies around us right now comes from people who are upset about the removal of Confederate statues while, in the same breath, dismissing any talk of slavery because “it happened so long ago.” While writing this book, I thought often of people I know and love who don’t consider the repercussions of slavery in the 21st century—and don’t even want to engage in those discussions because “I never owned slaves.” In the book, I tried to provide lots of on-ramps to consider, if only for a moment, the ways that that history still reverberates all around us. 

Whenever a messy subject comes up these days, people tend to retreat to their camps, digging into the trenches out of some team loyalty more than any real engagement with the issue at hand. I wanted my approach to some of these ideas to discourage that partisan retreat because the issues come within a very particular story—they’re not abstract or “political.” 

I was talking to one of my cousins recently about the diaries and family history, and he asked, “So . . . we have this land because all we did was stay put?” We’ve been living on our particular plot of land for five generations—since the diarist’s grandson settled it—and none of us had to do anything to have it except be born. So, yes, our squatting there is, of course, part of the story. 

The other part of that story—the part that I hope my book teases out—is that what we have is something most Black Americans can’t. Even if no enslaved people worked our land, this place is still tied to a history of slavery because it is a kind of generational inheritance that most Black Americans can’t access. Once you start to notice these kinds of sustained effects of that “long ago history,” then you start to notice them everywhere, and so my hope is that no matter the political stripe, readers might begin to step into these historical considerations simply by stepping into my own wrestling with them.

DL: William’s journals inspired you to try journaling, but you didn’t continue. What was the difference between daily journaling and the tools you use as a nonfiction writer?

JBJ: I failed at journaling and diary keeping, in part, because I’m not disciplined or consistent enough. But I think another part of this failure is trickier for me to sort out. When I sit to write in a sustained way, I tend to have a public end in mind. The essay or project may fail or go in a drawer, but my intent is always to put it into the world.  E.B. White says, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the essayist is “sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.” So . . . maybe my failure to successfully journal is ego. Unlike William, I want people to read my words. Another answer—one that’s less of a personal indictment—is that writing, and specifically literary nonfiction, is the art form I feel most pulled to, and so it’s not something that I’m also using to track my days or process my internal life. It’d be akin to a painter using canvas and brushes to make a grocery list.

As a country, we’ve survived horrific moments, so we can survive this one too.

I’ve become, despite my best intentions, a writer who needs large blocks of time to write. I have to sit in a space and get my bearings. And even then I move slowly, sentence by sentence. In other words, I’m not a daily writer. I am not currently living in a way that allows me to set aside chunks of time daily to write. Instead, I may block off half of a day once a week or stay up way too late to meet a deadline. I wish I could rush through an early draft or write some throwaway scenes in the car-rider line, but I am a word-by-word writer and so a successful few hours may only result in a few paragraphs. I don’t advise it.   

DL: You’ve lived with William for many years now: reading his journals, writing him letters, trying to understand the choices he made in his life. You’ve even described your relationship with William like being haunted. Now that Cipher is out in the world, has it released his hold on you, or do you think he will always occupy as much space in your consciousness?

JBJ: I suspect he’ll always be there, for better or worse. In a very literal, genetic sense, he is a part of me, but in the psychic sense, his life has shaped my perspective and that can’t be undone. I still see things and wonder, “What would William think about that?” His presence is a kind of welcomed haunting, and I think he’ll probably be floating around with me until I’ve passed on behind him. 

DL: Has your time exploring William’s life made you more or less hopeful in times like these?

JBJ: I think the oh-so frustrating answer is both. William’s life is bookended by the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, so I see him stepping into the early experiment of a country, and then I see that country arrive to a violent fracture. While I believe we’re living in unprecedented times politically, it has also been helpful to look at William’s life and recognize just how many terrible and unprecedented things were shaking out around him two hundred years ago. Strangely, there’s comfort in seeing that we’ve made it through some darkness. 

Of course, making it through wasn’t all butterflies and rainbows. Emancipation, for example, required uprisings and war, so that’s the other side of my both answer. As a country, we’ve survived horrific moments, so we can survive this one too, but William’s diaries also show that this survival may get worse before it gets better. I hope we right the ship sooner than later, but the pendulum swing isn’t always quick.

About the Author

Denton Loving is the author of three poetry collections: Feller, Crimes Against Birds, and Tamp which received the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry. He is a co-founder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Ecotone.

https://electricliterature.com/decoding-an-ancestors-scandalous-encrypted-diaries/