On Reclaiming My Creativity: Glimmer Journals

Written by Lauren HartmanPhotography by Calder Sell Let’s be honest: sometimes it can feel like the college environment sucks all of the creativity right out of you. Between cramming for exams in the soul-sucking silent section of College Library and frantically trying to hit the page limit on midterm papers without repeating yourself in a million slightly different ways, it can be tempting for even the most imaginative of us to collapse onto the couch to watch Netflix at night instead of picking up a book or writing something of our own for pleasure. However, for one of my English classes this semester, I was tasked with keeping a “glimmer journal.” The premise of a glimmer journal is to take note of everything that catches your eye. These “glimmers” can be anything: a fragment of a conversation overheard on the 80, a half-formed line of poetry that comes to you as you brush your teeth at night, a weird smell or noise or taste that makes your brain pause. At first I wasn’t sold on the idea; I’ve never been good at keeping journals or maintaining a regular writing schedule, so why should this be any different? But one of my goals for this semester was to keep on top of every class and do every single homework assignment – lol, right? – so I went out and bought myself the most passably cute notebook I could find from Walgreens and got to work. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. The smell of chlorine on a summer morning before the air turns hot and humid.
2. Her heart snags.
3. Slant.
4. The suffocating claustrophobia of walking down city streets beneath a heavy fog, the glow red taillights of the cars that pass you bleeding into the mist.
5. A lawnmower a few houses down on a hot summer day. The faint smell of freshly mowed grass.
6. This too will become ordinary.
7. Art is only as good as the conversation it inspires.
8. Flyover.
9. The sound right after a humming machine turns off. An empty ringing.
10. A bonfire on a frozen lake at night, the stars bright up above.

Are they particularly revolutionary? No. Do they make sense to people other than me? To be determined. But these snippets of images and feelings and scenes get my brain going and the words flowing, and I’m still writing down glimmers seven weeks into the semester. I’ll take it as a win.