Last week, I ran into Hobby Lobby because I needed a couple of new Copic markers. Apparently, purchasing a Copic marker requires a national security clearance: they are kept in a locked case, which must be opened by a manager, and then the manager escorts you to the cash register.

Seriously.

And I know, it’s an expensive marker, and I suppose if I were the kind of person who steals things, it would be easy to steal. But there are plenty of more expensive things I could easily steal which don’t require FBI clearance.

(I’m really not the shoplifting type.)

At any rate, as the manager escorted me to the cash register with my two purple markers, he said “You must be an artist if you’re buying these markers, what kind of art are you making?” and I said “scrapbook layouts” and he said “oh, so, not an artist.”

Ouch.

Except, really: I’m not an artist. I never have been.

Instead, I’m a scrapbooker because I am a writer.

I love pretty paper and embellishments and making stuff with fonts, but you could take that all away; if all I had was photos, white cardstock, and a printer, I would still make scrapbook layouts, because for me—a non-artist but a writer and a lover of stories—the purpose of scrapbooking is telling stories. Sometimes I have a story I want to tell, and I’ll find the photo that goes with it. (Sometimes this means taking a photo that supports it; sometimes that means making a layout without a photograph at all.)

But sometimes I start with a photo and find a photo to tell about it.

I know that not everyone loves writing scrapbook journaling though. Some people do scrapbook because they are artists, and their focus is on the visual, so the story matters less. Some people just have a hard time with writing.

Sometimes it’s hard to find a story.

If you look at a photo as an opportunity to tell many different stories, though, that makes it easier to find an angle. No photo has only one story, and once you start developing a process for finding them, it gets a little bit easier to find them.

Here are two examples of starting with a photo and finding a story to tell.

I took this photo of me and Kendell last week, sitting on our back porch:

Here’s a list of the stories I could tell:

1. Why I took the photo. After way too many weeks of not shaving or cutting his hair, Kendell was finally ready to get rid of the scruffy mess he’d grown. I took the photo to document what he looked like before he finally shaved.
2. My opinion on his hair and beard.
3. A history of his facial hair (which is usually a goatee anyway).
4. A list of the places we like to go together. (You don’t really have to write a story that goes exactly with the event or experience that the photo came from.)
5. The story of the recent experiences we’ve had together that have brought us closer and made our marriage stronger.
6. Why I am lucky to have him (I took the photo the day before St. Patrick’s day!)
7. Why he is lucky to have me.
8. 25 facts about the past 25 years (we celebrated our 25^th anniversary last month, and while I meant to have my son take some pictures of us on our anniversary, I never quite managed it).
9. Five things I love about our life together right now. (Or even five things he does that make me nuts!)
10. How he is recuperating from his heart surgery last fall.

And here is the layout I made with the photo:

There are things I would change about this layout—I should've cut the "thanks, honey" from darker paper, for example—but I like the little snippet of our lives together right now that I wrote about. I like to think that one day, when we're both gone, our kids or (future) grandkids would be happy to read these little details. The journaling is a combination of some of the items from the list I made, and it all clicked for me when, the day before I made the layout, Kendell took care of a bunch of stuff when I was at work, and when I came home I told him "thanks," and he said "you don't have to say thanks, that's what husbands do" and then I started thinking about what else I could thank him for.

But Amy, you might be thinking, what about older photos you didn’t take last week? You can still find some stories. Sometimes the photo itself will spark memories—look for little details that help you remember something. If I really can't remember much, I will look through my social media posts, my journal, my blog, or my emails for memory sparks. Take this photo, which I took in 2011:

Some ideas for stories:

1. Why I took the photo. (Notice that I listed this twice? It’s a good place to start, especially for older pictures, because if you keep following your "why," you'll come to other details, too.) I came into the living room and found my son Kaleb reading with this knight (which was left over from his birthday party) right next to him and it totally cracked me up.
2. The type of books Kaleb liked to read.
3. A list of his favorite books from this time period.
4. His relationship with reading.
5. My thoughts about him learning how to read and how it might change our relationship.
6. A list of the things he was learning in first grade, what he thought about his teacher, or a description of his classroom.
7. Something totally unrelated to him sitting on the couch reading: who his best friend was, what toys he liked to play with, what his favorite meal was.
8. A list of things he did that made me laugh.
9. How much he loved that green shirt, and how he would seek it out the second it came out of the dryer.
10. How the picture makes me feel looking back now—how young and little he looks, what I miss about that phase of his life, how he was sweet & kind & spunky then and how that has changed and stayed the same in five and a half years.

Here’s the layout I made with that photo:

(I can't tell you how much I adore those book stamps. I use them every chance I get! They are by Elle's Studio. As are the patterned paper and the puffy stickers.) I Photoshopped and uploaded this picture (along with a few others) right before I went to bed, and when I woke up I had the title in my head. Love that! This journaling captures a little bit more of Kaleb's personality quirks; I feel like the photo itself visually illustrates his social nature, and the details in the journaling backs it up with words.

The stories we can tell have meaning and value and they are, I believe, an integral part of our scrapbook layouts. (Or your journal, or your blog. You don't have to scrapbook. Just write them down!) And while writing might feel a little less sexy than playing with embellishments and paper, there is a great sense of satisfaction to be found in finding your way to a story you want to tell. If you allot some time in your scrapbooking process to drafting a story, to thinking about what you want to say and where you want to put it, you'll start discovering you can find a story.

Happy writing!

Last week I was inspired to scrapbook a few pictures from 2012. I didn’t remember many of the details about the pics, but I came to my blog and found I’d written about the day here, and then I was happy because I had a bunch of details to work with for my journaling.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about my blog, and blogging in general, and how blogging and the scrapbook world sometimes intersect.

When I started blogging in 2006, it was partly because of scrapbooking. I was still trying to find a niche for myself in the industry, so I could bring in some extra income while I was a stay-at-home mom. Everyone in the scrappy world had a blog, and people read each other’s’ blogs, and commented on them, and referred back and forth to each other. We knew about each other’s kids and husbands and careers and, yes, scrapbook layouts. Blogging created a type of friendship.

The good ol’ days of blogging, which seem long-gone now.

Now, blogging is much more specific; it’s no longer really about the person, but about the subject. This is, I think, part of the reason my blog is fairly not-well-known-at-all-by-almost-anyone; I’m a Jack of all trades and so a master of none. If I were a famous person, perhaps people would want to read my thoughts on a huge variety of subjects, but as a non-famous person I don’t have a huge readership because I don’t fulfill a niche. Sometimes I get discouraged at my lack of readers (but oh how I appreciate every single person who might be reading this right now!), but if I look at it through a critical lens instead of an emotional one, I can objectively understand why I don’t have a ton of readers. (I like to think the “niche” I fill is “good writing about a bunch of different topics,” but that’s not really a niche, and how many people like me are there in the world? A person who quilts, scrapbooks, reads, hikes, runs, gardens, parents, and has strong opinions?)

Looking back now, over 10+ years of blogging, I value the opinions, thoughts, and ideas I have shared. But those little, nearly-private family details I have recorded here and there mean something entirely different to me. I know that monthly reviews about what we did in a given time mean almost nothing to a general reader because I’m just a random person. But to me, looking back—they are invaluable.

Even if it does make me feel a little bit silly posting them.

So, I think I’m going to start doing this again—just writing about our life. I guess I don’t have to post it on my blog, I could just keep the details in my computer journal. But there’s also something about posting to a blog that makes it feel like I have reached out to the world.

Today, I’m writing about having an awesome weekend.

One of the drawbacks about being a librarian is weekends: usually, you have to work some Saturdays. I work two Saturdays a month, so the Saturdays I don’t work are precious family time for me. This Saturday was one of my free ones, and we ended up having a nearly-perfect weekend.

On Saturday, I got up, started a load of laundry, and went for a run in the canyon.
I am still recuperating from last fall’s sprained ankles, so perhaps I went for a “run.” I have worked up to longer stretches between walking breaks; on Saturday I tried to do walk for 2 minutes, run for 3. Except, I did one five-minute stretch. And then, when I was almost back down, I hit the hilly spot of the trail and I just never let myself walk on uphills, and then I was so close to the end that I just kept running, so I also did one seven-minute stretch. My ankle is still hurting, but my ballet barre class is making it stronger, so even though it hurts it feels more reliable. I’ll take pain over fear any day. It was a lovely spring morning to be in the mountains, birds everywhere seeming joyful at the sunshine, and little bits and buds of green starting to appear.

After my run, I picked up a corsage for Nathan and then took him to the train. He was going with a friend who lives in Ogden to her prom and decided Frontrunner was a better plan than his unreliable car. We had a nice, friendly chat on the way and I just remembered all over again how much I love him.

Then I came home and gardened. This is my favorite Saturday routine: Run, then weed. I don’t even care that I’m gardening in my workout clothes! This was my first time in the yard since last fall; it’s amazing how fast the weeds come on. I pruned the rosebushes, pulled weeds, cleaned out all the old leaves, and started making plans for some new plants here and there. Kaleb helped me for a while, until he left to go to the Rec to play basketball with his cousin and friends, and Kendell was outside washing the car and getting the lawn mower ready for the year, and it was sunny and warm but not too hot and just…perfect. When I was finished with the front yard, I discovered some daffodils blooming on the side of my house, so I lay right down in the shade next to them and spent some time admiring them close up, until Kendell came to find me and laughed a little bit at his crazy wife.

We cleaned up and ran some errands: visited my mom for a bit, stopped by to fix his sister’s computer, vacuumed the (just-washed) car. Then we went to Thai Village for dinner, which I have been craving for weeks. Hello, pumpkin coconut curry!

On Sunday, Kendell and I got up and went for a walk in the foothills. Our church this year starts at 11:00 and this is the third time we’ve gone on a pre-church walk. I know some people would think that this is an activity that breaks the “keep the Sabbath day holy” commandment, but I disagree. I find so much pleasure and peace in the mountains; on the trail I find God in every beautiful curve and cool shadow. We walked on a trail we’ve not been on in years; it curves around the south side of the foothills and then you come around the curve of the mountain to a stunning view of Timpanogos, especially beautiful with the lingering snow and that blue sky.

Then church, where I taught a lesson about the gathering of Israel. Then a nap, and some time kicking the soccer ball at the park with Kaleb, and dinner with all four of us actually at the dinner table at the same time. While I cleaned up, Kendell, Kaleb, and Nathan had thumb wars in the front room and they were all laughing at Nathan’s ridiculously long, strong thumbs. Harry Potter for a bit, and then The Walking Dead.

This was a good weekend. No arguments, no upset kids, no one sick or injured or otherwise in pain. Just good, calm family time. I needed it!

I confess: I have a sugar problem.

(Along with roughly, what, 92% of the world, yes?)

I love to bake. Not just because I like to eat desserts, but I enjoy the baking process. The transformation of butter and sugar into that pale, beaten yellow texture. The smell of fresh lemon zest, vanilla, almond. The almost-crisp sound a measuring cup makes when you squish it into the cocoa container. The soft rush of chocolate melting; the crack of an egg into a bowl, the ting of the whisk against a glass bowl.

At almost every family party I go to, I bring the dessert. (I hope my little great nieces and nephews remember that, that Aunt Amy always brought a good dessert. Someone can say that at my funeral. In, oh, forty years or so.)

Oh, sugar cookies! (The soft kind, with cream cheese frosting.) How I love you!

Sometimes friends even call me to ask for baking advice. Sometimes my sister asks me to bake a cake for her kid’s birthday party, and I am just fine with that.

But it’s not only the baking; I love sugar. I’ve grown more particular over the years: I like dark, dark chocolate and I like caramel that is not too sweet. I don’t love ice cream and I can skip cheesecake, but a good chocolate chip cookie, when it’s the exactly-right soft-crisp texture and has chunky chocolate and just enough salt and a buttery flavor: that is heaven to me.

Some of my best memories have dessert in them: coconut cake in Lake Powell, my mother’s caramels on Christmas break, the plate of sugar cookies a friend brought to me after I had Kaleb which were, in my nursing-starving state, the most delicious cookies I have ever eaten. Easter is synonymous with chocolate, isn’t it? Halloween is for candy. Fourth of July? It tastes like saltwater taffy thrown from the parade floats, warm and sticky and stringy.

Everything has sugar in it.

As I’ve struggled with my depression this winter (which I am beginning to think of as the Jadis Winter: always winter but never Christmas, even though there was a Christmas), I have reached, over and over, for sugar. Sugar like it was a torch in the darkness, sugar like it was a life raft I would drown without. Sugar like it could save me.

Of course, when you’re in a state where all happiness is found in sugar, it’s not a good place. My jeans are reminding me that I need to lay off a bit.

So, on Sunday night just before midnight, Nathan brought me a donut (strawberry glazed, from Krispy Kreme) from a party he’d been to. Kendell couldn’t believe I’d eat a donut and go to bed, but I did, as it was my last little bit of sugar for awhile.

Or, hopefully it will be.

I had a little slide on Monday, when I was running errands with Kendell after we’d exercised, and he was hangry so I got out a granola bar from my granola-bar stash (everyone has one of htose in the cubby of their minivan, right?) and I took a bite before handing it to him. But as it was a Kind bar that’s mostly nuts, and it was only one bite, I’m not counting it. (It does illustrate, though, how pervasive sugar is. It’s not just a craving and a desire, but a thing that’s ingrained in my way of doing almost everything.)

But otherwise I’ve been dessert and treat free.

I’m trying to see if I can make it till Easter before I eat anything sweet again. I’ve gathered up all of my chocolate stashes and put it all in the basement storage room, in a ziplock bag behind the snowman decorations. I know where it is…but just not having it where I can habitually reach for it will hopefully help.

If I am honest I will confess: I don’t want to live my entire life without sugar. I still want to bake and to be the Dessert Aunt. But I also know I need better coping strategies than clinging to chocolate as if it were my only rope.

As of this writing I’m about 87 hours without desserts or treats or snacks.

I can do this, right?

I can do this.

(For a while!)

Because I was born to a mother who is also a feminist. She taught me to cook and bake, to sew a straight seam, to love my family; she taught me that my value was only in homemaking if that is where I wanted to place it. She taught me I could choose who I wanted to be, no matter what church leaders or teachers or the prevailing zeitgeist said.

Because I had three sisters.

these women are my origin story.

Because I was a strange, shy, quite child who lived in her head and imagination but, brotherless, really only knew anything about the male species via novels.

Because of gymnastics coaches who taught me that women could be more than only mothers and who then, quite often, acted as surrogate mothers to me, at least as far as bandaged rips and taped ankles and consolation and encouragement and cheering go. They taught me lessons about doing hard and terrifying things, about facing my fears straight in the face, finding the space inside myself that let me believe I could do the seemingly un-doable thing, and believing that space was right. They taught me I could fly and sometimes I did, and even though I can no longer do a double full or a giant or a front flip, I still can do a cartwheel, I still remember every swing of my last bar routine, I still find that the space is structurally sound. I don’t fly anymore, but I still draw emotional strength through the physicality of my body.

Because in the summer after third grade I sat alone in my backyard and I could hear the girls playing on the other side of the field and I wondered then at girls’ capacity for cruelness, how the world seemed to think we were soft and sweet but mostly we were crocodiles.

Because my dad loved me in gentle ways. Because he taught me to love books, to listen to music, to read the newspaper, to tell stories, to take photographs. Because once, when I was 15, he yelled at my date for getting me home so late. Because he taught me to water ski. Because he taught me to wander in the mountains, even if he never took me wandering in the mountains with him.

Also because he made a beautiful yard and planted all the flowers and grew tomatoes, peppers, summer squash; because he mowed the lawn and never taught me how to do any of it. Because he didn’t teach me how to throw a baseball (even though he loved baseball and, by all the family legends, was quite good at it) or how to throw a football (even though he played football in high school) or a basketball. Because he was quiet and suppressed and never found his way, never found his true calling, never felt like a successful man.

I am a feminist because of my rebellious adolescent years, when the only tools I had for dealing with what I was experiencing was what I had learned from John Hughes movies, from Disney princess ideals, from the social understanding of what “romance” means, from, even, romance novels. Because I fell for the fairy tale image of what society says relationships should be like and then reality didn’t make any sense. Because no one, not even my mother, had taught me that I needed to know myself before I could be loved by someone else. Because I didn’t know it was not just OK but even good to define yourself free from the definition of boys.

Because real, true women friends are hard to find but, when found, they are irreplaceably valuable in your life.

Because I had to make some hard choices that grew out of misplaced ideals and muddled understanding, because those choices changed everything, changed me in ways I am still experiencing, and that was empowering but I never should have had to make such choices in the first place.

Because I can debate with my friends who have different ideas about what is right and wrong and we can disagree but still respect each other.

I am a feminist because of books. Because of Anne, Laura, Harry (not Potter but Crewe), Louise, Kit; Petrova, Paulina, Posy and all of the other Shoes girls. Because of Pippi and Nancy and Mary and Sarah and Lucy and Charlotte and Meg and Karana, not to forget Meg/Jo/Amy/Beth. Because of Esther and Edna and Moira and Maddy and Elaine and Esperanza and Clarisse and Morgaine and Lavinia and Orual. So, not just because of books, but because of characters in books who suffered, survived, learned, changed, grew, discovered. I couldn’t learn just by living all of the knowledge I have gained through fictional characters, who have all taught me something about what it means to be a woman and, equally, what it means to be a person alive on the earth, trying to live a good life. Trying to be brave and true.

And because of poems. And poets. Poems have saved me more times than I can list, because I have found myself in them and because I have found an Other in them, because they have given me words when I couldn’t speak or they have spoken the words I didn’t know I wanted to say. And, if poems then poets: Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Anne Stevenson, Louise Gluck, Jane Hirshfield, Josephine Jacobsen, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Marge Piercy, Naomi Shihab Nye, Carolyn Kizer, Carol Ann Duffy.

I am a feminist because in seventh or eighth grade I wrote a research paper on the Salem Witch Trials and it disturbed me on so many different levels, the betrayal of women by girls, the betrayal of women by society, the malice and menace of human violence expressed in real terms against real women’s lives: that little research paper changed me utterly. Then, decades later, I found I am a direct descendant of a woman killed in those witch trials, Ann Poindexter, and a puzzle piece of my life fell into place. I am a feminist because I want to teach all of my little great-nieces what witches really are: women who threatened the patriarchy.

I am a feminist because I became a teacher and discovered, among so many other things, that the idea of teaching being the perfect career for a mother is a lie. Because it is immoral and despicable how teachers, more and more and more of whom are women, are treated by this country, specifically by this state. And because the nation’s regard for the education of our children is so small.

Because of college and because of what I learned in college: literary theory, feminist literary theory, queer theory. History. Linguistics. Folklore. Because of Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigaray.

Because I am a Mormon—because I am a Mormon. Not because Mormonism lends itself to feminism; it mostly doesn’t. But because Mormonism needs feminists, it needs open minds, it needs broader thoughts or its sons and daughters will never change. Because Mormonism says “here is how to live your life” and my heavenly parents teach me “yes, perhaps that’s the ideal, but here is how to live your life, the one we gave you, the way we made you, the one we are making together” and because I see the most beauty in the non-traditional, non-conforming outsiders. Because I know our outsiders’ voices will make all the difference, but only if we open up our lips and use them.

I am a feminist because I am a librarian, because I see children and teenagers be changed by books, because I search out books with strong female characters, because I assure boys over and over that it is OK to read a book with a female protagonist. Because I almost never have to tell a girl that it is OK to read a book with a male protagonist because she’s already got plenty of practice with it.

I am a feminist because I had a daughter, who I tried to raise with my own vision of what it means to be a feminist, to be a woman in this world, as a part of who she is. Because I wanted her to have a backbone instead of a wishbone. Because I wanted her to fulfill her entire potential.

I am a feminist because I had sons, who I tried to raise with my own vision of what it means to be a feminist, to be a man in this world, as part of who they are. Because I wanted them to have the courage to show their soft side instead of only exposing hardness and fierceness. Because I wanted them to fulfill their entire potential.

I am a feminist because I believe I should make the choices of what I do with my body, not the government, not religious leaders, not my opinionated neighbor.

I am a feminist because I have been changed and influenced by so many good women: my mothers, my sisters, my friends both current and past. My friend Chris who is still, almost 30 years later, the bravest person I know. My two favorite college professors, Susan Elizabeth Howe and Laura Hamblin (and I am a feminist because of my least-favorite college professor, who had that air of some old-school professors that male poets were the real writers, while women poets were just hysterical, made worse by the fact that he wasn’t old at all). My grandmothers, Elsie and Florence, who each taught me something about womanhood, who I wish I could have known as an adult. The one young women leader, Lori, who, when I was fifteen and sixteen, looked past my black clothes and bad attitude and saw a person who needed love and acceptance more than conversion. I am a feminist because I have been blessed to learn from amazing women my entire life.

I am a feminist because I have read about feminism and studied the writings of actual feminists, because I know what it means more deeply than a few soundbites on cable TV news, because I will never understand women who say they are not feminists.

I am a feminist because there is always more to learn, more to change, more to fix in the world. Because we will never be finished with equality.

I am a feminist because I believe—no, because I know—that all people have amazing sides and dark sides, good and bad, unique ideas and abilities. Because there are always limitations but gender, race, nationality, identity, religion, socioeconomic levels should not be limits.

Why are you a feminist?

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to read was a series of biographies called Childhood of Famous Americans. They were hardback books with orange covers, and told about the childhoods of, yes, people who grew up to be famous Americans. I think I checked out every single one my library had at least four times, but with one caveat: I only wanted to read the stories about girls. Amelia Earhart, Mary Todd Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Pocahontas, Louisa May Alcott, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Annie Oakley (oh how I loved the Annie Oakley story!), Martha Washington, Molly Pitcher, Abigail Adams.

I can’t quite pinpoint exactly why I didn’t want to read stories about boys. Maybe because my family, with our four sisters, was so girl-centric. No one told me I couldn’t read stories about boys. (Actually, the more I think about it, if someone had told me “girls shouldn’t read stories about boys” I would’ve been more likely to read the boy stories.) No one told me girls’ stories were better. I just, when I looked at the names on the spines, felt a deep sense of boredom and even annoyance at the boys’ names.

But it’s a long-established fact that I was a strange child.

I have since learned to read about men in history, too. King Henry VIII, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Van Gogh, Degas, both Lewis and Clark are especially fascinating to me. But I will always be more drawn to women’s histories (Anne Boleyn is far more interesting than Henry, who just blustered around being a complete jerk), as they have always felt like the stories most imperative to know. Whether in novels or in non-fiction form, I like reading the stories of how women have influenced their current times. I like knowing how they lived, the details of their lives, how they dressed and cooked and interacted with people and with the world. I like discovering how, despite the limits of patriarchy and social mores, they achieved their remarkable achievements, or they lived their quiet, average lives.

March is Women’s History Month, and I have been thinking all February, since I wrote this post about writing down your stories, about how I could contribute. Because I don’t think that only important women’s histories are valuable. I think those “average” lives that most of us are living are important to document, too. One day, those stories will be histories, and someone in the future will be interested in learning how we lived, what we thought, how we dressed and cooked and interacted with the world.

So! Today I am posting a list of 31 questions for Women’s History Month. You could answer a question every day and then, on April 1, have told a chunk of your stories. I’m going to answer all of the questions, and I am planning on sharing some of the responses on my blog. I wrote the questions like I used to write essay questions for my students: several different sub-questions to flesh out the more general main question, to help you structure your thoughts.

If you want to play along, don’t make it complicated. You could use a notebook or your computer (or, heck, use your phone if writing long things with your index finger doesn’t drive you nuts!); you could post on your blog or keep it private. You could ask your mom, daughters, sisters, cousins, nieces, grandchildren and/or best friends to join you. You can write as short or as long as you want; some questions will evoke more words than others.

Later in the month, I’m also going to post a list of photo prompts for recording your personal history.

I hope you’ll join in. Let me know if you do. Here is the document:

Download Womens history month questions

Just download the PDF to get started.

Happy women’s history month! Happy writing!