Those of us committed to seeing personal experience in print often consider our journal entries a valuable source and form for literature. Usually, we are thinking of mining our own journals and compiling selected entries, but the three books I discuss this week show us how we might use other people’s journals in creating books.

Regina’s Closet by Diana M. Raab uses her grandmother’s journal written about her childhood and young adulthood in Europe, covering the years from before World War I to 1938 and entwines the journal pages with her own search for an answer to a family mystery. Not As Briefed: From the Doolittle Raid to a German Stalag, compiled by Karen M. Driscoll, is a first-person narrative created by cutting and pasting an uncle’s wartime journals. Water Cooler Diaries: Women Across America Share Their Day at Work, edited by Joni Cole and B.K. Rakhra, uses the journal entries of others to document a topic. If you have a relative’s journals and letters, reading about these books may inspire you to use the material in a book project. Or, perhaps you’ll be inspired to document a time, region, or area of interest by soliciting journal entries from others on a topic that you are interested in.

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Regina’s Closet by Diana M. Raab, Beaufort Books, New York, 2007

Forty years ago, ten-year-old Diana M. Raab went to rouse her grandmother Regina Klein from bed, only to find her unresponsive. The young Diana called her mother at work. An ambulance arrived and took her grandmother to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. A few weeks later, the young girl learned by overhearing her mother talking to friends that her grandmother had killed herself with an overdose of pills. Thirty-three years later, Diana’s mother presented Diana with her grandmother’s journal — “a transparent sheath filled with about fifty pages of single-spaced typed pages, laden with strikeovers, awkward syntax, and numerous grammatical errors.”

Diana began to read the journal composed of pages written in English after her grandmother came to the US. She hoped to find a reason for why her grandmother committed suicide. Reading her grandmother’s journal entries, she realized that what her grandmother survived had extra resonance for her now that she had struggled against cancer and survived. Reading the journal reunited her with her grandmother and committed her to capturing her grandmother’s sensibilities and the horrors she had endured. It also grounded the author in much needed security and love.

 The book includes excerpts from Regina’s pages, which start with stories of when she was 11, not too much older than Diana was when she discovered her grandmother dead. The journal entries describe childhood in Galicia at the start of World War I, a cold and rebuking mother, a kind but powerless father and a teacher that builds the little girl’s self-esteem. Diana also did her own research to fill in details of Regina’s life in her Galician village and shares the historical information.

The journal entries about the violence of the Cossacks as they rampaged through her town killing and plundering are unforgettable to a reader as are the descriptions of the ensuing cholera epidemic. As readers, we not only learn about Regina’s life, but track Diana’s as she digests the information Regina wrote down: “The closest I came to separating the ill from the healthy was while bedside nursing in the cardiac surgery unit in the 1980s.” At another point, she realizes that she is like her grandmother, constantly seeking approval from others because her mother, like Regina’s, did not allow herself to display her love.

The journal entries continue with Regina’s family members suffering cholera, typhoid, and dislocation. Regina and her sister become evacuees and are made to live in a Viennese orphanage, being all but abandoned by their older brother who’d escaped to that city because his wife did not want him to support his sisters. Regina, however, still graduates from high school with honors, secures a job in a bank, and knowing she needs relief from her daily woes, saves up for party dress and shoes to attend dances.

It isn’t long before she marries and becomes part of the Viennese middle class, doing well, enjoying life and raising her daughter, Eva, Diana’s mother. It also isn’t long before the rise of the Nazi party and the Night of Broken Glass in Vienna, when Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues were destroyed. In 1938, when Eva was eight, Nazi secret police barged into their apartment and arrested mother and daughter. In jail, Regina was thrown against a furnace, bruising her kidneys and becoming susceptible to serious lifelong kidney infections.

Luckily, Regina and Eva were released, and the family left for Paris. From there, they came to the US. Diana’s excerpts from her grandmother’s journals allow Regina’s voice to rise from the pages. Having Diana’s meditations on what she finds in her own life that helps her relate to her grandmother’s experiences serve to ground readers in the awful experiences of Regina’s times and act as stepping stones for Diana’s coming to terms with her grandmother’s suicide. After reading the letters Regina eventually wrote in hope of receiving restitution from the Viennese government, Diana concludes:

… every image and every memory of her has been recalled, and the result is a renewed understanding of her life and what she endured. The journey has helped me realize that a life without love is no life at all, and that those who have survived severe childhood traumas continue to live with the pain until the day they died. It is with this new understanding that I will hold Regina’s soul close to my heart.

Diana Raab’s 166-page book was a finalist in the 2007 Foreward Magazine Book of the Year contest and won first place in the memoir category of the 2008 National Indie Excellence Awards.

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Not as Briefed: From the Doolittle Raid to a German Stalag, Colonel C. Ross Greening, edited by Dorothy Greening and Karen Morgan Driscoll, Washington State University Press, Pullman, Washington, 2001

As a little girl, Karen M. Driscoll listened to her uncle, Colonel Ross Greening, a pilot and artist, tell war stories. When she was 13, he responded to a letter she wrote to him complimenting her on her writing and proposing that one day she would help him write a book. It was years before a box of dog-eared carbon copies of the now deceased uncle’s typed sheets about his wartime experiences were sent to her home. When she began reading them, she was unable to sleep until she finished them all. The next morning, she knew that she would organize the sheets and type then up for a family history. It turned out that Ross’ widow Dorothy had Dictaphone recordings made in 1955 when Ross met with a professional writer to record his history. However, both Ross and the writer died before the book they planned was completed.

Five years after she read the box of papers, Karen Morgan Driscoll had threaded Ross’s story together from his handwritten diaries, letters and the transcription of the oral materials. Washington State University, Ross’ alma mater, was proud to publish the manuscript, which includes his paintings and drawings. The result is a lively account that covers his piloting of a B-25 in the famous 1942 Doolittle Raid on Japan and, later in the war, his escape from a lengthy POW captivity in Italy.

After hiding for months in a mountain cave with two companions, he eventually finished out the war in a German prison camp. There he used watercolors supplied in YMCA aid parcels to record his experiences and those of other POWs. At age 42, ready to take up a post in Australia, he died of a blood infection.

According to an interview in Karen’s local paper the Port Townsend Leader on 11/10/2004, Karen told Ross’s widow Dorothy, named as co-editor, she was prepared to make a book from Ross’ writing, and Dorothy was thrilled to see the book finally come into being. In the interview, Karen says she promised herself she would create the whole text from Ross’ words and never change his sentences. In fact, only twice did she have to insert a phrase or sentence to bridge a gap in chronology. Other than in those two incidences, she used her uncle’s words exclusively as she cut and pasted from the carbon copies she’d typed up, smoothing out the rhetoric by cutting and pasting so the text wouldn’t ramble. She also included footnotes with historically accurate information to help readers understand the context of some of what Ross wrote about.

Her task as she saw it was not to write a book of her own but to deliver her uncle’s first-hand experience to audiences in his voice. There are fewer and fewer World War II soldiers alive and her diligence in creating the book ads much value to our society’s historical archives.

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Water Cooler Diaries: Women Across America Share Their Day at Work, edited by Joni B. Cole and B.K. Rakhra, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia.

The third in a series by the two co-editors, Water Cooler Diaries: Women Across America Share Their Day at Work is made of entries from 515 women across the US who volunteered the day diaries they kept about their workdays on March 27, 2007. Talk about getting to know what people are experiencing in a particular area of their lives!

Nashville Symphony Principal Clarinet and mother of two teens, Lee Carroll Levine starts work at home at 6:15 AM to get her kids out of the house to school. By 9:47 am, she’s made it three minutes early for rehearsal and her contract time to be seated ten minutes before the tuning note. Writing It Real subscriber Taylor Collins describes her day as an artist and writer trapped in a job in a government bureaucracy:

The phone message light is on and three are e-mails. My fifth supervisor in the past six years (which speaks volumes about how high morale is under the current administration) drives me to distraction. She is more paranoid than I am, and her mood swings make my past PMS hormonal shifts seem like Zen moments. Micro management here now borders on an art form, and incessant multitasking spins even mundane minutiae into intense crisis mode. I’m two year or less to retirement–not that I’m counting.

Didi Lorillard’s job is writing classic solutions to everyday etiquette problems. After working at her gym and stopping by the ocean on her way home for a hit of tranquility, she composes an answer to a question about whether a daughter who has broken off her engagement must return the presents (yes! and in the original boxes if possible.) Long-distance truck driver Patience Bourne contends with the difficulties of unloading the loose potatoes out of her trailer, a standard dry van, 13 and a half feet high and 53 feet long. She’s says the trailer will be a mess when the unloading is done and will need to be washed out at the truck stop and then its onto Milwaukee for a load of beer. Tina Wexler, assistant to a literary agent, wonders how her husband can fall right off to sleep as she lies awake thinking about all she wants to get done the next day (reading a new draft of a client’s manuscript, following up on submissions) and all she wants to do the day after and all she can put off but not much longer. Used bookstore owner Valerie Stadick writes about the people in her store:

There are a lot of older people who live downtown. There are a lot of low-income people and people with disabilities who can’t work. They like coming here. They like having a place to sit when they can’t stand for very long. They like that sometimes I see them coming and hold the door for them and bring them coffee. Maybe it is just the simple process of placing a book in someone’s hand that connects me to this community.

All though the pages of this collection, readers are privy to the events, activities, obligations, insights, feelings, concerns, checklists and dreams of contemporary women of all ages as they go through their workday. The day diaries show readers the surprising gamut of jobs in which women are involved as well as the number of people they love, are responsible for, are annoyed or helped by.

An extension of this project is Colgate’s Lady Speed Stick 24/7 partnership with This Day, which sponsors a website inviting women to post a day in their lives.

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Here are some lessons and ideas from these three books:

If you are honored to have a relative’s or friend’s journal or letters, consider using Regina’s Closet as a model for presenting their story and weaving it with your own to bring the other to life again and to show how his or her life impacted yours.

If you have old letters, documents, and diary entries of a relative, spend some time reading through them. What were the historically significant times and events in the person’s life? Perhaps there is enough there for you to compose a book that covers history from a personal perspective. Check with your local librarians about finding books and newspapers that elaborate on the times in which your relative lived. You might even try your hand at presenting the information in column form, as if it were written for a daily or weekly paper of the times. Or you might write it as a biography for young readers.

If you have thought about creating a book that covers a subject dear to your heart, put out a call for journal entries by people who are involved in the issues and situations you want to write about, and collect information that will prove indispensable. You will have targeted journals that you can cull for writings about a subject that you want to share with audiences. At the same time, you’ll be building a solid platform that bespeaks your expertise in the field–after all, you will have read hundreds of primary sources on your topic!