"Her face was a nice salad."

🔍 Step inside a 15-year-old’s notebook from 1996. (Mine.)

I started writing in Composition Notebooks in the summer of 1996. I was fifteen. There are lots of these—I’ve scanned them all and will publish them monthly for the next year or two—but the best ones, the most exuberant and embarrassing, are the notebooks from my high school days.

This first one contains very early attempts at short stories. I was at an arts camp in Michigan called Interlochen.

Here’s a random example of a complete one-page story.

Paid subscribers get full access. Keep scrolling. You’ll see that a lot of these early bits and pieces were about a character named “Joe” and his dog, “Dead Dog.” I wrote about those two for years. Link to Composition Notebook #1 below.

P.S. I’ll be chatting with my new gal pal Liz Goldwyn this Friday at noon PST/3 pm EST. I look like a Zombie in the photo she used for the announcement because I was still only partially recovered from pneumonia (the real kind not the “walking” kind—my fever went up to 106 degrees #bragging).