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N.A. Residents Asked to Fill Journal About CityBy Tammy Daniels
06:47PM / Monday, February 11, 2008
 | | Terry Clark, then and now. |
NORTH ADAMS - Terry Clark lives in the San Francisco Bay area but she left her heart in North Adams. So she's sent a journal here in which residents can express their own feelings about the City of Steeples.
The city native hopes people will fill the North Adams Traveling Journal, which can be found at Papyri Books on Eagle Street, with words and images describing their favorite haunts and recollections, what they treasure and why call this place home.
She's already started it off with a few pages describing her relationship to the city, pictures of herself and the family home and an invitation to join in.
She got the idea from 1,000 Journals, which started when someone left a "traveling book" out for strangers to enter their thoughts and then send on to someone else. Now, a thousand books are traveling the world and being posted on the Internet as each stranger fills them with verse, prose and images.
"I thought, 'what a fun thing to do,'" Clark said from her California home last week. "This is the same idea on a microscopic scale."
Clark left the city as a child in the early 1950s when her father's career in journalism took the family to the West Coast. Her father is a Plumb, her mother a Vincelette. They returned frequently to the area to visit with their East Coast relatives. Her grandmother's house used to be where Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts' Berkshire Towers dormitory now stands; she played across the street on the lawn in front of Murdock Hall.
"We have a deep connection to the area," said Clark, who owns a home-building company with her husband called Greylock Homes as an "ode to my hometown."
Clark said the journal is not simply a diary. It's a blank slate for people to fill with whatever medium best expresses for them how they feel about the city. It grows out of her own interest in illustrated journaling, to which she was introduced through an art course. She later added collage and paper arts to her work in watercolor and text and is a member of an illustrated journalers' group in her area.
But she stressed the book isn't just for artists - it's for everybody.
"I made this very simple. I didn't want to frighten off anyone," she said. "I wanted it so simple someone would look at it and say, 'I can do that, too.'" In fact, the journal demands contributors "Have Fun!"
The journal is reminiscent of old-fashioned scrapbooking and its more modern, off-the-shelf incarnation, not to mention the Internet equivalent of blogs and sites like MySpace and Facebook.
Clark said there's definitely a link to those forms of self-expression, in which people use images and words to convey their thoughts about all manner of things.
"What I hope to do is have the paper book scanned into a computer [and posted on the Internet] so anybody can look at it," she said. Collaborators don't have to reveal their names, just have "a willingness to put something down."
She chose Papyri because she had visited the bookstore several times on return journeys and spoke to owner Lois Daunis. "I wanted to find a place where a stranger could go in and pick it up," she said. "And I was impressed by her and her bookstore."
Daunis has placed the journal (itself a handmade work of art by bookmaker Brenda Jatho) in a prominent location in the bookstore with information on what to do with it. Residents - old and new - are invited to "borrow" the book and put in their contribution, then return it to the store for the next person.
"I miss my hometown," Clark writes at the beginning of the journal. "The seasons, the sky, the hills, the buildings, the fine Yankees who live here and the hardscrabble history of North Adams."
She's hoping that she won't have to miss it too much longer. Her teen daughter is considering MCLA, the place where she used to play, as her college of choice. Their son is grown and Clark said she and her husband are considering retirement - hopefully, to North Berkshire.
It's a long-held dream to return to her roots. As she writes in the journal: "I come for visits but it is never enough." |
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