The Owl and the Magpie: The Public Act of Private Writing

The owl and the magpie serve as companions in this exploration of journal writing as a curricular and pedagogical act. Encountering a dead owl while struggling with a disruption in my identity as a teacher, I turn to my childhood and adolescent journals and to the journals of Sylvia Plath to consider how writing participates in the ongoing construction of self. Drawing on theories of lived curriculum, rhetorical ecologies, materiality, audience, and the schooling of emotion, I examine the physical and rhetorical traces left through writing, including erasures, revisions, margins, inscriptions, and changes in handwriting as evidence of selves continually negotiated across time. The owl initially represents loss and rupture; the magpie, scavenging what remains, comes to represent another possibility. By gathering fragments of past writing and bringing them into conversation with the present, I consider how journals allow us not simply to recover former selves, but to reencounter, reinterpret, and continue becoming.