Lower Cape Sketchbook

Note: This is an excerpt from my father's journal (1961-62). I love his ideas for using his sketchbook as a tool for his art. I also think this could be a lesson in writing using all one's senses ("to feel the feel of it") and making a collage of words.

Perhaps I have already begun this book with the infrequent entries in a diary started last summer. But what sort of book could I write concerning our life on the Cape? Not a diary simply, for too many books take that form. A chronicle of nature that follows the cycle of the seasons. In some respects it might follow this form. 

Rather I will write a sketchbook of what I see around me from the elbow of the Cape north to Provincetown – Cape Tip – or wherever my travels on the Cape take me. For every few days finds me in a different spot, nosing around; the beaches, the bay, and marsh shores along the tideline rubble, looking for flotsam to add to my beach collages. 

In my collecting trips I look for almost anything that carries the marks of time. Anything characteristic of the environment of sea, bay, shoreline; whether wood, metal, shell, or bone. If they are small enough to carry I take them and dry them out and let them set for a time to make (them, us?) aware of their bounty. 

So I will record in my sketchbook that which I cannot carry but which is part of the environment – wood, metal, shell, or bone. Indeed it may be part of the scene, the effect of where I am. It will be a collage in words, a searching for the same effect that time-worn objects have—words on paper for wood on wood. Cork on wood. I want the reader to be able to rub his hand over a weathered washed up plank and feel the grit of it, the smell of it. To feel the feel of it.