Contemporary Notes: Dr. Bronwen Tate

10 notebook strategies, writing with pleasure, and how an award-winning poet takes notes

Feb 6, 2023

This week I have a real treat for you.

is one of the most talented note-takers I know—you’ll see what I mean. She also happens to be my favorite contemporary poet, author of
Ok, But How?
, and a dear friend.

We met in 2008 while getting our Ph.D.s at Stanford and formed a dissertation-writing group with three other wonderful ladies. Since then, we’ve continued to support one another as we all found academic jobs and published books.

(Side note: Bronwen actually reviewed my first full “Noted” post, back when I was very nervous about writing on the internet…strange to think that was only five months ago.)

Just over half of our writing group, meeting in Philadelphia in March 2022: Bridget Whearty, Bronwen Tate, and me!

Bronwen is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and Undergraduate Chair at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. She’s the author of the poetry collection The Silk the Moths Ignore (Inlandia Institute 2021), National Winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize.

Here’s a picture of my cat reading Bronwen’s award-winning book:

Every time I chat with Bronwen, I come away with so many ideas for how to fill a notebook. I’m not always disciplined enough to stick with them, but maybe you will be!

So here are ten note-taking ideas from Bronwen’s collection.

Most of Bronwen’s recent notebooks come from Ex Libris Anonymous, a company that re-purposes old books.

1) Poetry Exercises

Fresh out of college, a 20-year-old Bronwen was living in Italy, teaching English, and applying to MFA programs (she went on to earn her MFA from Brown in 2006). Preparing for life as an MFA student, she practiced her craft with poetry exercises. For example, here’s a page where Bronwen does Rita Dove’s “10-Minute Spill,” an exercise from The Practice of Poetry. These are the instructions:

Write a ten-line poem. The poem must include a proverb, adage, or familiar phrase that you have changed in some way… as well as five of the following words: cliff, needle, voice, whir, blackberry, cloud, mother, lick
You have ten minutes.

And this is 20-year old Bronwen’s ten-minute spill:

Bronwen using a notebook page for a poetry exercise

2) Translation as a Way into Writing

While finishing the MFA program, Bronwen designed the following poetry-writing exercise. As she read Proust in French, she would search for ten words she didn’t know. Then, she’d write them out. She explains: “I’d use a combination of what I thought the words meant and what I discovered about them to start a poem.” Bronwen describes this exercise as an “intentional way to get at a poem through material rather than feelings or ideas.”

Gathering words from Proust (circa 2006)

On the right-hand page, Bronwen translates some of her favorite lines from Proust. Many of them eventually became titles in Bronwen’s published work.

like chorus, even when not needed, stayed

on scene to add to the spectacle

apple leaves like a [wedding] carpet recently

touched                      by the white trailing satin

3) Daily Writing Rituals

For as long as I’ve known her, Bronwen has set writing challenges for herself. For a while, she wrote a sonnet every day. Then, it was a daily ode. She tells me:

They mostly weren’t successful as poems, but they’re interesting to look back on (and they might become material for something down the road).

Here’s another daily practice: writing 5-line poems with images or keywords gathered from the day.

When I found a rhyme that held the kernel or spark for the poem, I’d shift to the computer to finish it and revise. I did these five-line poems as a daily practice.

Gathering images and keywords from the day

On the left-hand page, Bronwen plays with describing her son playing with metal objects and her infant daughter’s mouth:

he holds 
a nail    a paperclip 
the cold what money 
colder exposed ankle 
Voluptuous    her snot milk            
She Night, her coughs awake-- 
Voluptuous milk, rapt mouth

This turns into the following exquisite lines in The Silk The Moths Ignore:

Tate, *The Silk the Moths Ignore*, p. 38.

4) Digital Notes

At some point in the process, Bronwen moves to the computer. Usually, she generates material by hand and then collages bits and pieces together digitally.

For drafting poems, she uses Scrivener.

Bronwen shared the following screenshot of a poem she is is working on for a new collection. Scrivener allows users to capture previous versions of a text as “snapshots,” in order to compare different iterations. In this example, Bronwen took a longer poem and trims it down to ten lines.

Bronwen edits a poem in Scrivener. You can see the "snapshot" function on the right-hand side

5. Collecting Quotations

Around 2003, Bronwen developed a habit of writing out quotations with a red pen. This helped her find quotes quickly. It also distinguishes quotes from her own original writing. This proved especially helpful in multi-use notebooks— those that they include original poetry, to-do lists, recipes, random notes, and quotes.

Here is one of my favorite pages from Bronwen’s early 20s. Bronwen is in an Italian hospital, having just broken her ankle. She is hooked up to an IV, but doesn’t yet understand how IV’s work and thinks she can’t move her arm while the needle is in place. So she writes with her left hand:

NOT DARK ENOUGH TO SLEEP. TOO DARK TO READ. HELL.

Bronwen’s notes from an Italian hospital bed (2004)

Underneath, she tapes the food delivered to her hospital bed (pasta in broth, prosciutto, mixed vegetables, bread, cooked apple).

Once Bronwen regains use of her right hand, she welcomes it back and copies out a quote in red.

6&7) One Notebook/Two Purposes: the Commonplace Book & The Frame Review

A commonplace book (a collection of quotations) is a type of diary that records one’s literary life. In her most recent newsletter, Bronwen reflects on using the commonplace book as a tool for focus and coherence:

When I remember that the Commonplace Book practice is (among other things) a practice in making peace with partial knowledge, I’m able to begin an entry even if I feel distracted or incoherent or in need of further reflection. And, spoiler alert: the practice itself becomes a source of focus and coherence because it IS an act of reflection.

Read the full post here:

Ok, But How?

Do You Need More Structure or More Space for Intuition? (Or Both?)

Hello Friends, Welcome to new folks who subscribed because 1) you just finished Intro to Poetry with me at UBC (such a lovely class! I’m missing you already!), 2) you read my friend Jill’s brilliant newsletter Noted and saw that she shared an example of the daily diary review frame I use…

5 months ago · 28 likes · 6 comments · Bronwen Tate

The following picture shows how Bronwen collects quotations in the same notebook as another kind of diary, the Review Frame. Here, she’s writing in two directions so that they will meet somewhere in the middle.

One notebook: two uses—The commonplace book on the left-hand side and the review frame on the right

We weren’t quite sure what to call this form. Bronwen suggested “recto-verso” or “dos-a-dos notebook.” She writes,

I like having these things bound together in the same cover but each on their own side.

Those of you who read my post, 12 Ways to Keep a Diary, will remember the Review Frame, Lynda Barry’s method for recording a day from Syllabus. Divide a page into 4 boxes. Barry recommends setting a timer for each section (3 minutes, 3 minutes, 30 seconds, and 30 seconds). Bronwen usually skips the timer and fills the allotted space.

Lynda Barry describes the review frame in *Making Comics*

Review Frame directions: Going clockwise, write about things you did, write out the things you noticed, sketch a picture, write out a quote and/or question.

Here’s one of Bronwen’s Review Frames from this past May:

Bronwen’s Review Frame from May 8, 2022. Owen and Vesper are pictured on the bottom right; they are her adorable kids.

Bronwen tells me that this has become a family activity. She’s working through Barry’s exercises with her husband, Caleb (a very talented artist) and their two kids.

Here is a Review Frame that little Vesper created.

Vesper’s Frame Review: She went to school, saw a dead slug and a porcupine. Her question: Who is the half blood prince? (They were reading *Harry Potter*).

Bronwen holding Vesper to show her the fallen snow. At the time, they lived in Vermont while Bronwen was working at Marlboro College (which, sadly, closed in 2020).

8) A Day in Images and Words

Bronwen wanted to try out some new watercolors, so she captured snapshots of her day. These include a dialogue between her kids (“We’re playing ‘Animal Boss’…”); images from the kitchen (Bronwen’s an incredible cook); and notes on Toni Morrison’s novel, Love.

9) Making Comics

Here, Bronwen experiments with the comic strip—which, she describes as a “sequential art.” On this page, a meditation on hunger and addiction, Bronwen describes how her daughter, Vesper, has begun drawing people and animals with “messy red jam-smeared mouths.” She imagines her young child theorizing her own drawings: “it speaks to an interest in hunger in my work…” Bronwen also notes her student’s senior thesis: “my student writes about shooting up and then eating cabbage rolls with his grandmother.”

This practice helps Bronwen knit together disparate parts of her day.

10) Picking Keywords from a Mug

Noticing I only had nine examples, Bronwen offered one more to make it an even ten. Here’s a keyword exercise she learned from Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Bronwen will draw a keyword from this mug:

Then, she’ll jot down the first 5 images that come up. From there, she picks “the one with the most life in it” and begins to write. Currently, Bronwen is working on a collection of essays and has found this exercise particularly helpful.

Reflecting on the many notebooks Bronwen shared with us, she wonders what role they play in her life.

Are they documentation? Material for future writing, part of an artistic process? Are they a tool for my mental well-being, a way to stay with my thoughts a bit, listen to myself? Are they objects in their own right?

Perhaps, they are all of these things.

Writing with Pleasure

In a twist of synchronicity, I found a copy of Helen Sword’s new book, Writing with Pleasure, in a Soho bookstore a few days ago.

Reading the introduction helped me better understand Bronwen as a writer—a writer, I might add, who finds writing pleasurable. One of the reasons for this might be that Bronwen writes in multiple mediums. Sword finds that writers who use a mix of analogue, digital, and hybrid tools are more likely to experience writing as pleasurable. She summarizes:

These findings suggest that some writing tools may be better suited than others, not only for specific kinds of writing, but also for specific kinds of writing-related pleasure.
3

You can read the beginning of Writing with Pleasure here.

Notes on Bronwen’s Notes

Turn writing into a ritual by creating daily/weekly/monthly rhythms for yourself. While we were writing our dissertations, Bronwen challenged herself to write for 25 minutes every day for 100 days!
Be the teacher and student: assign exercises to yourself. Bronwen is a brilliant teacher. She creates exercises for her students, but she’s been doing this for herself since her early 20s.
You don’t need to be an amazing artist to add drawings to your notes. Even amateur scribbles convey information. Bronwen feels that she’s not a talented artist (I disagree). The point is—you don’t need to be great at something to do it. Notes are not about perfection; they are about process.
Try writing the same thing using different tools. For example, start writing by hand, and then move to the computer. Bronwen uses notebooks for generating material and the computer for workshopping and shaping poems.
Taking notes doesn’t need to be a solitary activity. Bronwen includes her entire family in note-taking exercises.
Don’t throw anything out! You can mine old notes for material. Bronwen describes her writing process as one of sifting through notebooks and collaging bits and pieces together.

One More Organizational Tip

One last trick I just learned from Bronwen. If, like me, you have subscribed to a ton of newsletters and your inbox resembles an overgrown forest, try this: create a filter for messages from “@substack.com”—now everything from Substack will go directly into a single folder.

This is how you do it with Gmail:

Settings—> See all settings

Filters and Blocked Addresses—> set the following criteria: skip inbox, apply label “Newsletters,” and Categorize as Forums

On the left-hand side of your Gmail page, you should now see your “Newsletters” folder

On that note, if you’ve emailed me and I haven’t responded, it’s because I didn’t see it. (Thank you

Jane Ratcliffe

and

Kenshō studio

for being so persistent!) It seems that responding to this newsletter directly doesn't always work. If you’d like to send me a message, you can reach me at jillian.hess@gmail.com.

I hope Bronwen’s notes have inspired you to pick up a box of colored pencils and try something new! If you enjoyed this post, let me know by hitting the heart.

You can also support “Noted” by commenting, recommending, and subscribing. Also, if you purchase a book using a link in this post, I may earn a small commission. All those earnings will go towards the “Noted” research fund.

Till next week,

Jillian