Megan Stielstra's Blog

A friend of mine had a boyfriend who read her journal behind her back. Took it out of her backpack while she was in the shower. I had horrible, nasty things to say about that boyfriend. You don't read somebody else's journal. It's private. Hands off.

Had she left the journal out in the open, it would have been a different story. Then I'd have said, "You're asking for it." Like that girl who wrote terrible things on her blog about her boss. Of COURSE the boss is going to find it and of COURSE the girl's going to get fired! And those two high school students who wrote journal entries about dousing their English teacher with gasoline and setting her on fire. After they’d glued her to the wall (?) and cut off her feet and killed her family in front of her. And then—this is the interesting part. The part that makes it unique—they turned those journals in to her. To be graded.

This is where you’ve really got to knock on these people’s heads and say, “Hello? Anybody in there?”

I've kept a journal for years. Some of those entries I read and think, This might be interesting to other people, I’ll post it on the blog. Other entries I read and think, Huh. I can use this description in the short story I’m working on right now. Still others I read and think, I will go to my GRAVE before anyone sees this besides me, usually because I’m either A. being stupid ('cause sometimes you are) or B. cruel ('cause sometimes you have to be), which means I have to fictionalize the hell out of those sentiments before they’d ever see the light of day, especially if the writing is about someone real. And I'm going to GIVE IT TO THEM. TO READ. FOR A GRADE.

In my classes, I assign journals but don’t collect them—we’ll read aloud from them, but my students decide what that material will be. Hopefully, they're smart enough not to read the entry about how they’re going to brutally kill me. ‘Cause that’s really not funny. It's scary. And stupid. And a waste of my tax dollars for these boys to be pleading innocent 'cause the writing was done in their JOURNALS, which were supposed to be PRIVATE, even though they were (and I'm sorry to beat a dead horse here, but, come ON!) TURNING THEM IN FOR A GRADE.