Keep, Burn, Curate, or Donate: What to Do With Your Old Journals

We store them in closets, attics, and garages. We stack them on bookshelves, and, for the cautious among us, stash them in fire-proof safes. Some of us want to re-read them; others don’t.

They are, of course, our journals and diaries.

(A Love Letter to the Fountain Pen.)

No matter which word we choose, in their quiet company we chronicle events, examine emotions, record the physical, set goals, reflect, and dream. We scribe poetry and song lyrics. We sketch and paste in mementoes.

As writer Caren Lissner remarked about her stored journals: “My old diaries are full of rants and scribbles. They’re boring and make me cringe. But I would never be able to part with my useless, full-of-garbage prose, impossible-to-read journals.”

Can you relate? I do.

It’s hard to part with all that raw interiority—the words and pictures of our second selves.

Yet when you talk to journal-keepers about what happens after storage—the future of those journals—you meet a whole lot of question marks.

Like the writing of a will, it’s often a decision delayed. Until the mood strikes or the choice coalesces, to rid oneself of the past. Until the time comes to downsize or move, along with diminished storage space. Until the shadow of mortality arrives, and we wonder, “Where will my journals go after my passing?”

Trashed, burned, bequeathed? Turned into artwork, digitized, donated?

We may be aware of these options, but also feel unequipped to think our way to the right personal fit.

To that end, I reached out to journal keepers as well as the experts who study them to gather context for these decisions. I discovered a plethora of considerations to weigh as journal-and-diary keepers process the future of our second selves.

Toss or Burn

In the words of Lynda Monk, director of the International Association for Journal Writing, “It’s tender ground how we think about our journals—how we keep them, protect their privacy, and decide their future. It’s an entirely personal decision.”

Note, for instance, the divergent responses of two journal keepers who destroyed their journals. Leadership consultant, Blair Glaser, burned most of her teen and adult diaries in a fire pit in her yard, with no looking back. “It was just my wounds, unartfully recycled,” she told me. “There are more interesting things to pay attention to and write. I guess I am snake-like, without much use for my old skins.”

Jackie Carroll, an educator who resides in Finland, purged her emerging-adult journals twice, leading to lingering ambivalence. She explained: “I have pride in the strength it took not to carry the weight of what was processed in those journals. As I got older, I regretted losing access to the rawness of those initial impressions and in-the-moment events that had such an impact on my life.”

“There’s no one and done, “ said IAJW’s Lynda Monk, mirroring Carroll’s experience. “We are in an ongoing relationship with our journaling lives. What we might want to do with our journals at 25 can be very different than how we might feel later in life.”

So, how do we anchor ourselves in decision-making amidst in the flux?

Monk, who with Eric Maisel co-edited The Great Book of Journaling: How Journal Writing Can Support a Life of Wellness, Creativity, Meaning and Purpose, proposes three principles as focus points: responsibility, impact, and control.

With no plan for their future, Monk foretells, someone will have to deal with the journals. That someone then needs to guess your wishes for the journals’ afterlife. That someone might read portions of the journals, with lasting emotional impacts—on them, on you, on your relationship. Reading assorted entries, that someone might focus on a moment-in-time at the expense of the broader picture.

“We tend to work through painful or traumatic experiences in our journals,” Monk observed, drawing on years of counseling experience. “As time passes and people heal, their journals may well reveal more self-empowerment.” That developmental arc can be missed when that someone dips in selectively.

One of the biggest fears people have as journal keepers, Monk emphasized, is someone reading or doing something with their journal without their permission. When we leave the future of our journals to fate, we renounce the control over privacy we guarded through our lives.

In sum, stored journals are a responsibility. Which means leaving clear instructions for what we want done with them. Which means planning early, in case of the unforeseen. “Diaries,” Monk emphasized, “are more than a storage issue. What we do with them is a soulful question, a life question, that impacts not only ourselves but those who mean so much to us.”

Creative Transformations

Memoir and Curated Diaries

For the purpose of memoir, stored journals appear to be an unequivocal boon. Roughly 20 journals from about ages 14 to 24 helped Shannon Luders-Manuel remember events that informed her forthcoming memoir, Black Prince: A Father-Daughter Story in Black and White.

“My diaries are nothing special,” Luders-Manuel told me. “You have to find the nuggets mixed in with whichever boy I was obsessing about at the moment.” She plans to bequeath those diaries to her niece, whom she believes will resonate with her “humorous, pathetic, endearing” journey.

Other journal keepers view a behest to a family member as problematic. Writer Megan Vered carted around a cardboard box of journals for years. “I do not want my children to be burdened with them after I die,” she insisted. “On the other hand, they’re like a part of me, and I’m not ready to say goodbye to them.”

Margaret Sartor, a visual artist recently retired from the Documentary Center at Duke University, steered a path for her stored diaries through these concerns—extracting the nuggets while protecting the people potentially affected by their existence. She curated her high school diaries and published them as Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s.

Editing six-years of adolescent diaries and letters, she cut characters, focused on material that was funny and profound, and featured the young protagonist’s development. “I knew some people were going to be made vulnerable by my diary, so I tried to make myself the most vulnerable character of all,” Sartor told me. “The ethics of nonfiction is something you have to figure out—what to leave in, what to tell, and how to tell it.”

In another step from raw diary to literary art, Sartor set the edited diaries between an introduction and epilogue, both keenly descriptive and self-reflective. Providing family and cultural context, these bookends also create a conversation across time—the adult artist and teen diarist speaking to the best-laid plans and fateful mysteries of becoming oneself.

Yet it is Sartor, the mother and wife, who decided the fate of the unexpurgated diaries. She has donated her papers and photographs to the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke. Sartor decided to make her photographs fully available to the public, but to seal her diaries for 25 years after her passing. Her children would be older then, she said, should they choose to read them.

Unless. . . then came a caveat.

A recent conversation between Sartor and her husband opened the possibility of extending that restriction further into the future. It’s a decision she has yet to make.

As Lynda Monk said so aptly: “We are in an ongoing relationship with our journaling lives.”

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Legacy Journaling

Journal keepers with a desire to bequeath their journals to family or friends—without disclosures leading to embarrassment or strife—should consider legacy journaling. Pioneered by a retired Holocaust educator, Merle Saferstein authored Living and Leaving Your Legacy, a tome of journaling experience and advice, both to model and instruct.

From 359 journals stored in a fire-proof safe in her home—yes, you read that correctly!—Saferstein created the first of two volumes. From decades of notebooks, she organized her journal entries under themes of personal significance, such as parenting, spirituality, and relationships. Twenty years in the making, Living and Leaving Your Legacy was driven by Saferstein’s wish to share her life’s work as a journaler while helping others to understand the benefits of introspective writing.”

In Volume II, Saferstein guides readers in the creation of journal-based legacy books for their chosen audience, oftentimes children, families, or friends. The method is straightforward. Re-read your journals; identify themes you want to highlight; select entries relevant to your reader; edit and synthesize for unity; print or bind as a legacy book.

Your Life Through My Eyes is the title of the legacy book that Saferstein gifted to her adult daughter—a compendium of the mother’s journal entries about her daughter, starting in the toddler years. During its creation, Saferstein bypassed entries possibly hurtful or overly reminiscent of painful events. “I was careful and honest,” Saferstein told me. “I hope it will be precious to her. I would have loved to receive a book like that from my mother.”

So what about those 359 stored journals? Saferstein spent two years speaking with friends and colleagues about the decision. She considered digitizing, but it felt overwhelming. She looked into donation but couldn’t find a repository open to the full collection. Finally, she journaled her way to a decision.

“I concluded that my journals contain my deepest, darkest thoughts, and I can’t share them with my children,” she explained. “I proved to myself that my journals were for myself and no one else.”

Saferstein’s will states that she wants her journals destroyed.

Unless—then, came a caveat.

“The only way I would like them preserved is if, God willing, I have great-grand-children. I don’t want my children or grandchildren to read them. But if it’s far enough away in time, I would think about that route.”

Again, Monk’s words resonate. Our journals and ourselves are in an ongoing relationship—a soulful question, a life question.

Digitalization & Donation

Essayist Lizzie Roberts, who lives in Berlin, has been storing her diaries for more than 30 years. “I don’t like to think about destroying them,” she shared. “Their existence is strangely soothing to me, giving me the sense that my life is more of a story than a jumble of moods and experiences.”

Yet when viewed from a writerly perspective, she thinks of those pages as “repetitive and sad, often illegible, and disappointing in plot.”

What manuscript librarians want journal keepers to remember is that those notebooks—no matter the author’s estimate of their worth—are primary sources, the stuff of history.

As Jennifer Tuttle, Director of the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England, put it: “Think of them as incredibly valuable documents of everyday life in a place and a time, which historians recognize increasingly we need to know more about.”

Without the preservation of ordinary people’s journals, the individual shards of cultural and social history are lost.

There’s something else about their value: honesty. Tuttle elaborated: “There aren’t a lot of places where people, and especially women, tell the full truth about their lives. Where they express anger or frustration or defy the pathways set out for them. Diaries authorize the writer to say what they actually feel. No one polices them. That’s where you find out the truth—truth, you would never know if you only read official histories.”

She makes a strong case for “pause and reflect” before “toss or burn.”

I reached out to Michelle Krowl, an historical specialist in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, for guidance on donation. Where do journal keepers start and how should they proceed?

Finding the right match takes preliminary thought, I learned. You need to think about the journals’ content, filtered through the lenses of place and time. If your diaries speak to community issues, a local repository, such as a town library’s special collections or a regional collection, might take interest. If the diaries relate to your college years, your alma mater might take interest. If the diary speaks to national events—a war or terrorist attack, a migration wave, protest movements or legal debates—those themes might speak to the interests of a state or national collection.

Then, follow the natural connection and best fit—to a local, university, or state repository.

Should a national interest stand out, consider a query to the Library of Congress’ “Ask A Librarian” online feature, where you will receive guidance from a manuscript professional.

Once you query archives, be prepared to hear about practical matters, such as storage, preservation, and accessibility. There’s only so much space in collections for the intake of physical objects. Water-damaged, moldy pages or difficult-to-read handwriting might prevent an acceptance. If budgets are tight and staffing low, the digitization of diaries might be stalled, limiting public access.

Whatever you do, said Tuttle, advising about donation, “Don’t give up at the first ‘no.’”

Digital Journals

Might digitization be the answer to these complexities?

Not necessarily.

As Hannah Braime, creator of the Becoming Who You Are online community and published author on digital journaling, shared: “It encouraged me to get more creative with the journaling that I might share, but there are a lot unknowns.”

On the one hand, Braime has appreciated the creative avenues opened by the merger of technology and journaling. Especially during her traveling years, she benefited from on-the-go, 24/7 access. She learned to create journals that included written sections, along with photographs, videos, voice recordings, digital art, and location-and-weather tracking. Even now when she’s settled, she maintains several at a time, for record-keeping, private reflection, and her children. The last are, in essence, digital scrapbooks—legacy projects—that she hopes will bring her children pleasure when they look back upon them from adulthood.

On the other hand, Braime recognizes the risks. Some applications time-out, the format becoming non-transferable to other programs. Some applications don’t allow users to nominate legacy contacts. Encrypted passwords can be lost, preventing access to the owner. Potentially, password protection could be breached.

“There isn’t a great system currently for passing on digital journals,“ she said. “I will need to be proactive about what to do with them should something happen to me.”

Scanning Journals

What about scanning one’s journals by hand? Is this a legacy decision?

Only partially, said the Library of Congress’ Michelle Krowl. It all depends on the journal keeper’s purpose.

Scanning is time-consuming, a page-by-page process, so go in with your eyes open, she advises.

If safety is the issue—having back-up copies in case of fire, floods, or other types of loss—then, scanning is worth the effort. If bequeathing pages to a group of loved ones is the purpose, go ahead.

But if you’re thinking that scanning is a necessary first step toward donation to a repository, save your time. While a few scanned pages might be worthwhile to present to an archive you want to approach, there’s no guarantee that scans of the entire diary will be acquired by a repository or hosted online. Some institutions may only digitize materials for which they own originals. Others may have their own scanning specifications to control the quality of the images.

Summing up, Krowl said: “Diarists need to ask themselves what they anticipate when they digitize. Alone, digitization is not a legacy decision.”

New Horizons: The American Diary Project

Responsibility, impact, privacy, control—there’s plenty to consider before making the decision about the future of stored journals.

We shouldn’t forget, though, that new options emerge over time. Noteworthy among the most recent is the American Diary Project, launched in October 2022 by Kate Zirkle, its founder and executive director.

Zirkle started the organization with one clear goal: to rescue and preserve the writing of everyday Americans. The mission statement pledges: “To honor the diversity and depth of the human experience by providing a free—and accessible—public resource that preserves, archives, and digitizes handwritten diaries and journals from everyday Americans.”

No other organization in the United States has opened its doors as widely. The American Diary Project invites submissions from journal-keepers from all walks of life and accepts their writing—physical, digital, historic, contemporary—without restrictions. Once received, journals are catalogued by volunteers according to documentation standards set by the Library of Congress. Time permitting or upon request, journals are digitized for public access.

However, like digital applications and hyperlinks, organizations perish. Will the American Diary Project thrive and survive? If not, what happens to journalers’ hopes for their notebooks to exist in perpetuity?

Shelf space, Zirkle told me, is one of the organization’s foremost challenges. She looked for partnerships with local, university, and historical repositories, but was turned down. “I think that’s why a project like this hasn’t been started in the United States,” she remarked. “Everyone is afraid of how big the collection will get and concerned about not having enough storage space.”

The next step for Zirkle, her Board of Directors, and band of volunteers is to work on grants to secure a physical archive and staff its operations as day jobs. Having already set down its non-profit status and administrative infrastructure, she remains unflinchingly optimistic.

For donors with doubts about newer options, Michelle Krowl of the Library of Congress offers these guidelines: “Those who want to donate need to decide what risks are they willing to bear? How comfortable do they feel with the long-term survivability of the place or website to which they donate?”

Echoing the observation of IAJW director Lynda Monk, Krowl concluded: “Those questions will have different answers for each person.”

Self-reflection. Such is the journaler’s calling as well as the basis for decisions about the future of our second selves.