There are two ways you can get involved and carry on the story:
Your Diary Reflections
We invite you to share your thoughts about diaries.
If you would like to join in further research into online identity, please visit Ego-Media’s DiaryBox at www.ego-media.org/diarybox
LoveMyDiary
Calling all diarists!
Are you are diarist? If so we would like to invite you and thousands of other diarists to contribute your stories to an extraordinary ‘self portrait’ of today’s diarist.
As Great Diary Project patron Michael Palin comments:
“There’s no such thing as an ordinary life”
LoveMyDiary is an exciting and unique project to uncover the hidden lives of living diarists and their innermost thoughts and writings. Please visit this link for more information: LoveMyDiary.
The Great Diary Project aims to collect as many diaries as possible for long-term preservation. No other kind of document than the diary offers such a wealth of information about daily life and the ups and downs of human existence.
We’d love to hear from you and to have your contribution to the biggest portrait of living diarists ever attempted.
On a blank postcard:
- Tell us why you keep a diary and when and where you write it
- Write down the most personal or important entry from your diaries
- Send us a photograph of yourself in your own diary writing space
- Tell us whether you would like to be a diarist in focus as part of our gallery of featured diarists.
Please send your postcard and photograph to: LoveMyDiary, Polly North, Bishopsgate Library, 230 Bishopsgate, London, EC2M 4QH.
Alternatively send by email to: [email protected] (we would prefer postcards and printed photographs for the project but understand that this might be difficult for some diarists)
(You could choose to keep your handwritten stories anonymous by not including your photograph or any personal details.)
The material you send to the GDP for use in the LoveMyDiary project will be for public use, in perpetuity. Your email address will not be used for any external marketing or by any other organisations. However, we would like to retain your email address so that the GDP can contact you about the forthcoming exhibition. By sending us your responses you are agreeing to these terms.
‘I have perceived my selfe to be stirred up here of late to more waspishness and bitterness of speech, then 7 yeares before… I found through examination diverse blemishes in my selfe.’
Richard Rogers, a sixteenth-century puritan, diary entry, 28 February 1588.
Michael Palin on LoveMyDiary @ BBC’s Get Creative
Michael Palin: “There’s no such thing as an ordinary life”
For some it is their most private possession, so how would you feel about revealing the most personal and important entry from your diary? That’s the idea behind LoveMyDiary, a new project to uncover the hidden lives of living diarists and their innermost thoughts and writings.
But if you haven’t started a diary yet, we are here to help. BBC’s Get Creative caught up with the Great Diary Project patron and committed diarist Michael Palin to find out how he started documenting his life, from the birth of his children to the death of loved ones and everything in between ……
Download PDF to read more.
‘I shall perhaps obtain actual relief from writing. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow.’
Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent.
