When she was younger, Allison Moorer used to believe that she wanted an intellectual existence, a life of the mind. But now, at 42, she sighs, “What I’ve realized that I have is a life of the hands—I’m always just making something, or I’m writing or drawing something, because it makes me feel connected; it makes me feel real. It’s the same way with music—I just want to make it.” Hence, her latest ambitious set, Down To Believing, which documents her recent split from her husband, Steve Earle, and even the motherly guilt she felt when their son John Henry, now four, was diagnosed with autism two years ago. Moorer will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on her.
Moorer: I am a compulsive list maker. I get it from my mama. She would, periodically, write out rules and regulations for my sister and me on yellow legal pad paper in her incredibly neat hand, and would also make lists of goals and things to do and keep them with her in her purse or in the file folders she sometimes toted around. I’ve been making lists since I was in high school. I make daily lists of things to do, lists for the week that I cull from for my daily lists, long-term goal lists, things-I-need-to-get-done-that-I-don’t-know-when-I’ll-get-to lists, ongoing-projects lists, song-idea lists, things-to-make lists, the list of lists goes on and on. I keep them all in whatever notebook I’ve decided will be the perfect organizational tool and will therefore fix my life, and refer to it constantly throughout my day.
I am also a compulsive notebook buyer. I have a soft spot for paper in general, but a neatly bound book of it, unmarred and perfect, attracts me like almost no other tangible thing. My main notebook where I keep my lists, is a Moleskine Professional Notebook (whatever that means), but I also have a Tibetan-made one I found at the Rubin Museum on 17th Street that I write haiku poems in when I’m inspired to do so, a slim little orange one decorated with cherubs that I bought in Paris on a 40th birthday celebration trip with my best friend that I keep my philosophy and Buddhist study notes in, a huge black sort of generic spiral-bound sketchbook where I paste home and style references, and a smaller Moleskine sketchbook of ideas for clothing and objects to stitch up. They are all very personal and extremely private.
I guess I need a list of notebooks. I wouldn’t want to lose track of them now would I?
Joan Didion wrote in On Keeping A Notebook, that “keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
Maybe she means that I’m just always tying to start over. Because a fresh list in a fresh notebook? That’s a whole new lease on life.
Video after the jump.
