For her thirteenth birthday at the end of June 1943, Joyce Wieland received a diary as a gift. Until December of that year, she wrote consistently in the diary, her earliest writing extant. In these entries, always beginning with `Dear Diary,' she noted the weather, arguments, guests, and visits she made to friends. The highlights of her life during those five months were attending movies (twenty references to having seen films), occasionally getting new clothes and special treats -- fish and chips and cake. She also mentioned letters to and from her older brother Sidney, who was overseas until the war ended. Nearly eight years after that first diary, in 1951 Wieland began what she called `Private Notes and Philosophical Jottings' in a black fifty-cent notebook. The section in this collection, `Toronto Journal 1952-1955,' is made up of selections from this notebook. Here she wrote about her social life, her desire for love, along with her confusion about her feelings for men. She loved Brian Barney, an aspiring writer who introduced her to great literature, with whom she lived for a few years. His company was a pleasure to her as the two of them talked of literature and life, and took long walks looking for book sales. In this journal we learn about Wieland's reading: Andr? Malraux, Malcolm Cowley, and Colette. Colette was a writer whose life and books Wieland particularly admired; she talked endlessly to her friends about Colette. `Private Notes and Philosophical Jottings' shows clearly the conflict arising from Wieland's own desires and the typical societal expectations of that era in which a young woman was expected to marry and to give over her life to her husband and children. We can sense a progressive building of emotional intensity in her journal as she moves through her friendships, leaves Barney behind, falls in love with Michael Snow, and begins a relationship with him. Wieland wrote frequently of her two strong desires: marriage and making art. Sometimes the search for a suitable man took priority; other times she felt convinced she wanted only a career in art. She lived out much of her life in the early fifties inside the dichotomy of these two options. That Wieland could not stifle the passion for her art becomes clear by the end of this journal in 1955 as she looked for ways of harmonizing the two parts of her life she cared about the most. `France Journal 1956,' was written the spring after Wieland fled Toronto for France, thinking that putting physical distance between herself and Snow might be one way of discovering whether he was serious about her. Life on the other side of the Atlantic cast her Toronto friends in a different light; she eagerly awaited their letters as she became wistful about home. `I am very patriotic about Canada now,' she wrote. Wieland entered wholeheartedly into her experiences in France, even if she missed her homeland. Her journal gives us a picture of her interactions and experiences with new friends and her drawing, painting, and reading. She expanded the literary explorations she began when she lived with Bryan Barney: Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Simone de Beauvoir, Marcel Proust and Anton Chekhov. A few times Wieland wrote of her impressions in looking at art, and, as in the Toronto journal, she describes her friends and her feelings about them, her likes and dislikes, all the while revealing her distinct sense of humour. Living in a new environment was conducive to contemplation and formulating her ideas about her own work and art in general. The work of the artist, she concluded, was to give voice to whatever was within. At that time she voiced her thoughts on expressing love: `I must before time passes show in my work what it is to love,' she wrote. Her lover drawings were her attempt at doing just that. `Explorations in Words and Drawings 1956-1962' is a selection of poems and sketches, early lover drawings and cartoons. In some of these writings, Wieland expresses similar ideas as those in her journals. Her reading in the early fifties, her explorations of authors while she was in France, nourished her experimentation with language. In most cases Wieland did not bother affixing a title to these word sketches; they simply started and stopped. The longest one, `I am in Paris,' begins with an incident from her first visit to Paris in 1953 with her friend Mary Karch. Memories of events that occurred along the Seine move into impressions and free associations with her experiences there. Other selections in this section are more cryptic and, at the same time, energetically expressive. Wieland uses symbolism in a way that is somewhat mysterious. She excels at satire as she writes about critics, museum women's committees who like to think they are doing artists a favour, and businessmen of Canada. & Excerpted from Joyce Wieland: Writings and Drawings, 1952-1971 All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
