Creating the creative subject: The 1000 Journals Project, creativity and autobiographical identity

The 1000 Journals Project: a series of blank journal books, inscribed with a volume number, brief instructions and a return address (mailbox and, crucially, website), passed globally from individual to individual - it is a DVD, a monograph publication, a website and a kind of mass archive. In thinking about this project, specifically as life writing, I am interested in what it might tell us about the kind of representative community these kinds of projects encourage and reward in this context. For example, there is a predominance of visual representation (embellishment, illustration, sketches, collage) in the journals, and this paper is attentive to the ways in which (literally) visual registers of expression have gained popularity and meaning in contemporary life writing. However, I also want to think about this in terms of genre: the project declares an allegiance to the journal form that is significant both for how contributors engage with the project and for how the project is framed by its curator. As a structuring principal and aesthetic mode, diary in this context brings into focus a discursive register to this project as autobiography: for example, the authentic life as an expressed (visible) life and creativity as therapeutic.