Godwin's journals give early look into writer's adventures

When a writer called Gail Godwin and expressed a desire to write Godwin's biography, she was horrified. "I thought, 'who would know me better than me? I should do it.' "

Besides, Godwin's friend and fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates had suggested that Godwin publish her journals. "She said, 'There is a side of you in your journals and letters you should share with the world!' "

That's why the prolific Godwin, now 69, wrote an autobiographical novel based on her own early days as a journalist in Miami, "The Queen of the Underworld," and allowed Random House to publish the first volume of her journals, "The Making of a Writer, Journals, 1961-63."

Godwin said by phone from her home in Woodstock, N.Y., that after publication of the journals, she read an excerpt, and she "felt this wave of love as in 'Good for her! I'm so proud of her — for her courage and discipline. She wrote every day!'

"The next volume will take me to 1970, the year my first novel ("The Perfectionists") was published. My journal was the best friend I had, and the most trusted. The longer I wrote journals the more voices I could get — consoler, cheerleader, future me, past me — and I have done it steadily since 1961. I was trying to make a rendition of what it was like to be a female artist coming out of '50s America."

In fact, Godwin's collection of short stories, "Mr. Bedford and the Muses," is based heavily on her journals. "I had dreamed about the ladlady in 'Mr. Bedford,' and I re-read the journals, and what makes 'Mr. Bedford' so appealing is you have so many different people living in the boarding house. My journal gave me the details."

Born and bred in Atlanta but educated at the University of North Carolina, Godwin was always "a voracious reader." "When I was a young woman in my 20s, the only influences on me were men. When I was looking to be a writer, I read the diary by Dostoevsky — not even Virginia Woolf's diary was out. It was invisible to me that I was on a solo flight. Not many women were traveling around during my adventure in life. Did I threaten anybody? I'm sure I did. I wanted to be a professor or an artist — there is a lot of 'wanting' going on when you're that age."

In her journals, Godwin talks about how she had "a disease. . . . I want to be everybody who is great: I want to create everything that has ever been created. . . . I want to have written all the good stories, said all the clever things. . . . "