Turning the Notebook into a Book

Dawn Nazaré November 18, 2010. Photo Copyright Al Mennie.

Since finding my old notebook, I’ve been working through its pages and bringing together photographs from the same period. The notebook contains brief entries, handwritten observations and reminders I made for myself. Some are only a few lines long. Turning those notes into a book has meant returning to them and expanding on what was happening around them, while keeping the original handwriting alongside the fuller account.

One entry is dated 18 November 2010, at 5.15 in the morning, in Nazaré. I hadn’t slept. My head was buzzing, and the plan was to get to the harbour for six, going by the headland first to have a look at the sea.

Reading those few lines brings me back to the practical questions we were dealing with. What would the waves be like? How would Nazaré behave in the swell that was coming?

Looking through my photographs has been another part of the process. They show what I had the opportunity to photograph, from wherever I happened to be at the time.

That is what makes them useful alongside the notebook. The photographs and the writing come from within the same experience. Neither was made with this book in mind. I want to retain that quality in the finished book: the brief notes, the handwriting, the photographs and the fuller account of what was happening. Together, they record my involvement in the North Canyon Project during those first years, from 2010 to 2013.

At this stage I think the book is going to be called The Nazaré Notebook.

It has been a substantial job bringing it together, but finding those pages has given me the opportunity to preserve an account that had been sitting unread in a drawer for years.