I never thought I’d say it. A notebook can be a writer’s best friend.

I realize many writers would shake their heads at this, being creatives who routinely make use of personal journals for capturing miscellaneous thoughts, interesting words, potential project ideas, and more. I know my habit of not using actual notebooks (as opposed to computer note apps) may not be the norm. But a notebook that a friend gave me as a retirement present became a huge repository for ideas and even rough drafts of poems during a recent two-week road trip I took this summer. Its usefulness was predicated on an earlier trip in late July and early August that brought home to me how useful, freeing and enjoyable it can be to write things down, even if what makes it to the lined paper canvas are only fragments.

As one who works almost exclusively on my laptop, most of the stylish notebooks (fine leather bound, monogrammed, etc.) I’ve been given over the years sit on various shelves in my house, unused. These notebooks have accumulated, and are concrete gestures of caring that have come my way over many years from friends and family members — all of whom are trying to acknowledge and honor my passion for writing. They’re beautiful, and — had you asked me just over a month ago — I would have said, also completely useless.

I’m officially changing my take and my tune. In late July, my husband and I flew to Sedona and had an amazing experience visiting my sister and her husband, who’d invited us to stay with them for several days. It was lots of fun, until the very end, when we got up on our last day and, while drinking our morning coffee, received word that our flight had been cancelled. We were able to re-book on a red-eye, which offered the only decent option, and decided to make use of our extra time — a whole day, basically — by driving to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Heading back toward the Phoenix airport later that day, text messages from our airline informed us that our red-eye had also been cancelled. I won’t go into the boring details, but if there’s a bright side, I was able to get three new poems out of the Sedona-and-airport experiences, which are circulating to different journals as I write this. I mention this trip because while I didn’t carry a notebook, I did take my tablet, and of course my phone, and for the first time in a long time, I actually jotted down some ideas to flesh out when I returned home. While these three new poems came together quickly and intensely, I feel like they are now finished enough to circulate.

It’s not that I never write interesting words down, or ideas for poems. It’s not that I don’t appreciate that notebooks can be a great means of record-keeping and inspiration for many. I was actually a prolific journal keeper in my youth, and while in college, generated so many notebooks full of my personal thoughts that at some point much later in life, after hauling them around with me for decades, I made the decision to throw them all out. That was well before the days of laptops, smart phones and our digital universe. No, the new thing here for me is that I realized if I listen better during conversations, and can jot down even rudimentary ideas if I land on a word or a thought I’m afraid I will lose, this is a way of keeping my contract with the muse. I’ll be able to go back over what I’ve written and have both a context and an incentive to take those ideas a little further “down the road.” (Note: I do write down words and thoughts that interest me in my computer notes app, but what I do there never feels very organized and is often hard to find when I’m looking for it.)

Our Sedona experience was just wild enough that I felt like I wanted to preserve it somehow creatively. By capturing pieces of conversations and different aspects of our experience, I was able to come up with fresh material for poems. This inspired me to take an actual notebook with me when 10 days after we returned to Gainesville, my husband and I embarked on a two-week long adventure in our camping van as we headed out west to visit family and a few national parks, including some we already knew we loved and others we’d never been to before.

We returned less than a week ago. In the week since, that notebook has been at my side, waiting for me to rediscover and reinterpret everything I jotted down. I haven’t cracked it; it’s been a busier than expected week, and I am holding off until I am able to carve out some time to really focus. In the meantime, I am reimagining myself in the passenger seat of our van, reaching for that always-accessible notebook to pen my thoughts about everything from losing my sunglasses — yes, that happened — to experiencing the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. It was a strange comfort.

It’s not just that this notebook might hold a few new poems, the prospect of which always fills me with excitement and anticipation. It’s that I learned to reach for it as a companion I could speak to in bits and pieces, from my mind, my heart and a place of both remove and intimate dwelling. In a voice that might be scattered, weird, even nonsensical. A companion I could speak to without self-censoring, as only a writer can.