The Diary

My acquaintance with diary dates back to my childhood. When I was in primary school, our teacher would mandate the students write a diary during summer holiday. In the first day of the school, we would show it to our teacher and sometimes read couple paragraphs from it to the whole class. During my high school study, we read ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’. A couple of years after I read the book, I had a chance to see her house as well. By coincidence she was born in Frankfurt am Main, which I value it as my second hometown after Adana.

More than two decades later, I started writing blog articles like a kind of diary and published them as books. I always associated writing a diary with Anglo-Saxons culture. The reasoning behind every diary may differ, but they have one thing in common is that they last. So many suffered during wars. However, it is hard to imagine it by just looking at the pictures or the films. Writing with one’s own words during hard times has something deeper compared to still images. Looking at the pictures of the war is something, reading Anne’s diary is something else.

I also take pictures and videos, to document events and places since I owned a digital camera in 2001. Now I am writing as well to add one more dimension.

My books are not like classical diaries. However, they are like the paintings of a painter or compositions of a composer. I develop ideas like painting or songs and realize them with my own words and images. I try to be as natural as possible with my own grammatical errors and poorly drawn images. Those imperfections are like my fingerprints which make my work unique. That’s why I avoid the trends like usage of AI.

Finally, I recommend everyone to keep a diary. It’s a kind of self-therapy to write.