Writing from the Margins: Writing as a Contemplative Practice in the Notebooks of Thomas Merton and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

Writing is an inherently mystical act that is demonstrative of the writer's unique and sacred interiority. In the private notebooks of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Merton, their prose (and occasionally poetry) bears witness to a lifelong cultivation of writing as a contemplative practice. In this paper I engage the mystical theology of Christian monasticism and Modernist literary methods to explore the role of Woolf’s diary and Merton’s journal in their spiritual formations. This contemplative writing act is both meditation and prayer and the product of such a practice informs the public life and legacy of the writer. By situating Woolf and Merton's notebooks within the mystical literary canon this paper asserts that their private practice of writing was a devotional act.