Dream Houses

Keeping a diary is not an unarchitectural pursuit. What is a record of your most intimate thoughts and feelings if not a monument to how you came together, a blueprint for the construction of your self?

In this spirit, the artist Donna Dennis has chosen to make her diary available for public consumption as though it were one of her sculptures—the forsaken diminutive houses and hotels, say, that she showed at O’Flaherty’s this past spring. One evening in late April, Dennis was at Karma Bookstore, across the street from O’Flaherty’s, for the launch of that published volume, Writing Toward Dawn: Selected Journals 1969–1982 (Bamberger Books). She read aloud a handful of excerpts, though it was the November 12, 1971, entry, in which she examines her youthful obsession with repositories of domesticity, that struck me the most: