How to make a junk journal

I don’t remember how I first heard about junk journaling, but I know that I was immediately like, Well, this is made for me personally.

A junk journal is a scrapbook/photo album/diary/collage. The “junk” part comes from the fact that you fill it with stuff that you encounter as you go about your life: Receipts, stickers, tickets, and other bits and pieces that add color and texture and help tell your story. As a lifelong journaler, author of a book about journaling, and former scrapbooker, it immediately spoke to me. I like it because it’s a super inexpensive and low-barrier-to-entry way to be creative and to capture memories in a single place. 

I wrote about junk journaling in The Nice Life, in the chapter about writing your own narrative and taking your life seriously. I interviewed Emily Hassman, a longtime internet pal who teaches a junk journaling workshop at Pudding, her art studio in Eugene, OR. She gave me a lot of good ideas and tips, including the suggestion to use a notebook with sturdy paper and a binding that will be able to accommodate a lot of layers once you start filling it. (If you want to avoid buying anything new, she recommends using an old book as a starting point, and tearing out half the pages to make room for all the stuff you’re going to add in.) 

It’s a little hard to describe a junk journal because it can truly be anything you want it to be, so I’ll just show you the one I made after our trip to Maine/Acadia National Park last fall. The only things I bought for this were the notebook itself, a bottle of rubber cement, and a roll of washi tape; everything else was stuff I just acquired for free, or was a little souvenir I would have purchased/collected anyway. (Think: postcards, bookmarks, pins, stickers.)

I started with a 6” x 8” accordion kraft paper photo album that only has 15 pages; I like starting small with stuff like this, both because I’ve learned not to overcommit to new hobbies, and because I figured it would look better if it were fully stuffed as opposed to half-empty when I finished. Throughout the trip, I kept an eye out for junk: I hung onto the free map for the Island Explorer bus, the tissue paper and little bags I got when shopping, cute napkins, a Maine magazine in the rental where we stayed, receipts, business cards from local merchants, etc. I also used a mini photo printer to print photos from my phone every day that we were there (so I’d actually do it).

The collecting aspect turned out to be one of the most enjoyable parts of this project; I discovered that once you start actively looking for these little odds and ends, particularly ones that are colorful or unique, you start to notice them everywhere. 

After we got home from the trip, I sat down and got to work. It’s been a million years since I made a collage, and I forgot how straightforward and easy it is. (I used a mix of rubber cement, tape, hot glue, and a glue stick for the different items, but This to That would probably be helpful if you want to make sure everything is really stuck on there.) My goal was to not overthink it and to just have fun.

It ended up being such a pleasure to assemble! I wasn’t precious about anything, and was happy to cut things apart to make them fit/work because, again, it was all free or cost like $2. I also incorporated some stickers/patches I had at home to add more texture/color, and because I’m definitely guilty of saving stickers and patches for the perfect thing and then…never using them. I’m trying to break that habit, and this actually helped.

I’ve also been incorporating more layers into my everyday journal. For example, here are a couple of pages I put together last year after Kiyana’s mom visited us and we went to the Met. 

To me, junk journaling is a perfect hobby for 2026. It’s cheap/free and isn’t super consumption-centric—in fact, you can do it using literal trash. And it’s hard to capture in a photo how tactile a junk journal is, and how good it feels to hold in your hands. It feels like a really nice antidote to AI slop and to everything being expensive and stupid right now. ✨

‘The Nice Life’ cover design + pre-order links!

Hello! It’s a glorious day in New York City and I’ve got something fun to share: The cover design of The Nice Life! 

I wrote this book as a guide to resisting the enshittification of everything, which is making life so expensive and just…uninspiring, bleak, colorless, and boring. It’s about returning to the things that make us fundamentally human—imagination, art, beauty, joy, creativity, relationships—and intentionally making meaning together, both with and in service of others. It’s also about finding free/cheap ways to approach all of this; “just say no to buying crap” is a big theme, and going to the library, thrifting, borrowing, taking advantage of free things, and upcycling comes up in every chapter. It’s really meant to be for people of all ages, but I specifically kept teens/young people in mind as I was working on it, and thought a lot about how parents, aunties and uncles, and other adults can make creating a nice life a group project, and how kids can make us more open and curious help us see the world differently.

I really love where we landed for the cover; to me, a sumptuous (hand-painted!) still life of a bowl of cherries perfectly represents both the simple, everyday pleasures this book celebrates, and also the importance of art and creativity in feeling connected to other people. 

The Nice Life comes out on October 20, but you can officially pre-order it now! Pre-orders are very helpful for authors, as they signal to retailers that there’s real reader interest in the book; if you’re so inclined, you can do so using any of the links below, or request it at your local indie bookstore.

Amazon

Barnes & Noble 

Bookshop

Books-A-Million

Apple Books

Google Play

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One of the things I write about in The Nice Life is the idea of participation: not waiting to be invited or hoping someone else will make your nice life happen for you, but seeing yourself as an actor (as in, a person who takes action) and choosing to be present, here, with all of us, having embodied, real experiences.

I am not, and have never been, a person who cares about sports (and this week reminded me why—being emotionally invested in a team’s success is so stressful), but the collective euphoria across New York City as the Knicks dominated the NBA finals has been thrilling, and was such a clear example of what participation looks and feels like on a grand scale. Millions of people made the decision to simply be a part of it, even if they never cared all that much before. At a time when a lot of bad shit is happening that’s out of our control, it’s important to be reminded of the ways in which we do have agency. You can just wake up one day and decide to be a person who talks to strangers about the Knicks, and that conversation and human connection can make your day better. You can wake up and decide to do a lot of things.

Like many New Yorkers, Kiyana and I watched the game outside last night with our neighbors because it’s the easiest and also the best way to do it. Right before tip-off, a neighbor friend wordlessly handed me a blue and orange basketball Rice Krispie treat that had suddenly materialized with the naughty generosity of someone offering a joint at a party. I have no idea who brought them or how I was lucky enough to one, but it was one of many nice little moments during this playoff run.

The whole night (and, really, this whole week) has felt like the clearest example of what participation looks like on a large scale, and how uniquely energizing it is. As Barry Petchesky wrote for Defector this morning, “It's often surprisingly easy, in a huge city, to feel alone. That wasn't possible this month. NYC had a vibe I can only really compare to the 2020 election results coming in, and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and the 2003 blackout, and the days after 9/11. A sense that we were in this thing together. This was about the Knicks, but the lesson was that sharing it had been the entire point all along. All you had to do was go outside.”

Finding ways to go outside and connect with other people is absolutely the entire point, and it’s really nice to have (or create!) a reason to sit shoulder to shoulder with other humans and just let yourself feel things together. 🍒