The Mundane and the Meaningful Moments Found in the Notes App of Your Phone

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The notes app on your phone can be a repository of the quotidian aspects of life – a grocery list or reminder about a doctor’s appointment. But these notes can also be revealing, intimate and beautiful. It might contain a cache of private thoughts and feelings – the fragmented summary of a bad dream, the first line of a poem, or ideas for how to propose to your partner. This juxtaposition of the mundane with the meaningful is one reason artist Rel Robinson felt compelled to put together the new collection, “iPhone Notes,” which gathers the ephemera captured in the notes app of local artists and writers. We talk about how the notes app can be a reflection of self, and we invite you to share your notes. Guests: Brontez Purnell, author, "Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse" and "100 Boyfriends" Rel Robinson, writer and artist; editor of "iPhone Notes," created as part of Conventional Projects Rita Bullwinkel, author, "Belly Up" and "Headshot" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:37.1	From KQED.
0:37.9	From KQED.
0:50.0	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:53.4	For many people, the Notes app on their phone is the place to write out a to-do list
0:58.3	or remember a recommendation for a good movie or recipe.
1:01.4	But these notes can also be revealing and intimate and beautiful.
1:06.0	As one listener puts it, the Notes app is like a view into their soul.
1:10.5	We talked to contributors to the book,
1:12.5	iPhone notes about the ephemera they have on their devices, and we invite you to share yours
1:18.3	with us. Share your soul, that is to say. It's coming Madrigal. You're reading through the new book, iPhone Notes,
1:45.3	compiled by artist Rell Robinson. I was struck time and again how the jagged shards of life
1:50.5	that get flaked off during any old day get filed away into the Notes app on our phones.
1:57.0	And there's something happens to them. The new context tumbles them into something beautiful or haunting or funny.
2:03.4	It's not that the poems we write on our phones cannot be good poems sometimes,
2:07.4	but that the poetry which emerges from the process of living can be made of any string of words,
2:12.3	not just the ones we intentionally laid down syllable by syllable.
2:17.4	So today we're talking notes in your phone.
2:20.5	We're talking about the unusual and fascinating little book, iPhone notes.
	...

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