A lovely story from the Washington Post:
Woman, 100, has journaled every day for 90 years: ‘No excuse for me not to’
Evie Riski’s father gave her a diary so she could follow his tradition of recording the day’s events in her hometown. It was a week before her 11th birthday.
Nine decades and almost 33,000 entries later, Riski is still at it, journaling every night before bedtime in her independent living apartment in Lakota, N.D., about 20 miles from where she grew up in Niagara.
Riski, who turned 100 last month, has not missed a single day of writing since her first diary entry on Jan. 1, 1936.
I just loved this story– talk about consistency! And I liked seeing that she stores her diaries in much the same way I do, dating them on the edge, though it looks like she dates hers on the top edge and I date mine on the bottom edge.
One thing that surprised me was that there were a few negative reader comments on the Post article, rather snidely saying that Riski’s diary entries weren’t very substantive or reflective. The examples shown were all from her childhood, so you’d think people would be a little more understanding that a 10-year old didn’t spend a lot of time writing about world events and her place in history. But I also think these comments point to a misunderstanding of the difference in keeping a diary vs. a journal.
The terms diary and journal tend to be used interchangeably, (including in the quote above) but a diary is usually a record of events– brief notes about what happened on a certain day. That seems to be the format Riski has consistently employed, often in small diaries with only a few lines per day. (Similar to the Harvard Coop diaries I used when I was that age.) But a journal is a more expansive kind of diary, with longer form entries that are more descriptive of thoughts or feelings. My own notebooks usually involve a combination of diary-ish entries and journaling. There’s no right or wrong way to do it– if writing a few simple lines about your daily activities feels right and is satisfying, it’s nothing to feel guilty about. Sometimes these simple little records of our lives may be just as interesting and valuable as multi-page deconstructions of every little thing we felt.
Do read the whole Washington Post article– at age 100, Evie Riski’s joy in a lifetime of notebook-keeping shines through.
Thanks for this wonderful story. In her photo, Evie looks at least 29 or 25 years younger than 100. I suspect that regularly engaging with her life and writing down its salient points has helped her stay youthful. Let’s hear it for diary/journal keeping, persistence, and cursive writing!
I love this woman! Her persistence is wonderful and she is a remarkable person. But the article makes me despair. I started my diaries in August 1969 when I was 18 and I’ve been keeping them up ever since, but I cannot ever reach 90 years of diary-keeping!
I am a lot more longwinded, however, and even the excerpts from my diaries that I’ve been publishing online are about 4 million words, and I’m only publishing some of the entries and I still have about 25 years to go to catch up to now.
A very nice story. I have 104 years of consecutive daily diaries. 1919 to 1960 and mine 1962 to present. Most of them are hard bound by teo manufaturers. Wolworth and Day-At-Glance.
They are a combination of daily and historical events that tell of the sucess and hardship of life in rural Nebraska, the Great Depression, moving West and finding new beginnings.
The entries start before household electricity and to today.
With artificial intelligence.