Last week, I decided to write an article about journaling. What is the McGill Journaling Experience? was my big question. Through my writing journey, I learned that journaling is a highly individual experience, and a closely personal endeavour.
My first idea for this article was to approach arbitrarily chosen McGill students, hold up my cell phone, open a voice memo, and ask “Do you journal?” to which they would say “yes” or “no”. I would ask “why?” and the conversation would last two minutes, and I would walk away and move on to my next brief interview. Once I had ten interviews, I would extract short snippets from each and make a grand collage of the McGill Journaling Experience. Somehow, this scattered attempt at an article would reveal the deep emotional chambers of journaling.
What exactly was it, she asks, that she wanted to remember? And the grand question she ultimately faces: “Why do I keep a notebook at all?”
For the next few days, I saw many people potentially susceptible to my journalistic interrogations. I could approach that girl scrolling on her phone next to me in Leacock. I could ask the girl with the stickered headphones in the library whether she journals. But something about not personally knowing these people stopped me from asking them anything. How could I expect to understand their journaling experience without understanding them? I realized that I could not make small talk out of a topic so close to people’s souls.
So, I neglected the Tiktok-esque idea of briefly interviewing strangers, and instead I did what I assume most writers do upon needing inspiration: I read Joan Didion. In particular, I read an essay of hers called “On Keeping a Notebook” (which appears in her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem). The essay begins with Didion inspecting a note she had written in a notebook years before: That woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today. As the note’s contents are seemingly random (no character mentioned in the note is connected to Didion), Didion wonders why she wrote it down at all. What exactly was it, she asks, that she wanted to remember? And the grand question she ultimately faces: “Why do I keep a notebook at all?”
For Didion, who has been fascinated with notebooks since childhood, notebooks are not meant to be reflections of objective fact. Instead, notebooks are snapshots of moments, conversations, and sensations, things that, for clear or intangible reasons, sparked Didion’s interest. Her notebooks are snapshots of how life feels – not of precisely what it was but of how it felt to me, as Didion phrases it. While they may be ostensibly pointless, Didion’s records in her notebooks are reminders of the meaningful moments in her life. She considers that one day, when the “world seems drained of wonder,” she will “simply open” her notebook and rediscover her “forgotten account” of the beautiful “world out there.” One day, her notebook will serve as a diorama of life itself. Reading Didion, I realized that I could not reduce the art of journaling, or notebook-keeping, to impersonal two-minute conversations with randomly selected McGill students.
So I asked my friend Raphaële if I could interview her about journaling. The first time I met Raphaële was a few months ago, around a small, hearty Shabbat dinner table. She was talking about her life in France (where she grew up) versus here, in Montreal, and I remember wondering if she wrote in a journal. She spoke in a way I found bold and eloquent. In that sense, I suppose I had an instinct that Raphaële was a journal-keeper.
And indeed she is! A few weeks after meeting Raphaële, I sat with her in La Fontaine Park and we journaled alongside each other. She gave me a sticker, of a hand with painted black nails holding a maroon maple leaf. I placed it on the left-hand side of my page as my first ever multi-medium addition to my journal. Beside it, I wrote, Raphaële is sitting next to me journaling… I don’t think that I feel pressure to talk to her when we are both silent like this. And we did talk that day, quite a bit, but the closeness I felt to her was brought about just as much by journaling as it was by conversation.
Journaling is intimate, I realized, a close entry into a person’s inner world and chaotic memory. It is a manifestation of what makes their life meaningful.
We met again after class one late afternoon, and walked around the Place des Arts Christmas market. I learned that there are many more kinds of maple syrup than I had ever known, and that Raphaële loves detailed necklaces with star imagery. She gave me her camera to hold for a moment and I clumsily snapped a photo of her grinning in front of a bustling candle booth. Then we walked in the windy (but not biting) cold to her apartment.
As our hands thawed and tortilla chips burned in the oven, Raphaële and I sat on her bed and flipped through her journals. Here is where I became the official interviewer, and she the official interviewee. We leafed through grocery store receipts and photo booth strips, highlighter-yellow drawings of paper-cut-out stars, artful and thoughtfully messy lyrics of Don McLean’s “Vincent” and Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”, images of Norway (where Raphaële studied abroad), some pages full of condensed, urgent writing and some filled entirely of pictures.
We talked about journals and diaries and notebooks. Raphaële’s projects are journals, incorporating scrapbooking, art, and written entries. She explained that she started journaling during her studies abroad in Norway, when a volunteer gave her a notebook and told her to write down one positive thing a day. “For a year,” Raphaële remarked, “I did not miss a single day.”
Raphaële described her experience in Norway as being so “intense” and “amazing” that she needed to “keep a record” of it all. This “record-keeping” style of journaling is reminiscent of Didion’s, capturing real-life moments and mundane memories. She explained that “mundane things” that “would have been forgotten” are accessible for her to “read again” in her journals. “When I integrated scrapbooking,” Raphaële noted, “it carried even more of that nostalgia, keeping physical reminders of daily life.” Images and scrapbooking are, according to her, in “symbiosis” with traditional written journaling, as they are both real, felt representations of everyday habits and emotions. Journaling “ages like wine,” Raphaële mused, pondering how there is an intentional beauty in looking back on past journals.
This is not the McGill Journaling Experience. This is the heart and humour of Raphaële, whose style of journaling is, in every way, her. As I looked through her journals, and listened to her speak about them, I appreciated both the content of her words and the context surrounding them: the scent of burnt tortilla chips and the fairy lights illuminating the room, and the walk that led us to the apartment and the relationship we had built until that very moment. Journaling is intimate, I realized, a close entry into a person’s inner world and chaotic memory. It is a manifestation of what makes their life meaningful.
