Creating a Literary Archive by Rebecca Rosenblum
In late fall 2018, I was invited to donate my literary papers to an archive. I was flattered, surprised, and intimidated. As any writer knows, an invitation to share work is a hope—that what I write matters, or it might, to someone. The archive invitation seemed to me all the more flattering and intimidating because it implied that someone might care about my work after I’m dead.
I’ve always enjoyed collecting bits and pieces from my literary life, but I haven’t been organized about it. The decision to recycle something or keep it in a file drawer for 17 years is based on mood and whimsy, mainly. And in my moody, whimsical file drawers, was anything interesting to anyone besides me? I’ve never thought of myself as particularly modest or humble—you really can’t be, if you go around suggesting people spend 6-10 hours reading your book—but I had trouble imagining future scholars caring about me or my work. I could imagine them being annoyed that the archive was missing all the important stuff, stuff I had somehow recycled in 2014 because it didn’t fit in the file folder. Also, during the initial conversation, I was only 40. This may be one of the few contexts in which one can be “only 40.” What if I lived another 50 years and never published anything else? What if I published tonnes more and this stuff from before age 40 seemed trivial?
I panicked, and then, paralyzed by the idea of forever, did no work on the archive for a year except give away some bridesmaid dresses that were blocking access to my files. But after a while I calmed down. Maybe I didn’t have all the right papers or the most interesting stuff, maybe nobody would care. Or maybe the papers would sit with those of my literary betters for years and occasionally help out a scholar or a journalist. That’s still better than keeping everything in a Rubbermaid tub.
I started sorting documents. Beyond the bridesmaid dresses, other non-literary items I found in my office included:
a lot of hats, handbags, and tote bags—I kept about half and donated the rest
my wedding veil, which I wore for part of the archive-creation process
gift receipts for most gifts bought in the past 8 years—I recycled those, so if you didn’t like that sweater I gave you in 2014, you really should have spoken up sooner
all of my tax forms and supporting documentation back to 2004—I kept what the law requires and shredded everything else, which was satisfying
vast sticker collection (mainly animals, some flowers, which I mostly put on birthday cards but occasionally use to cover up hateful graffiti when I spot it), which I moved to my day-job office
a bunch of my great-grandmother’s 115-year-old china, which I finally unpacked and moved to the kitchen
dead bugs, a wrapped gift I never gave, my sewing box, a set of blank rewriteable cds from the “mixed cd” era and my pencil case from high school
So those are things that didn’t go in the archive. Which left everything else. I decided to work backwards, thinking it would be easiest to start with the periods I remember best and gradually go back into murkier times.
My most recent book, So Much Love, came out with McClelland and Stewart in March 2017. Between now and then were a few award nods and the documentation from those, reviews and interviews about the book, and clippings, booklets and advertising from festivals and reading series I’d appeared at—all dutifully foldered and popped in the box. And then I was prior to the book coming out. Oh boy. I spent over two years working with editor Anita Chong, who is both talented and patient, so there were a lot of versions, and of course prior to Anita coming onto the scene there were my own edits, my husband’s, my writing group’s—
I repeated the process for each of my two earlier books, The Big Dream and Once, and my chapbook, Road Trips, as well. I observed that either So Much Love had the most tortured process or I had recycled some of the drafts from the others and forgotten. Still the edits from the earlier books, which I worked on with another great editor, John Metcalf, were fascinating. Once a book achieves its final form, it’s easy for me to forget it used to be entirely different—and worse. The archiving process reminded me how much I owe to my editors and our work together. I also found my voluminous correspondence with John, still ongoing and pretty much the only literary correspondence I’ve maintained by post. It took two bulldog clips to get all the letters into the box—both editorial letters from our two books together and more general bookish chatter.
Putting together the press folders, I found that Once has the most press clippings. If you judge by sales, So Much Love has been my most successful book, at least so far. But Once, which was also reasonably successful, came out in 2008 and there simply was more print coverage back then. That was something I knew theoretically, but it was startling to see the clippings stack up from papers I hadn’t heard from in ages. I was surprised to realize the change in a just over a decade.
And then I was back before my first book, into journal submissions and drafts of individual stories. Though I have every journal, magazine and anthology my work has ever been published in—and tell me what egoless nut does not—I actually declined to part with them for now. I like to gaze at them, ok? Along with the journals, I hung onto contracts for works still in print, plus all my old diaries, which I could not bring myself to properly vet—or even look at, really. The archivist said I can make multiple submissions throughout my life as an author, so hopefully they—and I—will be up to getting this stuff archived in a future submission.
Onwards, or backwards, through the drafts of stories and essays I worked on in grad school, complete with workshopping notes. My first submissions calendar, which is actually a recipe calendar from the Dairy Farmers of Canada, with submissions, acceptances and rejections carefully recorded on various dates. After that year I switched to an excel spreadsheet. Folders of miscellaneous stories and “chapters” from “novels” that never got beyond 40 pages, written pre-grad school when I was adrift in a sea of potential and free time but not actually a very good writer, except very occasionally for a page or two.
Not a tonne of creative work from my undergrad years survives, but some essays do, much wilder and more experimental than I remembered. Surprise! By this point, I was starting to doubt that I wasn’t a packrat, as previously claimed. I found letters from McGill, my alma mater, telling me I had won creative writing awards, the prize for which was the letter itself. I found a few sparse pieces from the creative writing workshops I managed to take. I found a more robust than I’d remembered portfolio of all my writing for student magazines and newspapers. Apparently I wrote a study of church architecture in the downtown core, despite knowing nothing about any of it? If I remember anything about my younger self, and I’m starting to wonder if I do, I’m guessing I did it just for the headline: “Jesus in Montreal.”
High school was my first creative writing class, a huge watershed moment for me, and I saved everything. It was the last semester of my final year and other than those writing class materials, the only high school stuff I included is the booklets from kids’ writers’ festivals that included my work.
I stopped archiving at the beginning of high school because the earlier stuff is very—juvenile, even for juvenilia. I didn’t really see what anyone could learn from it, even if they were really into me, or really hard up for paper topics. But again, I do have the option of sending more stuff later and I do have all those diaries and letters. Covered in stickers.
I made a folder of financial documents related to writing and one of promotional materials from my various book tours, and that was that. I sealed the boxes. Over about six weeks, I went through thousands of pieces of papers, shredded perhaps half, kept maybe less than a quarter, to arrive at the rest in two bankers boxes. That’s it. My whole writing career, and that’s a pretty generous definition of career, since it includes high school.
The process was shocking and valuable, humbling and amazing. I have been lucky—lucky to have had this career, defined how I want to define it, so many opportunities and publications and correspondents—and hats and tote bags. But most of all it was interesting to see how I developed and changed as a writer while staying essentially myself, just better and more sensitive, more thoughtful versions, though constantly finding new ways to garner long editorial notes and painful bad reviews.
I’m sure there are better, or at least easier, ways to take a look at where one has been as an author, the sweep of a whole life of writings, but this is the way it worked out for me. I’m glad I got the chance to do it, and to keep going, to keep trying to create and get better, and put more stuff in the box.
credit: Mark Raynes Roberts
Rebecca Rosenblum is the author of the short story collections Once and The Big Dream, and the novel So Much Love. Her fiction has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Trillium Award, and several others. She is originally from Hamilton and now lives in Toronto with her husband and cats. www.rebeccarosenblum.com