Issue 7: Archives, Earlier Selves and Writing Memoir
Hello my darlings,
Welcome back to my newsletter where I share short, poorly edited notes about stuff I find interesting.
Recently, I got some big news about a project I worked on last year. Thanks to the hard work of librarians and archivists at the University of Alberta and Internet Archive, the Edmonton Independent News archive of free weeklies is now complete!
This project began as a question I asked on Facebook last year. It was the height of the pandemic, and I was trying to use the time to make headway on some Creative Nonfiction projects, but I was missing some important historical context. The problem was that SEE Magazine, the free weekly independent arts & culture paper where I’d started my professional writing career, had folded like so many of its contemporaries in the last decade. But unlike mainstream papers, there was no official online archive of this or Edmonton’s other free weekly–VUE Weekly—before 2011. The life and death of the two magazines was chronicled in this excellent podcast.
I began looking for options, and found physical holdings at a few libraries. The kind folks at the Edmonton Archive offered to scan and send me a few issues, but I had no idea which ones I needed. So I asked the community if anyone knew anyone who might be able to help me out. A high school friend who now lives in Montreal put me in touch with Sarah Severson, a librarian at the U of A.
Sarah looked into the digitizing process and discovered it could be done, but brutal cuts to the U of A budget meant they would need external funding. I recruited my old pal and fellow SEE Magazine contributor Mari Sasano and we got to work on a crowdfunding campaign. The community stepped up again, and before it was over, we had enough funds to digitize full runs of both magazines.
From there, it was just a matter of painstakingly feeding each issue page-by-page through a special camera. A year later, we have a fully searchable, colour archive of all but a few issues (if you have physical copies of the first few issues of SEE, get in touch!). I’m proud of this work, and I think it will add immensely to our understanding of that period in Edmonton history. But one thing I ran into often from my friends who were also writers at that time was anxiety about what version of themselves they would encounter in those archives. “Oh no,” they inevitably said. “What did I write back then?”
***
As a journalist and Creative Nonfiction writer, I think a lot about archives because they are central to the kind of work I do. A few years ago, I had the honour of writing about a small subset of that conversation for University Affairs, dipping my toe in the complexities of archiving in the era of digitization and decolonization.
In the research process, I learned about the challenges around early computer-based archives from the 80s and 90s. Back then, before the widespread adoption of the pdf file type, formatting could be wildly variable. A lot of the software people used to save those files is long past obsolete. One researcher told me that people were donating personal archives full of unretrievable data from that time. The most reliable file format from that era, ironically, was physical paper.
I’ve also been thinking about my personal archives because I’ve been working on a memoir of my childhood and youth at the end of the 20th Century. I grew up in the age before phones and social media kept track of our daily thoughts, which means a lot of the material I have about my earlier selves is in notebooks and diaries. But I wasn’t a conscientious diarist. I tended to write on scraps of paper in school books, which are long gone. Later, I wrote stories and emails on computers now long dead. Part of me longs to revisit some of the intimate conversations I had on the Earthweb Sailor Moon java chat or ICQ. The rest of me is glad they’re gone.
I do have one full diary that I kept from the age 14 to just after I turned 21. There are, obviously, large gaps in that record. Sometimes I wouldn’t write in it for the better part of a year. I would lose the book, then find it crammed in the bottom of some trunk and fill it in on what I thought was important. These entries provide a useful chronological anchor for my work, but they also remind me of who I was back then, how I felt about myself and the world, which wasn’t always great.
There are parts of the diary that are still sort of painful to read for a number of reasons. In order to write about these parts of my life, I’ve had to do a lot of work to distance myself from that pain. But it’s gotten easier. I’ve even used the diary in the fact checking process for one or two essays, and once I read some of its funnier passages at an event called Teen Angst.
This is a common journey when revisiting one’s own early personal writing. In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick writes about the shame and frustration she felt looking at her diaries, and the process of coming to accept them, and even use them as material for her brilliant memoir Fierce Attachments. “One day–when I had been looking over an accumulation of pages possessed of what seemed to me the sufficiently right tone, syntax, and perspective–I opened the diary again, read in it a bit, laughed, got interested, even absorbed, and within minutes was making notes.”
What changed between the two readings was her confidence in her adult voice and the distance she was able to create from that version of herself. Rather than being embarrassed by the flatness of her youthful voice, she was charmed. This is actually a lot like my experience of counselling around childhood trauma–finding the distance from my earlier self to forgive her, even love her, in ways I couldn’t forgive or love myself at that age. I needed to do that before I could write about the girl in that diary. It's hard to make meaning out of things you still feel ashamed of.
***
We are in a time when the archive is becoming larger and more comprehensive (not complete, of course, that’s not possible). As this happens, it becomes more and more likely that we will run into earlier versions of ourselves we might find challenging. I'm still working on some residual embarrassment about some of the early articles I'm running across in the free weekly archive (a somewhat easier kind of pain to work through than that from reading the diary). But we owe our earlier selves a bit of leeway, a bit of kindness, don’t we? Otherwise, how will we ever learn and move on?
Have you met yourself in the archive? What happened? Drop me a line via Twitter to let me know. If you'd like to read more or subscribe, you can do so here.
~Erika