Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives

Rat in the Box: Thoughts on Archiving My Stuff

Rat in the Box: Thoughts on Archiving My Stuff Susan McMaster “Mouse turds or rat turds? A few mouse turds are nothing, they can be brushed off...” I look with amazement at my neighbour and friend, Anne Goddard, formerly the literary archivist at the (then) National Archives of Canada, and a person I’d always thought of as precise, meticulous, organized, and very, very clean. She would paw through mouse turds? “A pity to throw all that out, a whole big box. Letters are irreplaceable, especially before computers.” “It really smelled! I think it was a rat. Anyway, it’s gone. I sent it out with the garbage this week.” “Hmmm. Pity.” Archivists are interesting people, living in the dreamlands of a longgone past, their life’s work to preserve it for an unknowable future. At the same time, they are immensely realistic, because they get to read all our shameful letters and late-night journal confessions. Finicky to the point of obsession, it’s archivists who turn pages as if they were handling leaves of gold through our childish first drafts and blowhard lists of life goals and 2 0 7 2 0 8 s u s a n M c M a s t e r failed intentions. They see where the money and the time actually went, and whether all that effort made a difference to anyone at all. They see in our rat-dirtied discards the mysterious beginnings of the stories, the dead ends and darkness, the unexpected sunshine or shivering retreat from the rain and cold of internal storms. Theirs is not the ground lens of literature, but the stench and mess of the garbage-sifter. And yet, what idealists. Who else but Anne and Paul, and Serge and Catherine1 would have encouraged me with such hopeful expectation to bundle my boxes together, ratty or not, for the good of unknown descendants in centuries to come? Who else is planning for fifty years, one hundred years after my death, planning for the scholars and lovers of words who might delve into my random accumulations and find comfort, surprise , mystery, romance? In the last three years, I have been archiving my papers, letters, photographs , documents, and objects—anything and everything that relates to my work as a poet, performance poet, and literary editor. I’ve had to consider what exactly it means to archive a writing life, my writing life. Along the way, I’ve encountered three rats: the rat in the box, the rat in the skull, and the secret rat. The Rat in the Box The first question, of course, is “Why?” Why archive my papers at all? For me, the first and most compelling answer came with finding that real and very smelly rat who nested in and excreted all over a box holding two years of my life in the basement. Over three decades of publishing, I’d accumulated a mountain of stuff I hadn’t been able to bring myself to throw out—strings of letters from writer friends; albums full of photos and clippings; artifacts and drafts and scores, submissions and scrapbooks from collaborations like Branching Out (the first national feminist magazine), First Draft (an intermedia group), Geode Music & Poetry (a.k.a. SugarBeat, a performance group), and Convergence: Poems for Peace (which took art-wrapped poems from writers and artists across Canada to every Parliamentarian in the millennial year); recordings, including Wordmusic, Dangerous Times, SugarBeat , Geode, Until the Light Bends, and Wordmusic 2; and anthologies including Dangerous Graces: Women’s Poetry on Stage, Bookware: Ottawa Valley Poets, Living Archives (a chapbook series from the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets), Siolence: Women on Poets, Violence and Silence, Waging Peace: Poetry and Political Action, and Pith and Wry: Current Canadian Poetry. Such projects involved many other creators and contributors besides me, so I just couldn’t toss the records into the trash. r at i n t h e B o X : t h o u g h t s o n a r c h i V i n g M Y s t u F F 2 0 9 On top of that, there were all my own personal manuscripts, notes, objects, and correspondence for scores of periodical and anthology publications and books, starting with the wordmusic volumes Pass this way again and North/South (wordmusic is a scoring system for multiple spoken voices...