Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women's Archives ed. by Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl (review)

This is an eclectic and multifaceted volume highlighting the multiple roles of the archive, taking its place within an institutional system as an ongoing creative site and as embodied in print and digital media. All the while the archive remains a thing of flux demanding re-examination and resisting demarcation.

Ruth Panofsky and Michael Moir highlight how archives become places of ethical and professional complexity. Noting past attempts to discuss Alice Munro's archival materials and offering a personal account on the archive of Adele Wiseman, Panofsky and Moir underscore the complex and provisional agreements that seek to mediate between scholars, literary executors and archivists. Taken alongside Vanessa Brown and Benjamin Lefebvre's personal accounts of conducting research within the archives of L.M. Montgomery, the collection shows formal archives to be lively and dramatic places, generating new and fascinating insights. Brown and Lefebvre also reflect on the role of Montgomery's archive in heightening her literary status, given how she has been marginalised 'as a result of her gender, popular appeal, and misrepresentation, generalization, and devaluation as a children's writer' (p. 233). Paul Tiessen's work on the Sheila Watson archive echoes this understanding of archival performance, willing that the voices of the archive be heard. Further attention to print archives is then displayed by Katja Thieme, discussing 'The Country Homemakers' page of the early twentieth-century Grain Growers' Guide, and by Catherine Bates, addressing Alice Munro and Marian Engel's own archival fictions.

Aside from the academics seeking to reconfigure literary narratives, the collection contains reflections on what it means to archive one's own writings. Essays by Sally Clark, Daphne Marlatt, Penn Kemp, Susan McMaster and T.L. Cowan draw together the economic and cultural impulses behind archiving with the highly personal, reflexive role of shaping an archive. McMaster sums this up by the shift in exploring 'what exactly it means to archive a writing life, my writing life' (p. 208). Here McMaster's conclusion that the writing self is part of a community overlaps with Marlatt's opening ruminations on the collective public reconstruction performed by the archive. In turn Marlatt reminds us how taking deposits from the contemporary writer into the archive complicates gendered statements of the personal being political, in choosing when to erect or dismantle barriers between the personal and the writing life.

Other contributions to this volume challenge received notions of the archive, pointing out how digital technologies negotiate the ephemeral and the accretion of deeply meaningful artefacts and texts. Cecily Devereux incisively defines the Internet's digitised marketplaces as forms of archives, and also correctives to official archives. Devereux draws out how eBay might make legible what a community 'unofficially preserves elsewhere, at home, in private collections, in shoeboxes' (p. 35). Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl also develop the digital scope of the collection, focusing on Sina Queyras's online blog 'Lemon Hound' as itself a literary archive. In common with Devereux's focus, Shearer and Schagerl's essay unpacks the significance of fluid digital participation. 'Lemon Hound' is here understood as an archive of contemporary Canadian women's cultural production opening out into an informal global system of decentred publics.

Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl's collection of essays provides an excellent cross-section of contemporary work on Canadian women's literary archives.