"Sojourners in the Archive": Reflections on the Art of Recovery Work

"From the Archives," "Reprints," "Profiles," and their newest sister, "On Culture," are features Legacy has developed to encourage the archival and recovery work crucial to developing and sustaining the field of American women's writing. In this issue in "From the Archives," we feature two essays that focus on the processes of archival work rather than the results. These essays prompt us—as what Lois Brown calls "sojourner[s] in the archive"—to consider the various professional, personal, and pedagogical meanings of this sojourn. Many of us have scrounged for travel monies, scribbled diligently with pencils only, engaged in intense negotiations with librarians, wearied our backs in hard chairs as we made the most of every minute of our research trips, fielded in library foyers cell phone calls from bereft children and partners left behind, and made miraculous discoveries that have changed the course of college curricula, our own careers, and our understandings of the past. Yet too seldom do we have exchanges about the experiences—the financial hardships, the personal costs, the physical toll, the frustrations and the compensating joys—that comprise the heart and soul of archival research's place in our lives.

Versions of the two essays that inaugurate this expanded understanding of "From the Archives," Lois Brown's "Death-Defying Testimony: Women's Private Lives and the Politics of Public Documents" and Jean Pfaelzer's "Hanging Out: A Research Methodology," were first presented at "Women in the Archives: Using Archival Collections in Research and Teaching on U.S. Women," a symposium held at the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England in Portland, Maine, 11-14 June 2009. We print them here to share them with Legacy readers not present at the symposium and to signal our interest in continuing this conversation in future issues. To submit similar reflections on archival sojourns, send an essay of five thousand words or less to Legacy-editor@ucsd.edu. Submissions will be peer reviewed.