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Archival Matters Sally Clark I am a Canadian playwright. My first play, Lost Souls and Missing Persons, was produced by Theatre Passe Muraille under the direction of Clarke Rogers in 1984. I wrote several plays after that, including Moo, The Trial of Judith K., Life Without Instruction, and Jehanne of the Witches, to name a few. In the early 1990s, some of my writer friends were “selling” their archives to universities for “large sums of money.”1 They were urging me to do the same. It seemed too early. I associate archiving with taking stock. It’s like clearing an attic. You get rid of old things so you can move on. But in order to do so, you must stop and reflect on where you’ve been. If you’re still in the current, the last thing you want to do is stop. I felt that I was just getting started, that I didn’t have time to stop and sort through my work. You can’t create new work while you’re archiving old work, and if your old work is only a few years old, then the act of self-reflection is bound to prevent any new ideas from strolling into your head. I write in longhand, and when those sheets of paper start to pile up and look like they’re going somewhere, I then type them into my computer and print out the pages. I use these sheets as my hard copy and edit or rearrange from there. As I work, the paper becomes a living entity. Even when the 13 3 13 4 s a L LY c L a r K play is finished, the pages retain possibilities for other directions. I wrote a screenplay for Lost Souls and Missing Persons about ten years after I wrote the play. A screenplay is often radically different from the source material . For instance, there were scenes that had been taken out of the play because they were too filmic, and those abandoned scenes worked well in the screenplay. I found it extremely helpful to have the early drafts close at hand and not in some library halfway across the country. For me, archiving one’s work has a finality to it that puts it in the same category as making a will or getting married. Issues of disposing of one’s property and accepting one’s mortality come to the fore. It can take many years before I feel that I am “done” with a particular piece of writing. Once I am finished with it though, that pile of paper goes from being a wealth of possibilities to garbage. It is alive or it is dead; there is no interim stage for me. As I never had the time or inclination to spend an afternoon sorting through my papers to see which ones were really dead and which were playing possum, I simply put them into boxes and left them. In 2007, I finally decided to try and donate or sell my archives. Since the 1990s, funding for universities has steadily dwindled, along with funding for the arts. When money is tight—and, for as long as I can remember, it has always been “tight” for the arts—then that great wealth of archival material becomes nothing more than a pile of mouldy papers. What distinguishes those papers from garbage? Seeking a buyer for one’s archives is similar to brokering a marriage. A writer with papers is like a bride with her dowry, carrying the intrinsic risk of waiting too long to sell the goods. The negotiation is over what the dowry is worth and the unspoken factoring of what the bride is worth. There is the sense of being formally accepted in Society. Does someone think you’re worth keeping? What are you worth? Andy Warhol’s prediction that everyone would have fifteen minutes of fame was uncannily accurate. I think of television stars who were worth a lot at the height of their careers, and are now forgotten . Should we be collecting their “stuff” for archives? Where do you draw the line at archival matter? When does someone go from being unimportant to being someone whose papers and ephemera are worth keeping? I decided not to dwell any further on these fruitless ruminations and set myself to the task at hand. I was aware that the University of Guelph was collecting the archives of Canadian theatre artists. I asked Ric Knowles, who...

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