Small Things, Carefully Kept

Giving your life that Archival Quality

I got this very lucky work-study job in college.

In the nineties, which was basically before the internet, you didn’t get your work-study job off a website. If you were on financial aid, you went to the office at the beginning of the semester and paged through a physical binder of available jobs.

So my junior year, I got to the binder early and landed an incredible opportunity: assistant to the archivist of American literature at my college’s rare book library.

I loved the job, and I loved my boss. I did her correspondence, and got her coffee, and talked about books. And to say that I romanticized the rare book library— and the job of the archivist-- is such an understatement.

I’m a child of time travel mysteries and fantasy novels. Libraries play a huge role in the fiction of my youth. So a rare book library with very heavy security? That’s the dream.

While I was working there, the entire library was undertaking a massive project: changing over their storage system from black paper acid-free boxes to new gray acid-free boxes for storing old papers. I have no idea what was better about the gray ones, but every day, we were throwing out all these perfectly good black boxes.

So I decided to take home some of them — basically, I wanted to archive myself. For a couple of weeks, every time I left work, I took a couple home with me. I put my journals and graded papers in them. It made me feel very important.

(When I think about this now, it feels like the setup for one of those YA mysteries, or maybe a heist movie — walking out of the library every day with seemingly empty archive boxes. This was actually just a couple of years before the security at the library got really tight because someone stole a signature, I think it was George Washington’s. But when I was there, I had the run of the place, and I felt like the big sister in Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.)

One of the greatest of all time: the original historical mystery for a generation. Also, such a good “archives” story.

Fast forward 26 years, to this week.

I’ve been thinking about archives a lot this week. Because I’ve got another very lucky job: I’ve been teaching storytelling for the Society of American Archivists. This is thrilling, since clearly they’re my favorite librarians (don't tell the other librarians).

In February I’ll host a storytelling show with archivist storytellers, where they’ll share about their personal connections to their archives. So I've been going through the story submissions for the show, reading all these little story snippets from archivists across the country, and I've found myself reflecting on two things:

First, my romantic ideas of the library when I was 20 were absolutely right, this job is exactly as exciting as I remember. Hidden collections! Finding long-lost relatives! Etc.

And second, archivists all seem to share one trait: deep care and reverence for even the smallest pieces of others' lives.

Someone wrote about going through her grandmother's office after her death, making sure everything had its place. Another archivist found a letter from 1948 written by a woman who was a spy in World War II, expressing the same frustrations about a bad day at work that she herself was currently feeling.

The stories are full of the letters, photographs, receipts and everyday ephemera in their care – things that maybe weren't meant for history, but that history has found.

And these archivists create a whole metaphor on their own— for the ways that our own small stories can stand in for our big histories.

Which is why I’m telling you about libraries, and librarians. Their reverent attention to the minutiae of strangers' lives — and remembering my own archiving— makes me wonder: why wait for an archivist to treat your life with such care? Why not do it yourself?

And how could archiving help you tell your stories?

So here's a little assignment for the new year, if you want it.

As you move through this year, try looking at the fingerprints of your life with an archivist's eye. Your receipts, your text messages, your shopping lists, your rough drafts. I'm not saying archive your whole life – I'm not trying to create a generation of hoarders here. Part of archiving is curation, after all. (She says with 5 giant boxes of journals and birthday cards in her attic.)

But what do they point to about your life right now? What story could they be standing in for? What would someone make of them, if they found them years in the future?

And in terms of stories: what small moments feel like ephemera right now, but might someday help tell the story of who you are?

Whether you've got fancy acid-free boxes or voice memos or just a running note in the Notes app on your phone, keep a little evidence, even if it doesn’t feel momentous right now.

For one thing, you’ll have something to look back on in case you ever do want to remember the details of this moment. But also, the act of “keeping” can tell your brain: let’s remember this. This might be important.

Because I think your stories deserve the same kind of careful attention I once gave to my college journals. Let's do a little romanticizing of our own lives!

And I'd love to hear what bits of your daily life you'd preserve in those black archival boxes.

Respectfully and enthusiastically yours,
Micaela