Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: I come from a family who wasn’t good about getting rid of things. My mother called it being “pack rats,” which isn’t really being hoarders but also is far away from being minimalists. As a writer who was already “aspiring” in my grade-school days, I have notebooks and documents from childhood on through college and two grad-school programs.
These past few months, however, I’ve been going through one box at a time and getting rid of so many different kinds of saved papers, including:
- Composition syllabi and grade records from classes I taught more than twenty years ago (don’t worry, I shredded the latter, per FERPA)
- Anniversary cards from my husband (after making sure he agreed that mementos like that had served their purpose in the act of giving and didn’t need to be archived; other couples might feel differently)
- Self-addressed, stamped postcards that served as confirmation of contest organizations receiving my mailed manuscript, back before the Submittable days (remember that??)
- Yearly planners (size 6 x 3 in.) from the ’00s
At some points, I felt embarrassed and slightly ashamed that I’d kept so many things. I felt sweaty and dusty and like a pack rat. But I also had some unexpected rewards as part of the process:
Time travel
While some documents didn’t require much consideration, I found myself lingering over others, rereading postcards from family and friends, feeling their affection all over again, for example. I got to revisit so many seasons of my life: I paged through creative notebooks from high school and remembered buying them at the Spirit Store. I found stories I wrote when I was thirteen, the first few I’d ever typed on a computer and printed—and I remembered the teacher who held a summer writing session in which they were written. I was back in the Beloit College newspaper office, creating a satire issue with my staff. I was drafting my first book of poetry and reviewing comments from my St. Louis workshop on a poem-in-progress.
There’s an old show, This Is Your Life, in which an unsuspecting guest would be celebrated as they were reintroduced to people from their past. That’s what it felt like.
Seeing communication change
As part of that time travel, I was surprised to find letters I didn’t remember receiving, especially a trove sent by my family during my first year away at college. I recall reading occasional emails from them on an ASCII terminal in the college computer lab (no email in a browser yet!), but I’d entirely forgotten how normal it was back then to write someone a letter to say hello.
As a Xennial, I’ve seen typewriters turn to computers turn to laptops turn to smartphones, etc. I’ve noted how much technology has changed, but I hadn’t grasped that how we communicate—and how often—had shifted as well. The letters feel more personal, off the cuff, and long-lasting than those old emails (a few of which I did print out to save). Later, I only remembered the same kind of communication I use most often now, the email, but that wasn’t what kept me going in that first year away.
Remembering those now gone
A few things in my files made me a bit teary: I discovered a small stash of letters from my college friend Karyn. She’d sent me a Christmas card during her year abroad in Russia; a thank-you card for the gift I sent for her wedding, which I couldn’t attend; and another card from Russia, a birthday/Halloween/Christmas card all in one. Karyn died from a blood clot after a minor surgery eight years after graduation, so it’s lovely to have her voice and personality still in these missives, which are staying in my files.
I also found (and kept) a note from my Aunt Vonne describing a housewarming party she and my uncle had. They separated decades ago. I wish I’d reached out to her more often afterward, but it’s too late: she died of cancer in 2022. Vonne was young, hip, and smart, and us oldest cousins loved spending time with her. She was also encouraging: “I tell everyone I know that my niece is a poet,” she says in the letter, and she asks if she can share the poems I sent her with her book club.
Also, while I was going through binders I’d amassed from various memorable classes, I spent a lot of time on one from Introduction to Critical Theory in college, taught by Lisa Haines Wright, who put together a color-coded and detailed set of notes for us about her lectures on our readings. Lisa had long gray hair at the time, often in a braid; she wore long cotton dresses, and her body often pulsed with energy when she got passionate. I can picture her on the steps of the building having a smoke break; I remember making sure I said goodbye to her at graduation. I just heard last week that Lisa had died. I feel like my brain was rewired by her class, and I wouldn’t have done as well as a graduate student without it. It’s good to be able to revisit that.
Organizing what’s left
Now that I’ve reduced the amount of material from the past, I can put it into time frames, rather than stick a bunch of unrelated manila files in a plastic storage box. If I want to find the notes I kept from Lisa’s class, I can go to the college section, for example. I have all the cards and personal correspondence in a shoebox right now, but at least one organizing expert (Lisa Woodruff, The Paper Solution—so many Lisas in this article!) recommends making binders of important papers like those (she focuses especially on selections from kids’ crafts from school), so we can more easily access those memories.
Among the things I kept (only about one-eighth of the original heap): a page from a Far Side tear-off calendar, January 13 (not sure what year!), which features a heap of cowboys and horses, and a sheriff asking: “And so you just threw everything together? … Mathews, a posse is something you have to organize.”
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I guess this column is in praise of both sorting through papers to get rid of some AND saving those that still mean something to you. Writers in particular might end up using letters, postcards, old notes or drafts, and more as future fodder, so it’s well worth going through your personal archive to see what kind of life has built up within it.
