Lisa Rivoir

 

Organizing a Lifetime in Two Semesters: My Internship Experience as an Amateur Archivist

When I walked into the English internship coordinator’s office for the first time, I was smack in the middle of the heated to-grad-school-or-not-to-grad-school debate that perplexes many a liberal arts junior. I was trying to figure out just what this English degree had gotten me into, desperate for any experience that would give me more material to work with as I evaluated post-graduation plans.  I walked into my meeting with the coordinator, Elizabeth Jenkins, fully prepared to spend three credits worth of time double-checking punctuation for a local press or photocopying stacks of articles from nineteenth century journals.  My first internship got me involved in course development work, a satisfying experience that let me approach a college class from a new perspective. 

I wasn’t intending to take on an additional internship, but Dr. Jenkins had recently received an exciting new internship request: Robin Becker, an accomplished poet and Penn State professor, was looking for an undergraduate to help her organize and prepare her papers for collection in a literary archive.  Given my accomplishments and interests (I had taken several poetry classes and was in the proposal stage of an honors thesis on poetry translation), it seemed like I could be a good fit.  Occasionally, students had the opportunity to work with the manuscript collections housed in Paterno Library or with the renowned Hemingway Letters Project.  The unique opportunity to actually work with a prolific author who was still active in the literary community and continually adding to her collection was something that I was not about to pass up.

Going into my initial meeting with Professor Becker, I was more than a little anxious.  I was familiar with her work, she had read my résumé, and if all went well… soon I would be looking through her personal letters from her mother and her poems that editors had rejected?  We discussed the technical details of the project and decided to give it a try. She arranged for me to see the workspace before she left for the summer;  this was when I first realized the scope of the project that we were about to undertake.  In the loft that served as her home office were two large filing cabinets, another smaller cabinet, and a few more boxes containing hundreds (thousands?) of folders stuffed with all sorts of documents.  During the coming semester (as it turns out, coming year), we were to sort through these documents, decide what could be included in the archive, and impose a more thorough labeling system on the saved material.        

In preparation for the project, I surveyed some published collections of authors’ papers to see some different approaches to organization.  I also spoke with archivists specializing in manuscripts and personal papers in the Special Collections department to get a feel for what institutions look for in a collection, and to familiarize myself with collections comparable in scope to Professor Becker’s.  Archivists prefer to respect the authors’ own configuration of their material, in terms of grouping and chronology.  However, a certain degree of consistency in organization is necessary to make the eventual cataloguing and documenting of the pieces easier.  We concentrated on making the collection more coherent and accessible by performing a sort of “triage” on the raw material by deciding what was of special value and what was of little or no value.

In a way, everything in the raw archive is potentially significant.  Exceptionally diligent future biographers use any number of items to aid their research: photocopied articles show potential influences, postmarks establish a timeline, hurried notes on bags and scraps of paper reveal a thought process.  At the same time, do all of the things that find their way into a collection contribute valuable details?  Some evaluations are easy: an early draft of an unpublished poem, with marginalia—yes; business and personal correspondence with an accomplished novelist—yes.  Others are more difficult.  Do birthday cards with a short greeting and dashed signature hold any real interest now?  How many flyers from years of public readings really need to be preserved? 

We quickly developed a system. Professor Becker went through the originals, passed them to me to be appropriately labeled and filed, and we talked through the pieces that were the most problematic in terms of archival significance or categorization.  While my interest in writing, academia, and archiving certainly help me stay excited about the project, I’m afraid that my most valuable asset in regards to the work (seeing as my penmanship is merely adequate at best) is my memory.  “Actually, I think we already had a postcard from your grade school teacher in one of the first drawers…”

Although the project is ongoing, I’ve already gained so much from this internship experience over the past six months.  Robin Becker is exceedingly personable and fun to work with; it doesn’t hurt that she has had an extremely full life that leaves quite a trail of paper and ink.  Sifting through the history of a contemporary poet’s life and work offers a real behind-the-scenes look at the writing and publication process.  Creative writing takes hard work, persistence, and a thick skin, as confirmed by the stacks of rejection and acceptance notices that we’ve plowed through.  In addition, Professor Becker’s archive offers a perspective on her work and the realities of the academic sphere, something for me to consider as I evaluate possible career paths.  Although working with an author on her end of the archival process may be relatively rare, my internship further convinced me of the importance of preserving our print history and how rewarding archiving work can be.  This experience, combined with my part-time job in the Arts & Humanities Library, has led me to consider pursuing a career in manuscripts and archiving in the future. 

In this world of instant communication where digital traces are rapidly replacing our paper lineages, I would like to conclude by encouraging you to give some thought to the personal archive that you are amassing, and take some time to write an old-fashioned letter now and then: just make sure to always include the year when dating your correspondence, and be sure to save the envelopes from the letters you receive!