Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women's Archives(Life Writing)

Women's letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women's archives in Canada. The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present. From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae - missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication - that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.

Table of Contents:
Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Women's Archives, edited by Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl Introduction: No Archive is Neutral Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl I. Reorientations Of Mini-Ships and Archives Daphne Marlatt Finding Indian Maidens on eBay: Tales of the Alternative Archive (and More Tales of White Commodity Culture) Cecily Devereux ""Faster Than a Speeding Thought"": Lemon Hound's Archive Unleashed Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl ""I remember""I was wearing leather pants"": Archiving the Repertoire of Feminist Cabaret in Canada T.L. Cowan ""In the hope of making a connection"": (Re)Reading Archival Bodies, Responses, and Love in Marian Engel's Bear and Alice Munro's ""Meneseteung"" Catherine Bates An Archive of Complicity: Ethically (Re)Reading the Documentaries of Nelofer Pazira Hannah McGregor Psyche and Her Helpers, under Cloud Cover Penn Kemp II. Restrictions Archival Matters Sally Clark Keeping the Archive Door Open: Writing about Florence Carlyle Susan Butlin The Oral, the Archive, and Ethics: Canadian Women Writers Telling It Andrea Beverley Halted by the Archive: The Impact of Excessive Archival Restrictions on Scholars Ruth Panofsky and Michael Moir Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers Catherine Hobbs Invisibility Exhibit: The Limits of Library and Archives Canada's ""Multicultural Mandate"" Karina Vernon III. Responsibilities Rat in the Box: Thoughts on Archiving My Stuff Susan McMaster Letters to the Woman's Page Editor: Francis Marion Beynon's ""The Country Homemakers"" and a Public Culture for Women Katja Thieme Archival Adventures with L.M. Montgomery; or, ""As Long as the Leaves Hold Together"" Vanessa Brown and Benjamin Lefebvre The Quality of the Carpet: A Consideration of Anecdotes in Researching Women's Lives Linda M. Morra ""I want my story told"": The Sheila Watson Archive, the Reader, and the Search for Voice Paul Tiessen ""You can do with all this rambling whatever you want"": Scrutinizing Ethics in the Alzheimer's Archives Kathleen Venema Locking Up Letters Julia Creet Afterword Janice Fiamengo Contributors Index

About the Author :
Linda Morra is a full professor at Bishop's University. She was the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies (2016-2017) at University College Dublin and a visiting scholar at Berkeley, University of California (2016). Her book Unarrested Archives (2014) was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize. Jessica Schagerl's research focuses on Canadian studies, drawing heavily on archival material; she is also invested in questions of professional concern, including mentoring and the futures of arts and humanities. She is the alumni and development officer for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Western Ontario.

Review :
`` Basements and Attics theorizes archives as non-neutral sites, and articulates archival work as open to critical interpretations and methodologies.... Each section explores alternative research by highlighting the resourcefulness of publishers' archives, private collections, or digital repositories. The contributions included in "Reorientations" and "Responsibilities," for instance, constitute excellent "how-to" guides for researchers interested not only in how archives problematize (dis)location, representation, and cultural translation, but also in ethical (re)readings of an author's literary career.... Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace ...serves as an essential guide in defining what constitutes an archive-as an ideologically and culturally constructed site-and in addressing pertinent challenges encountered both in the creation and study of Canadian women's archives, and also those presented by the advent of new technologies.'' -- Cristina Ivanovici -- Canadian Literature, 219, Winter 2013 `` Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace is a fine example of the systematic ways in which Canadian scholars (to a greater degree, perhaps, than their Australian counterparts) have successfully opened out and responded to some of the larger and more compelling questions concerning what it means to work in, and with, archived personal papers, whether as archivists or researchers. As Morra and Schagerl observe, their collection "addresses the real and sometimes peculiar challenges that affect archival work today", and they freely admit that some of that work now involves "deciding what constitutes and archive" (p. 1). The subtitle, Explorations in Canadian Women's Archives , indicates that the volume is especially directed towards those engaged in ongoing debates concerning the archiving of material produced by women, but those professing little or no knowledge of these debates or Canadian literature more generally still have much to gain from these detailed and sometimes provocative essays. If, as Catherine Hobbs suggests in her contribution ... "archival theory has done a terrible job of accommodating the particular needs of individual peoples' archives" (p. 181), this volume arguably goes some way towards addressing this lacuna. Comprising 20 essays, as well as a lengthy introduction and afterword, it is a substantial work.... While the last section contains perhaps the most explicit reflection on questions of ethics, contributors across the volume consistently return to this aspect of archival work, thus making it a valuable resource for anyone seeking to extend their understanding of the many ethical dimensions invovled in managing personal papers, whether in their acquisition, processing, accessing or scholarly use.... [A] major contribution to ongoing debates in the area of personal papers.... Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace is a valuable addition to current scholarship and debate and, as such, deserves to be read and appreciated well beyond the Canadian border.'' -- Maryanne Dever, University of Newcastle -- Archives and Manuscripts, Vol. 41, No. 2 ``Each of the volume's authors explores some of the unacknowledged, yet crucial, ethical, material, and cultural boundaries that pertain to the archiving of, and access to, the works of Canadian women.... The book's contributors also address issues extending beyond gender, such as the challenges of archiving digital works and those of a more ephemeral nature, modes of resistant reading and in every way challenge the static view of how we might come to understand both archives and the process of archiving.'' -- Kane Faucher -- Western News, October 31, 2013