In this 1988 lecture,* Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), one of the heavyweights of 20^th Century American letters, talks about his long journey as a writer and the process of creating fiction. His novels earned him the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose and the 1977 National Book award for The Spectator Bird, but he also wrote short stories, histories, biographies and essays. His subject matter was largely people and places of the American West, particularly California and Utah. He relied extensively upon material from his personal life for his fiction, including his first novel, Big Rock Candy Mountain, published in 1943.

Although Stegner later founded Stanford University’s esteemed Creative Writing Program, as a novice he was hopeful that there was a way to learn the process of writing. He remembers taking a course in the 1930’s entitled “How to Write a Short Story, Though Ignorant.”  Stegner describes a creative writing teacher who treated the craft as akin to carpentry, a process by which stories are made not born or discovered, where the circumstances of a tale “had to fit a Procrustean Bed” of tried and true narrative technique with characters in conflict and readers’ expectations reversed.

“Beginners and hacks pay more attention on how to write than what they should write,” says Stegner. But he claims that writing from a blueprint does not allow for passion, “illuminates nothing and leaves no wonder in the reader’s mind.” While he admits that faithful application of the writing rules contained in George Polti’s literary rubric “Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations” might achieve results in the right hands, such formulas did not suit him. The best fiction writers – Chekhov, Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway — are more sculptors than carpenters, striving for epiphanies and revelations. He advises beginning writers to “take something that meant a lot to you, that you brooded about, and try to see it as clearly as you can.”

Disagreeing with Stendhal, Stegner did not see a writer’s purpose as precisely mirroring reality. He believed a writer functioned more as a lens than a photocopier, illuminating reality with his or her own viewpoint. Such fiction “contains the astigmatisms of its maker,” portraying what is uniquely important to the writer.

While acknowledging that the fragmentary styles of modernist writers like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon can open new doors to viewing reality, Stegner considered himself more of a realist. He was not averse to innovation in style but only if it served to “make everyday life memorable.” Furthermore, unlike many avant-garde writers, Stegner had no solid family background or overbearing cultural traditions he wanted to declare his independence from. Rather than be a loner, he wanted to belong to the common life around him.

The renowned foreign correspondent, Martha Gelhorn, complained that Stegner’s portrayal of quotidian lives of mostly Western Americans did not interest her. She urged him to seek adventures in the world and place himself into new environments. But he saw that as “slumming” — an effort to seek experience in order to develop something new, when what he needed as a writer was already around and within him.

For Stegner, the real world exists and literature imitates it. The necessary raw material for his work are the places and people he knows, including his family, which lived an itinerant, hard-scrabble life in Montana, Saskatchewan and Salt Lake City. Not surprisingly, his fiction is often described as semi-autobiographical. Stegner makes no apologies for this. Like John Cheever, he “wrote to make sense out of his life” because “an unexamined life was not worth living.”

Since novelists are so prone to drawing from their lives, Stegner says that few of them write autobiographies. The story of their lives – Philip Roth’s, for example — has been told in their work.   But he also notes that, paradoxically, that a writer’s remembrances used when making either fiction or autobiography are often really “factions”, embellishments of reality due to the imperfection of memory. “Mark Twain often said he remembered a lot of things very clearly that never happened.”

Ultimately, Stegner views the writer as on a quest to be receptive, skeptical and watchful, like a photographer of found objects shedding indirect light on a subject to see it at a different angle and thus develop something new. His ultimate advice: “See the thing as clearly as you can and try for the clearest, least obscured image,”

___________________________________________

*Broadcast over WNYC as part of the Voices At the New York Public Library series on May 30, 1993.

In October, I attended the annual conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) in Savannah, Georgia. Here are a few of the highlights.

One view of the vendor’s area of the conference. Photograph by Lindy Leong for AMIA

Continue reading →

As we have mentioned in earlier posts, newly digitized material from the Archives will be added to Amherst College Digital Collections on a regular basis. This week I want to call attention to the nearly complete run of Amherst College yearbooks — The Olio — now available online.

The College Olio (October 1855)

The very first instance of what eventually became the sort of yearbook we know and love today appeared under the title The College Olio in October 1855. The 1828 Webster’s dictionary definition of “olio” is “1. A mixture; a medley. 2. A miscellany; a collection of various pieces; applied to musical collections.” That term fits perfectly for this first effort with its mix of membership lists, award winners, and items of college news. The student paper — The Amherst Student — would not appear until 1868.

Amherst Aurora (November 1856)

The next year, a similar publication appeared under the title Amherst Aurora. It is numbered “Vol. 2 No.1″ indicating that it is a continuation of the publication originally titled The College Olio.

The Olio (November 1857)

By 1857, the third volume of the paper settled on The Olio as the title, which has stuck ever since. After the Civil War, The Olio appeared in a pamphlet format with many more pages in a smaller size.

The Olio (1872)

It was another ten years before The Olio included any photographs, but early issues are filled with illustrations:

The Olio (1884)

By the end of the 1880s, The Olio took the form of what we now think of as the standard yearbook format — a hardcover volume with photographs documenting college life. Though few in number in 1889, the spread of photography would eventually result in yearbooks that were almost entirely photographs with very little text.

The Olio. (1889)

One striking feature that is consistent from 1855 until 1984 is the prominence of “Secret Societies” or, as we now know them, fraternities. Secret societies dominate the front pages of the very earliest issues (shown above) and remained a major element of The Olio until fraternities were abolished in 1984.

The 1951 edition of The Olio prominently features a fraternity that took an important step in the long history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In 1948, Thomas Gibbs III, an African-American student at Amherst, pledged Phi Kappa Psi. A fuller account of what followed can be read in The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities by Nicholas Syrett, so I will just give the short version here.

A white fraternity wanting to admit a black student made national news back in 1948. In spite of some strong opposition, the men of the Amherst chapter decided they would rather lose their affiliation with the national fraternity than refuse to accept a member because of his race. The fraternity changed its name to Phi Alpha Psi. Gibbs graduated in 1951 and this page from The Olio refers to the scandal surrounding his membership. Gibbs is seated in the second row toward the far right in the group photo:

Phi Alpha Psi in The Olio (1951)

After the college abolished fraternities in 1984, the house in which Thomas Gibbs III lived with his fraternity brothers was rechristened Drew House, in honor of Charles R. Drew (AC 1926). Although Drew was highly respected as a scholar and an athlete during his time at Amherst, Thomas Gibbs was the first black student at Amherst — or anywhere else in the United States — to break the fraternity color barrier.

In September 2010, I blogged about a Revolutionary War spy whose descendant, Natalie Nicholson, was one of my early mentors in the MIT Libraries.  When I started shelving books in the Humanities Library at MIT, Natalie was the Associate Director of Libraries.  The Director’s Office suite shared the second floor of Hayden Library which gave me unprecedented access to power!  I actually got to see the Administration!

Natalie took an early interest in me, stopping to ask about my studies at Northeastern University or comment on the full pre-shelving section at the end of term.  We worked together for ten years—1965 to 1975—and throughout, Natalie, appointed Director in 1972, kept an eye on me.  As a young librarian, she looked for opportunities for me to learn and grow.  She asked me to chair my first task force—converting the MIT union catalog to microfiche.  It turned into a learning experience for me with lessons in diplomacy, persistence, the power of data, marketing, return on investment, strategizing, space planning, communication, quality control, and the role of humor in defusing tense confrontations.  Natalie was a great teacher and in my regular meetings with her, she offered encouragement and perspective, but never prescription.  She always turned my questions into “What do you think?”

As I made each transition in my career, I would call Natalie and let her know … [ Read all ]

On November 26, 2014, President Barack Obama signed into law Public Law No: 113-187, the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014. This new law modernizes records management by focusing more directly on electronic records, and complements efforts by the National Archives to implement the President’s 2011 Memorandum on Managing Government Records.

Key points of this law include:

• Strengthening the Federal Records Act by expanding the definition of Federal records to clearly include electronic records. This is the first change to the definition of a Federal record since the enactment of the act in 1950.
• Confirming that Federal electronic records will be transferred to the National Archives in electronic form.
• Granting the Archivist of the United States final determination as to what constitutes a Federal record.
• Authorizing the early transfer of permanent electronic Federal and Presidential records to the National Archives, while legal custody remains with the agency or the President.
• Clarifying the responsibilities of Federal government officials when using non-government email systems.
• Empowering the National Archives to safeguard original and classified records from unauthorized removal.
• Codifying procedures by which former and incumbent Presidents review Presidential records for constitutional privileges.

We welcome this bipartisan effort to update the nation’s records laws for the 21st Century. H.R. 1233 could not have become law without the efforts of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking … [ Read all ]

We have two fairly big announcements to make!

Firstly, some of you are likely up to date on this, but the IOE has now officially merged with UCL.  As of December 2nd, we are now the IOE Archive at the UCL Institute of Education. For more information on the merger, visit here.

Secondly, our Archive has been awarded National Archive Accreditation status (which was also made official on December 2nd… December 2nd was a pretty big day around these parts)!  The IOE Archive is the first archive of an educational institution in London to be accredited.

Accreditation is the new UK quality standard that recognises good performance in all areas of archive service delivery. To achieve accredited status, an archive must demonstrate that it has met clearly defined national standards relating to the management and resourcing of the care of its unique collections and the service it offers to its users.

The accreditation panel that made the award noted the following:

[They] were very impressed with the application and the range of ways in which the service is delivering its mission. They noted specifically the excellence of the documentation submitted, which reflects on the service’s strong management and planning. They congratulated the service on its achievements and innovative good practice in many areas, specifically developing outreach, broadening the volunteering offer and tackling digital preservation issues which many larger and better-resourced services have struggled to address.

We are so pleased to now be fully accredited, and want to thank the accreditation team for all of their help and support as we went through the application process.

For more information on accreditation, head to the National Archives.

They look so at home next to each other, don’t you think?

kind of a strange combination to you, let me assure you: it definitely is.

When I saw the title, I knew this was going to be the best one.

selections isn’t your thing, or even if it is, I would recommend you come in and take a look at

In our latest adventures as graduate assistants, Rebecca Bramlett and I have been learning how to digitize serials for the FSU Digital Library. This process involves scanning materials in the Digital Library Center, editing them, uploading them, and creating metadata for each issue. Using metadata to describe important features of the serials – such as date issued, subjects, and summary of contents – will make them easier to locate through database searches.

For this project, we are digitizing Volume 39 (12 issues) of The Girl’s Own Annual, a British serial for girls and young women that was published from 1880 until the 1950s. Volume 39 was published in 1917-1918, during World War I, when the girls’ and women’s publications were combined into The Girl’s Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine. Each issue of The Girl’s Own Annual contains a mixture of serial fiction, recipes, knitting and sewing patterns, housekeeping advice, and articles on topics of interest, such as the royal family, women’s education, and women’s contributions to the war effort. The Girl’s Own Annual is part of the John M. Shaw Childhood in Poetry Collection and will be added to the Poetry in the Great War collection in the FSU Digital Library.

Since winter break is almost upon us, this is the perfect time to take a look at the 1917 Christmas issue of The Girl’s Own Annual (Vol. 39, No. 3). For your reading enjoyment, let me present you with:

Five Ways to Have a Girl’s Own Christmas:

1. Curl up with a stack of serial fiction. It’s the early-twentieth century version of a Netflix binge. The Christmas issue is fourteen pages longer than usual and full of extra stories. There’s the first two chapters of “The White Towers” – the story of a mysterious artist and the young art student who captures his attention – as well as two chapters of the romance story “Cicely Ann,” “The Typewriter’s Story: Which Ends with a Wedding,” and several Christmas-themed morality tales. A cup of tea and a roaring fire are optional but highly recommended.
2. Then read something a little more substantial. Once you’ve satiated your serial fiction needs, you might want to turn to something more informative, such as a discussion of future inventions by Alexander Graham Bell (predicting a time “when we may be able to talk with a man in any part of the world by telephone and without wires”) or the editor’s article on women working outside the home.
3. Sketch a snowy landscape. Issue No. 3 contains “When Snow is on the Landscape: The Fifth Article on Sketching in Colour,” with advice for sketching in the snow for those who won’t be spending their Christmas in Florida. Just remember, “If you begin to feel unmistakably chilly, pack up straight away.”
4. Cook an elaborate Christmas dinner. 
   

   

   If you’re looking for a break from the usual turkey or ham, perhaps you could serve roast goose, venison, or pheasants? They would go well with potatoes baked with meat and mashed Jerusalem artichokes. And of course, no holiday is complete without old-fashioned Christmas pudding and a prune mould!

5. Give everyone a homemade present. In a sea of mass-produced consumer goods, perhaps nothing says “I love you” better than a hand-crocheted cap or bonnet, a set of d’oillies with embroidery and filet crochet, or a homemade children’s coat (shown right).

Volume 39 of The Girl’s Own Annual is available to read online at the FSU Digital Library. Additional volumes from the 1880s-1920s are also available in the John M. Shaw Childhood in Poetry Collection and may be accessed through the Special Collections Research Center.

Katherine Hoarn is a graduate assistant in Special Collections & Archives. She is working on her Master of Library and Information Science degree at Florida State University.

‘Whatever else war is, it is always horrific’

– Richard Aldridge in ‘IMPACT 21: How ought war to be remembered in schools?’

Last month, IMPACT (an initiative of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain) organised a seminar led by David Aldridge, lecturer at Oxford Brookes. Held at the Institute of Education, Aldridge and his co-panellists discussed: ‘How Ought War to be Remembered in Schools?’

History teachers aren’t faced with the easiest of tasks; it’s already a challenge to engender a memory of events that students (and often teachers, themselves) didn’t experience first-hand. Teaching the First World War, a war often seen as morally neutral, can be doubly tricky. In history lessons, there are aspects that are black and white: Asquith was Prime Minister in office at the outbreak of war; the Battle of Liege began on the 5th of August, 1914; the war was primarily fought in trenches. But it’s the grey areas that also need addressing whenever we teach, talk, or even think about the past. Aldridge pointed out that, as educators, whenever there’s reasonable disagreeance on an issue, we need to teach that variance.

Aldridge argues that the horrors of war need to be communicated for students: images and narratives of soldiers – including children and young adults – killed or wounded. He advises educational institutions to ‘consider whether the rituals and practices they engage in around remembrance successfully communicate the horror of war’ (Aldridge, 2014: 6).

Aldridge’s fellow panellists also shared their thoughts. Jerome Freeman, Director of the First World War Centenary Battlefields Programme (run by the Institute of Education and Equity), emphasised the importance of going beyond the horror to encourage students to really discover the First World War. While schools often opt to teach the Second World War over the First, the FWW has been largely undertaught. The Battlefields Programme enables two students and one teacher from every state-funded secondary school in England to visit battlefields on the Western Front between 2014 and 2019. Students are encouraged to research their own family connections to the war, but the tours are important historically, not just emotionally. Freeman emphasised the significance of discovering the political and social consequences of war, while also engaging with historiography – was it a just war? What were the consequences? The tours are built around these key questions, while also probing the issue of remembrance. Who, what, why and how do we remember?

In the IOE Archive workshops we deliver in local primary schools, we use archives to tell the stories of ‘ordinary’ individuals during the war. How did the Great War impact men, women, children? These details range from photographs of children setting up gardens to address food shortages on the home front, to letters describing life in the trenches, to applications made to tribunals for exemption from military service. Working primarily with primary schools, we ensure the horrors are not overplayed; rather, children develop a sense of how nearly every aspect of life was impacted by the war in some way.

Pupils tend to a school garden.  Allotment-style gardens were developed in available areas of land during the Great War – including school playing fields.
Image via Imperial War Museum via www1schools.com

However, that doesn’t mean skirting around the terrors and tragedies of the war, including the realities of Britain’s own role. We worked with a Year 5 class in Camden who were busy learning about conscientious objectors. Through the archives and classroom discussions, students were fully aware of the harsh consequences faced by COs. Moreover, as pupils carefully considered why pacifists objected to serving brought to the fore the daily realities of war: the very fact that, as Aldridge pointed out, ‘war is killing, not just dying’.

A Year 6 student commented that he had recently read Private Peaceful, a Michael Morpurgo novel (spoilers ahead). In the novel, a young soldier, Thomas ‘Tommo’ Peaceful, reflects on his life in the trenches of the First World War. It’s revealed that Tommo is to be executed by firing squad in the morning for cowardice, and serves as an honest examination of soldiers killed on the grounds of cowardice or desertion. The student simply, and thoughtfully, remarked: ‘I couldn’t believe stuff like that happened by our own army… wasn’t there enough killing?’

As with teaching of any sort, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way. But we also have the knowledge that history too often repeats itself.  One of the best things we can do as educators is to ensure students have a multi-faceted understanding of the range of issues and perspectives which surround any historical event, particularly when it comes to conflicts and peace-keeping.  Aldridge suggests it’s imperative that we remember the horrors of war, ‘so that we continue to make every effort to avoid or at least condemn unnecessary conflict in the future’ (Aldridge, 2014: 5).

Relevant Educator Resources:

The Interwar Peace Movement: lesson plan from the IOE Archives
While our archive collections don’t contain a great deal on the graphic horrors of war, the National Union of Women Teachers collection contains papers, leaflets and correspondence relating to the post-war peace movement and their support of/for conscientious objectors.

Learn Peace: An education project by the Peace Pledge Union

Gerard Foley
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 – 16:24

Key ‘Prize of War’

Anzac Centenary commemorations have been the impetus for Archivists at the SRO to examine the State Archives Collection for First World War stories. One of the stories about WA’s official ‘War’ file has already been presented in an online exhibition called “Tipsified Germany Glyphic” – revealing the actions and responses of government, administrators and the community to the comencement of the First World War a century ago.

Recently, a fascinating collection of legal records have been found documenting the seizure of three German ships – ‘Neumunster’, ‘Thuringen’ and ‘Greifswald’ – off the WA coast at the start of the war. These ‘Maritime Prize Court’ files (WAS 938, cons. 4230, items 1-3) are Supreme Court of Western Australia records, in the court’s capacity as a Colonial Court of Admiralty, and were deposited in the State Archives in 1991. The court cases for the three ships are also detailed in ‘Minutes – Maritime Prize Court’ (WAS 939, cons. 4335, item 1).

In 1914, upon declaration of war, enemy vessels and cargo which were captured in port or at sea were processed through the courts of the captor’s country. A “Prize Court” was especially constituted for this purpose, deciding questions of maritime capture in time of war according to international law. This court decided whether the capture was lawful, the ownership of the vessel, whether the cargo was “neutral” or “enemy” and what should be done with it. The archived files in the SRO contain relevant Prize Court documents as well as seized ships records, such as ships certificates, log books, bills of health, sailing and arrival codes, port clearance papers, manifests, etc.

For the Thuringen a key from the ship is also retained as an archive. In one of the Prize Court depositions the circumstances of the taking of the Thuringen are described. Lieutenant Dalglish of the HMAS Pioneer is recorded as saying that when they boarded “I was received by the third officer, and was taken up to the bridge where the captain was. I informed him the ship was a prize and he asked why. I informed him that war was declared between Great Britain and Germany … I then went down to his cabin and he produced all his confidential books, which I locked up in a safe. Then pay master Ramsay came in, and we examined them together …”. This evidence indicates that the key could well be for the ship’s safe.

The seizure of these ships and subsequent Prize Court adjudication were covered in the newspapers in 1914 and 1915. The Norddeutsher Lloyd ship Greifswald arrived in Fremantle Harbour the day war was declared and was detained by naval authorities. The liner Neumunster was captured off Fremantle on 16 August 1914. ‘The West Australian’ newspaper reported that the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer Thuringen was seized off Rottnest on 27 August 1914. [1]

For weeks these ships sat in Fremantle Harbour, their cargo off loaded and crews interned at Rottnest while Prize Court proceedings ensued. On 8 October 1914 ‘The West Australian’ reported that Acting Chief Justice Burnside granted an application made by the Crown to hand over the ships to the Admiralty and also handing the cargoes to the Crown for delivery to consignees.

On 23 December under the headlines

“THE PREMANTLE CAPTURES. NEUMUNSTER AND THURINGEN CONDEMNED. APPEAL TO PRIVY COUNCIL PENDING.”

‘The West Australian’ reported that Mr. Justice Burnside had “delivered his reserved decisions with respect to the applications made by the Crown for the condemnation of the German ships Neumunster and Thuringen.” Furthermore “leave was granted to the defendants to appeal in the Privy Council, and all questions other than costs, were deferred till the issue of that appeal”.[2]

In June 1915 word came that the appeals “would not be persisted in” and the ships became crown property. The Thuringen was renamed the Moorina and was leased to the Indian Government. This ship, carrying Indian troops, was torpedoed by German submarines in the Mediterranean on 10 November 1915. The Neumunster renamed Cooee remained in service in Australia until 1926 when it was sold to a Finnish shipping company. The Greifswald was renamed Carina in 1915 and was engaged by the navy to transport cargo to and from Europe during the First World War.[3]

The crews of these merchant ships remained interned on Rottnest until late 1915 when they were transferred to Holsworthy Internment Camp in New South Wales, most remaining there until the end of the war. 

[Update: our holiday gift guide is now available! Thanks for the contributions]

Last year we asked on the ArchiveGrid blog for suggestions for gifts for archivists — and we were blown away by the number (and quality!) of suggestions (posted in 24 fun and practical gifts for archivists). This year, we’re moving the conversation over to HangingTogether and extending the fun to librarians. So, librarians and archivists, what would you like as a gift? We’ll assemble the best of the best and post them in a week or two. Then it’s up to you to leave the link for that special someone to find. Or use it to treat your colleagues. We look forward to your suggestions in the comments below!

[Untitled, Anacostia family c. 1950. Smithsonian Institution]