Curating Personal Archives

A New Offering

Hello fellow writers, thinkers, feelers, readers,

Some years ago I began feeling entirely overwhelmed by my digital archive. I both felt like I was drowning in files and terrified I would lose them. The overabundance of memory began to make me feel crazy. So I took up a task—deleting. I write about that here: The Art of Letting Go.

This ongoing pastime has been fueled by three main feelings:

1. The urgent feeling to have less.

2. Recognizing how important it is to let myself forget

3. Knowing that had my grandmother’s archive been digital, I probably wouldn’t have spent much time in it (I’ll expand on this one below)

Digitizing nearly 100-year-old letters sent back and forth between my grandmother and her family during the war. Some of these can be seen in the We Share The Same Sky exhibition. Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick.

My life’s work has been We Share The Same Sky, the story about my grandmother’s wartime history. But more specifically, it’s been rooted in the personal archive she left behind. As I write in my book:

“In the years after her death, I uncovered the most beautiful archive of her life. It wasn’t a hidden archive or a secret one. It was just what she had left behind. It was everything she had told me, curated and edited. There were preserved albums and hundreds of photographs dating back to the 1920s. There were letters waiting to be translated, journals, diaries, deportation and immigration papers. There were pieces of creative writing from various stages of her life—some marked up with line edits. The archive was seemingly endless. Every time I thought I had found the last box, I discovered another. There were repeated stories—some written at age fourteen, and others at age eighty. There were anecdotes and memories that contradicted each other, bringing the question of memory into all of her stories. There were childhood report cards and souvenirs from her cross-country travels. There were confessions of love, secrets intended to stay private, and flashbacks never intended to be understood.”

It was touching the thin pieces of paper that captivated me. Examining my grandmother’s shaky handwriting, flipping over photographs, and putting my own fingerprints on the leather bindings made me want more. Those sensory details were vital for me to feel like the history was also mine. I loved the patina. I loved that nothing about the archive was glossy. It was and remains bendable and breakable.

I think about this often when it comes to my own stuff. I’m part of a generation trained to scroll and yet I crave turning pages. I don’t want my life to be a tab on the computer screen. I want it to feel real and like a story that can literally fade. And I say all this while simultaneously being dedicated to digitizing what past generations have left behind. It’s a both/and situation.

So, in this spirit, I’ve developed a multi-session course for individuals who are also engaged in their own art of organizing a personal archive. This could be your archive or what a family member has left behind. And it could be a professional project or a personal one.

This course will begin in September and offered as one-on-one sessions with an option to join group storytelling workshops as you please. The program will offer guidance, personalized conversation, and accountability. The cost is $725 and this is what is included over four months:

• Three 60-minute individual coaching sessions that focus on organizing, culling, printing, captioning, and storytelling.

• An automatic spot in any group writing workshops (the forthcoming one will be on October 4 and themed ‘letting go’)

• Biweekly writing prompts to get you digging deeper into your stories

• My availability to counsel and be a thought partner along the way

If you are interested in this offering, you can email me at rachaelcerrotti@gmail.com or follow the link below to my website. And please note: if you are a paid subscriber to this Substack, you receive a 10% discount on any classes, workshops or coaching we do together.

And for my paid subscribers, I’m leaving you with a poem I wrote as I pressed delete on a file full of photos of old boyfriends and boys who were more than friends. For as much memoir writing I do, sharing poetry feels out of my comfort zone. But that’s a good thing, right?

Read kindly,

Rachael