Launching Memory Work

I’m writing to you from a world you’ll have
a hard time imagining, to a world I can’t 
picture no matter how hard I try. Do you still 
have birds that wake you up in the morning 
with their singing and lovers who gaze at the 
stars trying to read in them the fate of their love? 
If you do, we’ll recognize one another.

Charles Simic, NASA July 2021 Mission to Jupiter

Beginning a newsletter focused on memory work the day after a presidential election when most people I know desperately want to disassociate from reality is perhaps not the best idea. Or maybe it's the best idea.

We don’t get through tough spots without negotiating our relationship to the past, the present, and the futures we want. That negotiation depends on access to memory. Access to memory depends on memory work. 

I am a librarian and sometimes thoughtful to a fault person living in the Mojave Desert who has somehow managed to work in the biggest library in a swamp, an ocean-adjacent library where longboards were a common form of transportation, an internet preserving library based in an old Christian Scientist church, a landlocked midwestern archive that remediates fire-stricken records that look more like charcoal briquettes than paper, and an ark of a library in Las Vegas - perhaps the most authentically inauthentic place there is.

I became a librarian because I am interested in helping people make sense of the world. As a mixed race, first generation college student from a working class background (proud UAW family), I am attuned to the ways in which the world is systematically unfair. I see memory work as fundamental to building a world that is individually and collectively fulfilling.

Many people do memory work. Librarians, archivists, and historians of course, but also poets, technologists, artists, creators, and the keepers of lore in your family and broader affinity networks.

Memory Work covers the work we do to remember and why it matters.

Expect discussion of culture, technology, art, identity, labor, and more. I’ll do my best to connect the dots in a way that I hope is helpful and interesting. I’ll share round-ups on memory work as well as a “memory of the week”. I’ll also share memory worker profiles and longer reflections on memory work.

There will be occasional puns that are variously successful. 

And maybe, just maybe, a bit of beauty too.