In Alumnae Hall, above the strange, too-empty passages and old couches, there is a small suite of rooms that you will almost certainly miss unless you are looking for it. It’s one of those tucked-away corners of campus where computers feel out of place, and you can still clearly visualize women in saddle shoes walking from class to class. 

Here, brighter than the yellow fluorescents, sit rows and rows and rows of white boxes—inside them, white folders and, inside those, white papers. The Pembroke Center Archives are dedicated to preserving the writings and teachings of feminist theorists, women throughout Brown’s history, and Rhode Island activists. 

Since my sophomore year, I have come here nearly every week to process new collections. In the office, I page through the papers of academics who studied marriage, pornography, affect, queer life—often before formal departments for such disciplines had even been created. These collections come to me disjointed, a rainbow of homemade files and journals nearly glued shut with age.  

I handle syllabi tattooed with coffee rings, brittle-edged newspaper clippings, printed emails, and written letters. I shuck pages free of their paper clips, flick them through my fingers. I make decisions that startle and unnerve me—which photocopies to keep and which to recycle. I decide that this set of documents is about animism in poetry, and that one is correspondence related to queer film studies. By the time I am done, the collection will be imagined anew, set in clean folders, dated and coded along the top, each number in alignment with the finding aid published on the archive’s website.

The work itself is not glamorous. Oftentimes, my forearm spasms with cramps, and I am always anxious that the oils of my fingers will seep into the paper, ruining it. But I love it. I love reading on the job, lingering over a research paper in between folders and squinting at the notes scrawled in the margins. My favorite documents are handwritten—sometimes loose sheets, sometimes bound in plain cardboard. Entire lectures charted in swooping script, hasty diagrams of bodies, poetry, theory on yellow legal pads or stenographer’s notebooks—people do not write in pen like this, so beautifully, these days.  

You’re so brilliant. I’ve thought this many times, feeling a rush of fondness for whichever
academic I am working with this week—Wendy Brown, Susan Friedman, Hortense Spillers. These women radiate from the page, their theories and frustrations made vivid enough to climb or chew. Sometimes, settling all those white boxes against each other on their shelves, I wonder if I am the first to see their lives like this—a chronology of scrawled notes to printed paper. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to imagine mine in the same way. 

***

We all make our own archives, constantly. The archivist I work with reminds my Gender Studies seminar of this as we roam our fingers over typed poetry and activist pamphlets from the 1970s. All the time, she remarks, we lumber through our spaces, collecting birthday cards, receipts, shopping lists—not to mention the documents we imbue with even more purpose: birth certificates, job applications, love letters.

I touch the yellowed corner of some woman’s handwritten poem from the 1920s as she speaks. The idea charms me. I imagine a large white dog, shaggy with loose-leaf fur, bounding at my heels. I imagine a room that follows me to every house, every apartment I will ever live in. When I open the door, there are my things. Every book I have annotated, every piece of pottery I have thrifted, carefully filed away. There is every paper I’ve written on James Baldwin, fifteenth-century Italian marriage law, full-cost environmental pricing, abortion bans in El Salvador, abstract expressionism. I want to print out every stage of my drafts, see how much paper they make—exactly how many words came out of those long nights at the Rock with sleep pooling painfully under my eyes?

There’s no easy way of knowing; most of us will never make something for its own sake, never teach it to others. This careful work that I am paid by the hour for, work measured by cubic feet and finding aids, is reserved for a select few. For most of us, mapping our lives in trails of documents is a hard thing made harder when we have no idea where that trail is leading.

***

There is a feeling that something is coming to a close—the end of a series. I want to make the most of what’s left. My friends and I have exchanged that refrain too often over the last few weeks. Don’t take it for granted. 

I’ve been feeling hunger pangs these days, the kinds I felt when my second-grade teacher saw my stories and smiled with all of her teeth. Brilliant. Her praise lit something wolfish inside me. I did not hesitate to write things down back then. There was not a thought that was not worthy of record in heavy-handed Ticonderoga graphite. Intelligence, like beauty, was the beacon of my childhood. It was promised, possible if I could only catch myself the right light. I scrambled over myself in pursuit of it, collecting graded quizzes in my desk drawers. 

Suddenly, I am staring into the dregs of my college education, and that way of living in my mind feels more precarious than it ever has. 

Do you want to go into academia? My advisor asks, offhandedly at the end of a meeting. It’s a fair question, if an unexpected one. I imagine myself prolific, hours spent in symposiums and faculty dinners and libraries. I imagine my everyday archive—my journal, my school notes, my emails—neatly cataloged and made purposeful by some research assistant for public use. I give him a noncommittal answer. What have I been telling people recently? Law school. And after—what then?  

I am afraid I’m leading myself somewhere without record. That the things I am learning now, the animated gesture of my professor’s hands, the sparks of recognition I find in a text, will slip away, slough off of my mind like water. I’m afraid that the girl who wrote everything down will become too hard to hold into my head. I worry that I’ll stumble over her, snuff her out. But most times the thought of dimming in this way isn’t so painful, and I’m afraid of that too. 

***

Of course, I am not entirely without evidence of myself. 

In my childhood room, my desk drawers are still filled with those graded papers, my abandoned notebooks, doodles of flowers and women because I never learned to draw anything else. Like Anne Fausto-Sterling and Barbara Johnson I have also saved my printed emails, letters penned to me at summer camp, holiday cards.  

In my Providence files: Trader Joe’s receipts, tea bag tags, scales of purple gel polish that I pull from my nails in one smooth peel. Our apartment bible—half guestbook, half cookbook, with our friends’ names scrawled in the front and our favorite recipes printed, carefully, with a Muji pen in the back. My journal, a cautious practice of stopping and starting, handfuls of sweet memories jotted minutes before falling into a bone-tired sleep. 

Then, there are the archives that have snowballed beneath me since middle school. Thousands (could it be millions?) of text messages: 

• [2021] Long, vivid blue apologies to my mother when we were each too stubborn to talk to the other. I know.
• [2023] A nonsense message from someone I miss terribly, pulling peals of laughter from my throat like scarves while my sister asks again and again and again, what’s so funny? 
• [n.d.] Dozens of photographs: clothes in a dressing room when I needed a second opinion, books I know my friend will adore, flowers found in the early cries of spring. Look at this!

If they were somehow material, they would fill boxes and boxes that I could drag with me from one home to the next, feeling the lovely ache of them, an anchor. 

***

It’s not a passive thing, to be documented. Anyone lucky enough to have their own collection in the Pembroke Archives has a say in what gets included. The archivists remind me of this. It makes it all the more extraordinary that such intimate things, such privacies, are allowed inside. 

While titling folders, I’ve read over countless letters between academics and their families. Fond sendoff messages, happy birthdays, condolences. In her archive, the literary scholar Heather Love includes her own medical records, charting the history of a stroke that would go on to impact her ability to see and write. There is a jolt when reading her diagnoses, what scholar Marika Cifor calls the “liveliness” of the body pulled so suddenly to the surface of the archive. 

Could I ever let myself be read like that? I already know the answer. 

A memory: In second grade, I threw a Goldfish across the classroom carpet. I don’t know why I did it; what I remember is that my teacher—the one who called me brilliant—was not five words into reprimanding me before I burst into tears. The memory is not so defined, but the Goldfish incident was printed—a clipped sentence in an otherwise glowing midyear report card. I threw it away, as if destroying the paper would have erased the disappointment from my teacher’s face, my salty cheeks. 

There are other artifacts—clear if I want them to be: notes from therapy appointments and doctors’ offices, words I wish I could scrub from my parents’ minds. There are texts I fantasize about unsending, poems that rot, unfinished, in my computer. There are ugly truths that would stop me short, choke me up if I rested on them. 

That unease is bottomless sometimes. It hollows me out, fills me again. I’m searching for a stable way to read these parts of myself, casting and catching memories, filing through what I can. 

***

Sometimes, after the archivists have left for the day, I stay late in the office, letting myself page through my work—which is, of course, not my work—swallowing paragraphs about marriage law and biopolitics to digest on my walk home.

 I’ve been clumsy recently, smearing signs of myself everywhere. A scholar looking for Linda Williams’ papers will read the series titles I marked, maybe noting the place where the script is slurred as my hand grew heavy with afternoon exhaustion. Someone will see the crease in Christina Simmons’ papers from a file folded wrong. I am leaving soon, and they will find someone else to do this job. 

When I leave, I will sweep the paper clips into the trash bin, line the pencils up at the edge of the table. I will close the door before the sun has set, and all the white boxes are swallowed up into the blue night.