1.

In a tiny bedroom nook in the parsonage home of their father, the Brontë siblings created worlds. Much has been written and studied about the Brontë juvenilia — many words spilled to explore and analyze the early writings of three of the most enigmatic and mysterious women authors of the English language. Scholars have historically approached the collected juvenilia to see how they point to the writers the creators would become: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. The Brontë Sisters. Inextricably connected and woven together, their work and creative lives a spiderweb of connections.

“The vast imaginary world the Brontë children created…was at once a playground and a workshop, a land where the aspiring young artists could begin to work through problems, at once psychological and vocational, which would concern them for the rest of their lives.”1

Juvenilia as a heuristic function.

heuristic (adj): Enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves.

It is interesting to explore the miniature books, pamphlets, and poetry collections with an eye to the future — to see how the nascent talent would blossom and go on to create some of the most incredible fiction of the 19th century. But I am more interested in the juvenilia in context, as the creative production of three young girls (with the contributions of their brother, Branwell).

Charlotte alone produced over two dozen volumes of work as a child, some of which she cataloged at the age of fourteen:

Throughout their childhood, the Brontë siblings produced a profusion of work so intricate and dense that scholars are still studying the breadth and depth. From novels to newspapers to poetry, the four siblings created literary collections that described, explained, and created culture for their paracosms. Much is missing, but what remains is fascinating — they created entire worlds full of intricate political and social systems and peopled with striding, powerful characters.

“What distinguish the Brontë practice is a quality of excess, a refusal of limits — whether in the size, scope, duration, or range of their productions.”2

paracosm (n): A detailed imaginary world, especially one created by a child.

The four siblings worked collaboratively, first on the wild world of Glass Town, and then, as Emily and Anne broke away from the influence of their two elder siblings, their own creation of Gondal. Gathered together in the tiny parsonage bedroom, they plotted and planned the histories and social structure of their worlds, weaving their ideas and stories together to create a rich tapestry of knowledge known only among the four.

“[The juvenilia] challenge certain fundamental assumptions about the nature of literary production: that authorship is solitary, that its progress can be mapped developmentally by genre choice and stylist fluency; that it supports fixed hierarchies; that it receives its necessary validation in the public marketplace; that there is a meaningful distinction between writing and publishing.”3

Some scholars have compared the collaboration between the Brontë siblings to that of collaborative fanfiction — they produced their work for “fans” (their siblings) of their imaginary worlds who already understood the intricacies of the society and culture.4 There was no need for tedious backstory and explanation, not when they worked within a closed and guarded communal system.

2.

I don’t remember exactly when we first got the internet — it was the early 90s and I was a pre-teen — but I do remember a before and an after. I also don’t remember when I stumbled across personal web pages, but I do remember the rush of adrenaline when I realized that I could make my own.

My first attempts were the typical clip-art laden, scrolling stream of blinking and bold text. Probably hosted on Geocities, those hallowed halls of early web production. I wish that I could remember how or when I stumbled across the knowledge that I could learn to actually code a website. But I did, and soon, I was. Thirteen years old and hand-coding websites in text files with a speed that, looking back, feels outlandish. By fourteen, I was fluent in Hypertext Markup Language and could bash out an index.html file quicker than I could do my algebra homework.

The family computer eventually drifted into my bedroom and the die was cast: I was building a world beyond the computer screen, file after file until they blossomed outward into a web of code and text. I found like-minded girls on the internet, who were also creating web pages full of poetry, journal entries and graphics made from pirated versions of Photoshop. We linked each other, creating a closed web of pages that floated like an island in the middle of a vast sea. I never wanted to leave this paracosm of our own making, this world built from HTML tags and Photoshop brushes.

The internet in the mid-late 90s was the wild west — everything was there for the taking, any program, any file, anything you wanted. We right-click-View-Sourced our way across the world wide web, copy and paste bandits of HTML segments that we frankensteined together, customizing and tweaking to our own tastes.

I was too young to really take part in the zine zeitgeist of the early 1990s, though I devoured any and all riot grrrl publications I could get my hands on. By the time I was wanting to create my own media, the internet provided the medium. We were making perzines, but they were digital.

“The increasing numbers of culturally productive female youth in our society indicate that more and more girls are successfully resisting the dominant ideologies of gendered and generational subjectivity by telling their own stories.”5

Until the 1990s, girlhood and girls had almost always been viewed and studied through the lens of consumerism. What girls consumed, what they bought, what they supported with their attention and allowances. How can society protect and ‘save’ adolescent girls and inoculate them from a culture hell-bent on destroying them? In an effort to shield girls from supposed harm, researchers have framed girlhood as a time of naive cultural consumerism.6

A shift in focus began as the internet took hold — suddenly girls were beginning to be noticed as producers rather than just consumers. As an increasing number of “culturally productive” girls moved their work onto the web, it began to be seen by more and more eyes — suddenly, girls could be mass communicators in ways that had been previously barred to them.

“What would it mean for a girl — against the stories read, chanted, or murmured to her — to choose to tell the truth of her life aloud to another person at the very point when she is invited into the larger cultural story of womanhood? To whom would a girl speak and in what context? What does she risk in the telling?”7

I know what it would mean. Who did I speak to and in what context? I chose my peers and I chose the world we created online. I chose our own digital paracosm, the entire vast expanse of it contained within its borders.

3.

detournement: Appropriating and reconfiguring mass-produced cultural artifacts into personalized and politicized creations. See also: bricolage.

"In recognizing that what is represented in the mass media has little to do with their lives and experiences, many female adolescents employ the practices of detournement in the subversion and resistance of privileged notions of gender, generation, race, class, and sexuality."8

The Brontës mimicked the few publications they had access to in their cloistered world, breaking apart the format and content of magazines like Blackwood’s Magazine and using it as a model for their own literary work. They recreated the layouts, columns, and even advertisements, subverting them to suit their own imagined world and characters.

Just as the creators of riot grrrl zines mimicked the structure of teen magazines, we also “borrowed” from larger and more visible web pages to create our own. We studied the formats of websites, memorizing the file tree structures and file names so that we could recreate them for our own purposes. Index file, about page, guestbook, content pages…we built the same hierarchies of files in our FTP clients and named them accordingly. Layouts were similarly lifted from larger sites — I remember pouring over the HTML source files for web pages that interested me so that I could learn the structure and codes for certain layout portions. It's how we learned the new tags and elements with the updated versions of HTML that rolled out in the late 1990s. I specifically remember the iframe update and how it changed how we could conceptualize web page layouts and what we could position on the page.

As for the content of the web pages, we filled them with what we knew best: poetry scribbled in dog-eared notebooks and meticulously transcribed by keyboard, grainy webcam selfies, intricate graphics that took hours in our pirated Photoshop, diary entries typed in a long scrolling line of text that tripped down the page, short stories bashed out on a keyboard in the hours after school and homework was done. We traded words and stories with each other, clicking on the links and following the thread from web page to web page. Guestbooks kept a record of our communications with each other, and before the age of social media and comments and likes, we sent emails and left notes.

“Girls’ productions, whether online or off, enable them to explore and create their own cultured knowledge.”9

Like the Brontës, we were writing and creating and producing a world out of what we had around us, filtering it through a lens of what we imagined the adult world ought to be. Like the Brontës, our bedrooms became production sites, little havens where we had the freedom to think and dream and create.

subaltern counterpublic: Parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, so as to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.10

“Although many girls who make media in their homes do so by themselves, most are problematizing the conventional construction of the bedroom as private by using this space as not only a production studio, but also a distribution center. Indeed, the majority of American girl media producers send their texts well beyond their homes to audiences far outside their local communities. This phenomenon should give us pause, for while girls’ domestic media production is transforming bedroom culture, the broad diffusion of girl-made media has the potential to substantially alter girls’ relationships to the public sphere, a cultural, economic, and political landscape from which members of their demographic group have historically been excluded.”11

The idea that girls had begun to reconfigure the bedroom, a previously private space, to a new, safe, public space in which to produce, create, and share, feels new and modern. But the Brontës did just that, when they retreated to that little bedroom in Haworth to dream up worlds and record them. How could they have known just how much more public it would become? Just as I could never dream that by creating my own little worlds from the safety of my bedroom, that I would make life-long friends and set myself on a path that ends up where I am today?

I have been agonizing over how to construct this edition of the newsletter for weeks — the connections between the research into the Brontës and the research into early internet girlhood were there, amorphous in my mind, but I was having such a hard time creating an essay structure that I was happy with. I could feel the links, but was having a hell of a time writing them down.

It wasn’t until I read ’s wonderful piece on the connections she made between Maurice Sendak and Katherine Mansfield, and the permission she gave herself to just share her notes in a newsletter that I realized that sometimes it’s not about making the perfect argument or essay. Sometimes just sharing the notes and connections is enough to show the magic of how interests can intertwine. I love how Taylor put it: “My garden of ideas and inspiration does not have to be tidy.”

I hope Taylor doesn’t mind that I took inspiration from her loose structure — it was the push I needed to just get the notes down and share.

I had so much fun researching this one and you can see the citation list below in the footnotes. But I especially want to share two pieces that I very much enjoyed reading:

Authorships of Resistance: Brontë Juvenilia and Riot Grrrl Zines

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Abstract: In this article, I focus on the contexts in which the Brontë juvenilia and Riot Grrrl zines were created, rather than offering a literary study of them. My focus is on how the different creators produced their texts. I explore the theoretical approach of feminist media studies with particular attention to its notions of identity formation as foundation for the comparison of these texts. I outline the Brontë juvenilia and provide a brief history and background of Riot Grrrl zines and offer a comparative analysis of the two media. I conclude by identifying the importance of studying girls’ engagement with the practice of writing in terms of identity formation and expression, and suggest ways that this study can be applied to future critical work.

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MAKING THEMSELVES KNOWN: GIRLS' WWW HOMEPAGES AS VIRTUAL VEHICLES FOR SELF-DISCLOSURE

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Abstract: Recent literature has pointed to a shortage of places for adolescent girls to publicly yet safely engage in self-narrative. This study examined personal World Wide Web (WWW) home pages as one auspicious location for some girls to speak. I employed ethnographic content analysis, a unique type of qualitative analysis, to analyze the personal WWW home pages of ten girls between the ages of 14 and 17. The girls’ home pages in this study suggested that, fundamentally, they served as vehicles for self-disclosure. Self-disclosure, a concept originating in psychology, describes the process by which people share personal information about themselves with others. The girls' home pages evidenced disclosure in the service of five functions, as described by Buhrmester & Prager(1995). These included self-clarification, self-expression, social validation, relationship development, and social control.

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It’s halfway through 2026 and the beginning of summer, two reasons for me to start feeling like I need to cast critical eyes on my systems and make sure they are working for me. Back in January, I posted an exhaustive list and explanation of all the layers of what I call my Personal Archive. Now here we are in June and I’m ready to give an update on what has made it through and what has been set aside.

In typical fashion for who I am as a person, I was overly ambitious. I love a notebook, and I especially love a notebook’s potential. Back in January, I was riding on several months of end-of-year motivation and flush with new year optimism. I should have known better — I love a bit of resistance and complication, but I had over-complicated things in a way that felt sticky. The weeks passed and the notebooks that didn’t serve me started to fall away, one by one.

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“As you study all knowledge, store up for yourselves good treasures...in the treasure house of wisdom are various sorts of wealth, and many filing places in the storehouse of your heart...their orderly arrangement is clarity of knowledge...confusion is the mother of all ignorance...but orderly arrangement illuminates the intelligence.”

Hugh of Saint-Victor, 12th century

I. In my latest attempt at reading every niche history book about knowledge and information management, I’ve finished Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. And, as always, I have some notes.

II. Before alphabetization, the Western world organized knowledge in whatever way was easiest to memorize. This was often some type of natural order; chronologically, size, regionally, or hierarchically. The Doomsday Book is organized by hierarchy, with properties owned by those with the most money and power coming first. Church documents were also hierarchical, with the writings of the most important Church Fathers preceding all others, until the pagan authors brought up the rear. Even encyclopedias (the medieval and early modern worlds loved an encyclopedia) were organized hierarchically, this time in the rank of the Universe and natural world: God, angels, and Saints were the most important, and came first, while everything else proceeded by rank. Knowledge was organized as a mirror to the world as it was known, with the natural order creating a template for information and archives.

III. Commonplacing became a learned pastime, a way to collate research and information under subject headings taken from these natural orders.

“Make a book of blank leaves of a proper size. Divide it into certain topics...in one, jot down the names of subjects of daily converse: the mind, body, our occupations, games, clothes, divisions of time, dwellings, foods; in another, idioms or ‘formulae dicendi’ (forms of speech); in another, proverbs; in another, difficult passages from authors; in another, matters which seem worthy of note to thy teacher or thyself.”

Jan Ludovicus Vives (16th century), Precise instructions on the creation of a commonplace book.

IV. The 17th century scientist Robert Hooke kept a commonplace notebook of scientific observations and experiments. He wrote his notes on slips of paper and then adhered them to the pages of his notebook with “moth glew,” a type of adhesive used to trap moth and butterfly specimens, which stayed sticky. This allowed the notes to have mobility within the notebook, moved around as new observations were made. “What was plac’d first may be plac’d middle-most, or last, or transposed to another Head.”

V. I was especially taken by the evolution of the government archives of Lucerne: in the 15th century, a single clerk managed the entirety of the city’s documents by consulting a long list of everything in the archive. Within the next 50 years, those lists had morphed into more complex registers: documents were divided by a variety of subjects (local/regional/federal government, trade & profession, rural or urban, creator’s social status) and then itemized chronologically. 100 years later, documents are finally indexed, but only at box level. The boxes themselves had no organizational scheme. By the late 16th century, the boxes were assigned letters of the alphabet and sub-categorized by numbers. But the letters had nothing to do with the box contents — this still isn’t alphabetization. Finally, at the end of the 17th century, boxes were re-ordered into categories (commerce, urban administration, religious matters, foreign affairs) and itemized into a single index, complete with cross-references. This is a fascinating progression of an archive from a simple list to an inventory to an index.

VI. Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631) was a prolific manuscript collector whose entire library became one of the “foundation collections” of the British Library in the 18th century. It’s thanks to the Cotton Collection that we have the only copy of works like Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight. Cotton’s library was organized by the busts of famous people from Antiquity (Augustus Caesar, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Nero, Otho, etc.) that sat on top of his bookshelves. The Cotton Collection still retains their original catalog classification schema — Beowulf is still under Cotton MS.Vitellius A.xv, which means the 15th (xv) book on the top shelf (A) of the Emperor Vitellius bookcase.

VII. Many early organization schemes prior to alphabetization required some preliminary knowledge of the subjects. But with alphabetical order, if you could memorize the alphabet, you could use it. As the scope of knowledge continued to grow, this was more than useful — suddenly, there was too much information to comfortably memorize.

“(Ephraim Chambers) was sure alphabetical order was the correct decision, some things were lost by its use, most importantly the sense of the interconnectedness of things. This he resolved...by extensive cross-referencing. In following the cross-references, those who wished could build complete pictures of any subject, while the already learned could use alphabetical order to carve out paths of their own.”

VIII. Skeptics of alphabetization saw alphabetical order as somehow going against the natural order of the Universe. It’s strange to think that something like an organizational system could be seen as a type of rebellion, but there were those who saw it as resistance to divine creation. “An author who placed ‘angeli,’ angels, before ‘deus,’ God, simply because A comes before D, was an author who had failed to comprehend the order of the universe.”

“A full decade after it began to appear, the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge remained a vehement opponent of alphabetization, storming against what he saw as nothing more than a ‘huge unconnected miscellany...in an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters.’”

IX. Alphabetical order allowed any literate person to choose what they would like to learn. Knowledge was no longer fixed and formalized — it could be up to anyone to decide what they had interest in and what could be ignored. This was seen as a threat to those who might consider themselves to be “authorities” — the world’s knowledge was no longer kept locked away behind a gate, accessible only through the guidance of a strict hierarchy of prescribed lessons and sources.

This is exactly the type of niche micro-history that I enjoy, full of rich context and information. Not just a history of alphabetical order, but also of knowledge management, index cards, encyclopedias, archives, and libraries. It was also a welcome introduction to a varied cast of characters, all with the same voracious impulse to collect words and knowledge.

I think, out of everyone, I feel the most kinship to the 17th century scientist Robert Boyle, who spent decades trying to find the perfect organizational system to help him collate his research. He tried tying his notes into bundles with different colored string, each color representing a subject. Colored folders and markers and boxes also came into play (he liked a color scheme). Boyle even crafted mnemonic verses to remember the order of his papers. This endless search for the perfect system feels very familiar, and I have to wonder if, after a time, he was enjoying the search. Boyle tried numerous ways to organize his work, but the one thing he didn’t try was alphabetization.

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I’m so ready for long, languid evenings when the sun fades from bright blue to pink to purple, for the lush greenness of grass underfoot, for the smell of flowers and the hum of bees. We are lucky, up here on our mesa-top, to have such supremely splendid summers.

I’ve drafted a short list, of goals and dreams and plans, for the season. It’s not anything formal or set in stone, really just a mish-mash of vibes and ideas that I want to attempt. It has nothing to do with needing new things, because sometimes I think we feel that we need to buy our way into a change of season. With the state of the world the way it is, who can afford that? Instead, it’s more a list of ways I want to move myself from Spring to Summer — move my mind, my body, and my surroundings.

1. Getting my hands into the dirt.

2. Regular bookstore and library trips.

3. Junk journal night every other week.

4. Walking pilgrimage.

5. Battling the literacy crisis.

6. Jotting things down.

1. Getting my hands into the dirt.

   Gardening. All of the gardening! Last weekend was spent getting the back yard ready for the season ahead: I cleaned out the green-house and my husband prepared the hive boxes. Our new bees arrived this week, and maybe just maybe we will be able to keep these alive for more than just the summer and fall (we had a hornet massacre sometime over the winter). This will be our third summer in this house and we’re starting to see some action — the raspberries are growing on the older canes, my roses are reaching toward the top of their arch, plants are returning and establishing and spreading. We are planning out the vegetable garden and will hopefully be planting starts in the coming weeks. I have high hopes for a beautiful garden, even if the late freezes have struck down any hopes for fruit on our young trees.

1. Regular library and bookstore trips.

   I want a book-saturated summer. I want my library holds list to stretch for pages, alongside a steady stream of check-outs. I want to single-handedly substantially increase the monthly patron reports. I want to be the Queen of Library Cards!

   I joined our local indie bookstore’s membership program a few months ago, which means I get to pick up a book every month with my membership fee. I want to buy books as gifts and buy all of the new stationery they stock. I am determined to be a regular.

2. Junk journal night every other week.

   Speaking of our local bookstore, they host a junk journaling night every other week and it is just the coziest time. I take my daughter and we craft and chat and the vibes are just really, really good. I want to be more in community with events like that.

4. Walking pilgrimage.

   I have this crazy idea that someday I want to do a walking pilgrimage. A portion of the Camino or maybe St Cuthbert's Way— I want to walk somewhere where thousands of other steps have fallen over the centuries, all heading to the same place. That feels very much like a prayer, and I want a small part of it. To walk and see the world slide alongside, to feel the beat of my steps beneath me. That means I need to start right here where I am: regular pilgrimages to the local park, to the canyon behind our house, out and away for half an hour, an hour. No music, nothing in my ears but the wider world.

5. Battling the literacy crisis.

   Having an almost twelve-year old right now is terrifying. Near the top of the list of things that scare me is the literacy crisis — so much of the wrong and rot in our society is influenced and fed by it. She is a reader, thank the Universe, but I can’t help worrying. Schools are using AI in the classroom (tell me why a fifth-grade research assignment includes gathering sources from the classroom chatbot), short-form media is warping attention spans, and everything just feels like it’s crumbling. We are taking action in any small way we can: less screen time (she only gets screen time on a family computer in our living room, we are a no-phone-yet family), absolutely no social media, designated reading times. For the summer and beyond, I’ve ordered a vocabulary building game off eBay to play at dinner — we talk about words and phrases, but I want to go even deeper. I also don’t restrict what music she listens to — looking back on my own word-filled childhood, I think that so much of my early foundations in vocabulary can be traced not only to the books I was reading, but to the lyrics I was singing. Songs lead to poems, and we all know the magical paths poetry leads to.

6. Jotting things down.

   I already do this but I want to do it more! More lists, more snippets, more notes. Not every bit of writing has to be “a piece.” I want to fill all of my notebooks with half-finished thoughts — anything that pops into my mind. I want the pages to be where I record and explore everything. Messy, casual, hopeful, spontaneous…no more being precious, no worry about “aesthetics,” just pen to paper.

I have big hopes for Summer of 2026. The world feels so wildly out of control right now, and I am grasping hope wherever I can find it. Local community, my family, the earth under my feet. It’s all I have influence over and right now that has to be enough.

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I was there to do preliminary research for the interpretation of the Oppenheimer House in Los Alamos, which is part of our museum campus. I’m not a historian or exhibit designer or really anything to do with exhibits, but we are a small non-profit with a tiny staff, and we all wear many, many hats. The entire week was spent neck-deep in the J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers, which is a vast collection of material spanning the length of his life.

In the Finding Aid for the collection, I noticed a box labeled simply “Index Cards, 1946-1966.” We were strategically moving through the massive collection, focusing mostly on dates before and during the war, but I couldn’t resist. I requested the box on my next cart and felt a frisson of anticipation when it arrived as a small, unassuming box the perfect size for a personal card catalog. I am fascinated by the ways people of the past used index cards for their personal knowledge management, and it was thrilling to think how a polymath like Oppenheimer might have used them.

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All of my brain power for the past month has been dedicated to this trip, preparing and planning. I’m halfway through American Prometheus, a book I have (shamefully, considering my job) never read cover to cover. I’ve read chapters here and there and looked up passages and used it as something like an encyclopedia — but I loaded it on to my kindle for the flights to DC, opened it up and then never put it down. I can see why it won a Pulitzer — it’s eminently readable and engaging.

If any of you are interested in this aspect of my work (Los Alamos history), I can share more about this week. I will try to update periodically in Notes, too!

I am excited to be here, but I am also excited to begin the research for which I have been planning and plotting for so long. Siphon off all that has overtaken my brain and make room for my own interests again. I’ve been limping along, planning out some new topics for the newsletter and working on the next paid subscriber installment in my Personal Archive series. But until then, here are some distractions that have kept me sane:

When I am feeling starved for inspiration, I do a lot of diving into the depths of the Internet Archive. I love antique catalogs for visual inspiration, especially those produced around the turn of the last century. There is something about the graphic design being created a few decades out from either side of 1900 — with one foot in the Old World and the other striding forward into modernity. I adore the grainy product photographs and cut-and-paste aesthetics. I flip through them, looking at household goods and decorative pieces, trying to imagine what it might be like to still shop this way. I remember catalogs, with that intense nostalgia of a world long gone. The children yearn for a dELiA*s or J.C. Penny’s Christmas catalog. I stumbled across this 1884 catalog for art tiles from J.G. and J.F. Low, instantly entranced by the lettering of the title page:

The tiles themselves are gorgeous — classical themes, florals, twining greenery, and ancient emblems. Beautiful:

But when I flipped toward the back, the ads captured my imagination. Page after page of hand-drawn ads for various home decor, construction, decorative, and furniture. The most whimsical collection of lettering and illustration I’ve ever seen.

Sometimes inspiration is hiding in the back pages.

🍐 Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’ He was at the heart of 1960s counterculture, then paved the way for the libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley. At 87, Brand is still keen to ensure the world is maintained properly – not just today, but for the next 10,000 years

🍐 Thinking in the Margins What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read

🍐 Getting to Know the Know-It-Alls On a new history of pedantry

🍐 Daydreamers and Sleepwalkers: Crossing the Borderlands of the Unconscious Scientists, novelists, and philosophers have spent centuries studying the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. Each descent only deepens the mystery.

Noted

Susan Sontag's Playground of Ideas

Some notes breathe new life into me. I feel almost giddy with their intelligence, elated by their insights. That is how I felt last week, while reading Susan Sontag’s (1933-2004) notes in UCLA’s archives. It was the closest I’ll ever get to thinking alongside one of our most storied public intellectuals…

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4 months ago · 326 likes · 69 comments · Jillian Hess

🍐 Curiosity Is No Solo Act It gains its real power when embedded in webs of relationship and shared meaning-making.

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My daughter is a fan of fairies, a condition that I think should be requisite for all nine-year-olds. On our regular trip to the library this week, she emerged with a stack of books about little folk, including this gem of a book. It’s an entire book of fairy house photographs, with no narrative and hardly any words. Just page after page of the most cunningly made houses constructed from sticks, stones, shells, berries, and other flotsam-and-jetsam. She was excited to get home and start building her own fairy house, and I was thrown back into memory of my own endeavors creating abodes for tiny creatures in the shaded yard at my grandparents’ house.

My grandparents lived south of Houston in Galveston County, in the middle of a pine forest on an acre or so of land. Their nearest neighbors were far enough away for it to feel slightly secluded, with the houses blocked by stands of towering pine trees that cast dappled shadows across the ground. In the deep shadows, moss grew verdant and velvet on the gumbo clay soil, and I will never forget my grandmother’s voice as she pointed it out to me and called it “fairy carpet.” She showed me how to take the tops off of acorns so that they could be little bowls, how to make a ladder from twigs, and how to weave pine needles to make rugs or thatched roofs. I would spend hours creating little worlds, hoping to wake up the next morning and see tiny footprints in plush moss.

I had a deep love of the miniature as a child, as many children do. I wanted to hear fairy stories and read books about tiny mice living in the hollows of trees. My favorite picture books had pages full of cut-away illustrations of multi-leveled homes carved out from a tree trunk, or underneath a floorboard — rooms full of teeny-tiny paraphernalia that I would press my face close against the page to see. I tried to create my own miniature worlds in the imaginative games I played — peopling my fairy houses with Sylvanian Families or Playmobil figures when the real fairies remained scarce — and in the imaginative narratives I wove in my head. I mentioned in a previous newsletter my tendency to create elaborate stories of little folk who lived in secluded places in the “real” world: fairies in their fairy rings, little people living in the cracks of a stacked-stone wall.

When novelist and short-story writer Steven Millhauser wrote his 1983 essay The Fascination of the Miniature, he pondered the reasons why humans love tiny things so very much. “Wherein lies the fascination of the miniature? Smallness alone compels no necessary wonder,”1 he mused after providing an exhaustive list of beautiful small things (I love a list). In Millhauser’s opinion, we love the miniature because the size is a distortion of something familiar, and it “shocks us into attention.” I think that this is definitely part of the draw — the small recreation of the mundane triggers something within us. “The miniature is an attempt to reproduce the universe in graspable form. It represents a desire to possess the world more completely,” Millhauser posits. “We are teased out of the world of terror and death, and under the enchantment of the miniature we are invited to become God.”2

But I don’t know if playing God was what drew me to tiny things as a child — I didn’t particularly want to possess the fairies I hoped to entice with my pine-thatched hovels and velvety fairy carpets. I didn’t want to be God, controlling the world — I wanted just to be a part of that tiny world. In her incredible theoretical work On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, literary critic Susan Stewart describes miniature worlds as “a space within an enclosed space.” She uses a dollhouse as an example, but her ideas work just as well with other miniature worlds. She describes the dollhouse as a locket, a “center within center.”3

I was a child who longed to be part of a fantastical world, anything that brought me closer to the stories I read and the worlds I created in my head. It frustrated me how much I lacked agency in a world set up to manage children. I was a voracious reader, with a deep perception of the world around me that I felt was wasted because no adult would take me seriously. Many children feel this way — frustrated by their inability to make adults understand. As I dug through the research for this newsletter, I was struck by how often the writing I found on the miniature referenced this childhood frustration and how it connects to a child’s love of the small. “The metaphor of miniaturization presents a protagonist who is independent, resourceful, and intelligent but very, very small.”4

My favorite books featuring a miniature world have to be the incredible Borrowers series by Mary Norton. Here were the resourceful, tiny protagonists in the Clock family! Inches tall, they carved out a world for themselves in the periphery — under floorboards, in the walls, in any secluded, shadowed place away from the prying eyes of humans. I could relate to this as I sat in the shadows of pine trees and built a tiny world. I devoured the books as a child, relishing in Norton’s rich description of the Borrower’s world. The way the Clocks ingeniously repurposed human cast-offs to create cozy rooms full of furniture and art thrilled me to the core.

Wouldn’t TikTok just love Homily Clock? I can imagine her, house-proud and smug, showing off her latest upcycled treasure. To use blotting paper as carpet so that it soaks up spills? Queen.

Even as I child I was fascinated by this resourcefulness, completely mesmerized by the cunningness of these cobbled-together treasures. I tried to recreate them for my fairy houses and my dollhouse, searching out books on handmade dollhouse furniture made from scraps (if you were a child in the 1970s/1980s then you know the type of books I mean — all of the kid’s craft books back then seem to be about how to make things out of trash). “The cozy little world of the Borrowers offers the reader an unexpected gift: the recovery of wonder at objects long overlooked.”5

I still get a thrill when I think of this miniature world. The lure of the tiny is still there — I follow dollhouse accounts on Instagram and ply my daughter with stories of fairies and little folk. It’s become a pathway to what is lost — that vista of childhood, when the fantastical seemed just within reach.

Here are some fun links with links(ha!) to miniatures:

• A Miniature Fascination: copper-heiress Huguette Clark’s love of dollhouses in The Paris Review.

• Welcome to the Dollhouse: The Best Cross-Sections in Picture Books

• Brambly Hedge: Winter Story (a wonderful kid’s tv program)

• Someone has remastered every episode of the award-winning 1992 BBC series of The Borrowers.

• a recent The New Yorker profile of Steven Millhauser, who has a new short-story collection out this year.

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I. I finished a book about the history of the Index and then went straight into another about the history of alphabetization. I don’t think I will ever escape the nerdy librarian/archivist stereotype, as if I would ever want to. I am just so fascinated by the ways humans organize and access knowledge — I want to know everything about the history of it all, and then I want to take that knowledge and possibly use it in my own information management. What could be better than knowing the way you file or collate words is the same way monks in 14th century England did? I am the kind of romantic that swoons at that through-line stretching through centuries. The impetus is probably the same thing driving this urge for an “analog life” that we see all over social media these days — we’re all rotting our brains away on short form content, and wanting something more tangible. I think that, especially for those of us who can remember the before times, we are longing for those processes that have nothing to do with the internet.

II. After reading Index, A History of the, I can’t help viewing the profession of indexing as romantic — it feels old-fashioned in the best sort of way and, dare I say, analog. Imagine that your career is to read books so deeply and carefully that you are creating a map of its subjects, teasing out the message in its words and creating access points so that readers can move through the pages with intention. Dennis Duncan describes indexing as “devised to offer these agile, demanding readers not paths, but something instantaneous, non-linear - wormholes.”

III. If indexing can be romantic, it can also be a weapon — I learned that from the book, too. Duncan gifts readers with the concept of “ideological indexing,” and tells the story of Whig indexer John Oldmixon, who was given the job of indexing Tory historian Laurence Echard’s “History of England” in 1718. Oldmixon uses his index as a political weapon, deliberately satirizing and misrepresenting Echard’s narrative. A decidedly Tory historiography, at one point Echard tried to downplay and discredit the story of “the warming pan incident,” a 1688 conspiracy theory that accused Catholic King James II and his Queen Mary of smuggling a baby into the birthing chamber in a warming pan, passing the imposter off as the newborn prince. How could a baby fit in a warming pan, Echard reasonably asked? Preposterous! But Oldmixon, devoted Whig that he was, used the index to argue and satirize against Echard — the index entry for the incident reads: ‘Warming pan, very useful to King James’ Queen.’ If brevity is the soul of wit, then indexes are custom-made for it — they are “brevity incarnate” and “the perfect place for snark.”

IV. Sherlock Holmes created his own personal, universal index. Any subject, any idea, any person that caught his fancy was recorded and alphabetized so that he could reference it later. His index was vast and complicated, a scrapbook of newsclippings, biographical entries, and descriptions. It was how he was able to instantly recall and connect subjects and crimes. “Looking closely at Holmes’ index,” writes Duncan, “There is something charmingly, inescapably homespun about it. Victor Lynch, venomous lizard, Vittoria the circus belle: this is a rattlebag of headers: patchy, piecemeal…Holmes’ index brings together the collected readings and experiences of a single, albeit extraordinary, figure - the index as personal history.”

“The facts are briefly these: Some five years ago, during a lengthy visit to Warsaw, I made the acquaintance of the well-known adventuress, Irene Adler. The name is no doubt familiar to you.”

“Kindly look her up in my index, Doctor,” murmured Holmes without opening his eyes. For many years he had adopted a system of docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to name a subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish information.

A Scandal in Bohemia

V. Duncan’s book also introduced me to the medieval polymath, philosopher, scientist, and theologian Robert Grosseteste, who is credited with early understanding of rainbows and the Big Bang, and as the creator of the first subject index in 1230. His Tabula distinctionum was an index to subjects and concepts in the Bible and 200 other works, including those by Church Fathers, Classical, and Arabic authors.

He created a system of annotation that relied on over 400 symbols to represent his nine “distinctions” (categories), which each had numerous subcategories. “All the letters of the Greek and Roman alphabets are used, plus mathematical signs, conjoined conventional signs, modifications of the zodiacal signs, and additional dots, strokes and curves.”1 Each symbol was linked to a list of references, where the concept could be found in the literature of the time. Grosseteste annotated his reading, which was prolific, by jotting down the symbols in the margins. This allowed him to go back and scan through his books to find the references to include in his Tabula index. I’m not big on annotating books (I read too many from the library to be writing in the margins), but I do love the idea of creating a system of symbols for quick reference points!

V. I’ll end these notes with a list, because we all know how much I love a list.

Medieval terms for an index:

repertorium

breviatura

directorium

pye

remembraunce

margarita

tabula

register

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I don’t think you understand. I am mourning.

I love a mass market paperback. I love the size, especially if they are a chunky tome, with the smell of the ink and paper. I wish that I could adequately describe the smell of a mass market paperback, but all I can conjure is paper and ink. It’s a distinctive smell, and totally unique to the format. Trade paperbacks and hardbacks have their own smells, or maybe they smell similar to each other? I don’t know, but I never really notice the smell of other books. But a mass market paperback? I’m instantly transported via olfactory trigger, hurtling back in time.

It reminds me of being eleven, curled up in a chair near a large window in our house in Aberdeen, Scotland. The light is maybe that watery winter light, casting mottled shadows through the Victorian leaded glass panes. We had just returned from the high street, where I had bought an L.M. Montgomery paperback, a Puffin Book edition with pastel spine and a large photograph of Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie on the cover. I came to an especially riveting moment and paused, taking the last bite of the apple in my hand. Looking pensively at the core held by the stem, I twirled it once, twice. There wasn’t a bin in this room, and I would have to get out of my chair and put my book down to throw the core away. Without closing the book, I ate the entire thing, spitting the seeds into the corner behind the chair. And kept reading.

Or maybe it reminds me of being back home in Texas, staying with my grandparents for the summer. I spent most of my time reading in their upstairs guestroom with it’s blue chintz bedspread and the prints of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy and Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie framed side by side above the bed. When I wasn’t reading, I was accompanying my grandmother while she ran errands. She loved to shop, and we would inevitably end up at one of two local shopping malls, where I would make a bee-line for the bookstore. The big, newer Baybrook Mall had a Waldenbooks, but the smaller, older Almeda Mall, with its terracotta brick tiles and atrium plants, had both a Waldenbooks and a B. Dalton, heavenly choices for a kid like me. They were cramped and overly bright, with shiny plastic shelves and brightly colored signs suspended from the ceilings. There was nothing calm or soft about book shopping in a mall, soundtracked by the clamor of the food court and the tinny music of the carousel. But I could spend hours going shelf to shelf, waiting for my grandmother to finish her shopping at Palais Royal, Lerners, Foley’s, and Merle Norman.

Book shopping in the 1990s and early 2000s is a lost world. It’s like a dream, sometimes, to think back to how it felt. Before the ubiquitous internet, before Goodreads, Amazon, and Booktok. Back before algorithms. Choosing what to read meant approaching a shelf and moving spine by spine until something caught the eye. Slip it from the shelf, inspect the cover, flip it in your hands and read the back. If it wasn’t the one, back it would go before moving further down the shelf. I spent hours in book stores performing this ritual. And it was a ritual — there were rules to follow, boundaries to respect. Some of mine were: no hard science-fiction, there had to be some fantasy. Bonus points if it was a woman author. Was there a dragon on the cover? More points. Scantily clad women in suggestive or submission positions? Take away points. Lady knight or warrior? Excellent chance.

Every visit was much the same, making my way alphabetically down the fantasy/sci-fi shelves. It was slow and meticulous, methodical and intentional. I discovered some of my lifelong favorite authors and series this way, moving paperback by paperback through the shelves. The hum of the mall crowds, the glare of the lights, the laughter from the children’s section — I still walk into a book store today hoping for that strange high, chasing that feeling from the Before Times. It’s comfort, anticipation, and safety, but there is something missing.

I can’t wrap my finger around it — maybe it was the lack of the internet and the algorithm, which hangs heavy around everything these days. Even off-line, it’s tentacles still reach into the real world. Influencer displays, AI-generated covers, and entire genres taken over by the algorithm — we can’t escape it. What I wouldn’t give to be able to go back, to feel that feeling again, to perform that ritual.

And this, all this, is why the loss of mass market paperbacks cuts so deep. They are a link to that world, that treasured past. Seeing them still on a shelf felt like a possible portal, as if I could somehow slip one out from between its neighbors and instantly be transported. But isn’t that how nostalgia works, tethering us to a specific past and the experiences we remember in that place? Svetlana Boym said that nostalgia operates like a double-exposure, showing us the past and present simultaneously, but that “the moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.”

I’ve been working on the effort of collecting my favorite series in mass market paperback form. Many moves and many library culls have resulted in the loss of many a paperback, but this news has galvanized me to bring more of them to my shelves. Would you like to see my biggest flex? Here:

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I wanted to get this Hodgepodge edition of the newsletter out early this week. My posting schedule for the month was planned, and I was ready. Until I wasn’t. Like many, I have been completely derailed by the tragedy in Minnesota this past weekend. The brutal execution of Alex Pretti by government agents. I refuse to allude to it with coded language, or to minimize its horror in any way. Horrors upon horrors, one after another. This entire past year has felt like a snowballing roster of bad news. And here I sit, privileged on my mountain (both literally and figuratively), in a little bubble of safety and quiet, moving through the motions of motherhood, home, and work. God, it’s so surreal—even after all this time, even after all of the “unprecedented events” my generation has lived through, I still find it so unnerving to witness the horrors and turn back to the mundane.

I had planned to write a bit about Brigid’s Day (February 1) and maybe craft some new brigid’s crosses for the house, but instead it has taken all of my energy and all of my discipline just to keep myself from spiraling into a vortex of online news. The energy needed to be creative has been channeled into repetitive crafts, like knitting or beading, and simply surviving. I can feel myself starting to emerge from the fog, but that in itself is another source of guilt. The world goes on, leaving behind so many.

So here is a little excerpt from a Brigid themed post I wrote two years ago (if you are interested in Celtic folklore and early Christianity click through and have a look), and beyond that is the Hodgepodge list of articles and media I have been consuming in the past few weeks. Maybe it will help distract you, too.

The following is an excerpt from this post from the archive:

Brigid held power over the animals of the field and sky, of the landscape around her, and the weather. Her hagiographies are full of stories where Nature bows to her will, and it was this link to the natural world that endeared her to the ancestrally pagan Celtic world. According to the legends, Brigid traveled the length and breadth of Ireland, connecting with the land and the people. On one trip, she and her attendant nuns wanted to cross a swiftly-flowing river. Soldiers of the powerful Uí Néill clan (allies of St. Patrick and Rome) happened across them and refused to help. The legend says that as both groups crossed, the waters raged and overtook the soldiers but became calm and placid, lapping gently at the women’s knees as they made their way safely across.

In these early stories, casting Brigid in this light was a calculated move by early hagiographers. Harnessing the land-connection and ancestral ways of the people to bolster the power of the Celtic church, they were not turning a goddess into a saint, Christianizing a pagan belief — they were turning a saint into a goddess.

Currently reading:

🍐 Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

🍐 The Witch Roads

Media I’ve consumed:

Beth Mathews

Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green

Hello! This is a long, hopefully fun one! If you’re reading this in your email, you may need to click “expand” to read all the way to the end of this post. Thank you…

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6 months ago · 2299 likes · 184 comments · Beth Mathews

🍐 Enchanting Imposters: Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery shows that humans have been creating fan fiction and fake news for millennia.

🍐 A brief history of the muses: the Greek goddesses who provided divine inspiration for ancient poets.

Do Not Research

Stephanie Yue Duhem: Only Bad Poems Go Viral

Stephanie Yue Duhem (IG) (X) is a writer based in Austin, TX…

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a year ago · 271 likes · 11 comments · Do Not Research

🍐 Souvenir Hunting on the Battlefield of Waterloo: At Waterloo, a site of immense bloodshed, tourists quickly turned the aftermath of war into collectibles.

🍐 The 6-7 craze offered a brief window into the hidden world of children.

The Works in Progress Newsletter

English has become easier to read

This article originally appeared in the first print issue of Works in Progress, Issue 21. The last possible date to get this issue in print is Thursday 18 December. If you miss that cut-off date, your first issue will be Issue 22 in January…

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6 months ago · 133 likes · 10 comments · Henry Oliver and Works in Progress

🍐 What’s the difference between ghosts and demons? Books, folklore and history reflect society’s supernatural beliefs.

🍐 They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted. Inside the civil war at the anti-woke university backed by Bari Weiss.

🍐 Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges.

🍐 Medieval Friendships: No Girls Allowed. Medieval European elites inherited the classical concept of friendship as something possible only for men. Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe beg to differ.

🍐 You’ve just stolen a priceless artifact – what happens next?

🍐 Yeats and the Occult Imagination: Beneath his poems lay a lifelong devotion to magic, divination, and a visionary system that shaped his most prophetic work.

Sighs & Whispers

Barry Zaid: An Artistic Journey from 1960s London to Push Pin, Celestial Seasonings to Mexico

Yesterday afternoon, I released a new episode of the Sighs and Whispers podcast—a conversation with artist, illustrator and graphic designer Barry Zaid. Below is an introduction to Barry—you can listen to our discussion on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts…

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5 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Laura McLaws Helms

Cyber Celibate

Luddites are the new vegans: the luxury of logging off

Seems like everyone on Instagram has decided to post pictures from #2016 this week…

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5 months ago · 93 likes · 22 comments · Tiffany

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I’ve lately been very into a random niche of social media, the world of the “daily carry.” A bit of “what’s in my bag” crossed with a love of trinkets and flat-lay photography, it scratches some weird itch in my brain. I love to see what other people find necessary to carry on their person day to day, what little bits and bobs they keep close by just in case. It’s a delightful assortment of utilitarian and whimsical, and lately has a bold dash of what the youths are calling “old tech.”

I’ve seen different terms used for this trend:

Daily Carry

Load Out

Everyday Carry

Being who I am, I take notes. One of my goals for 2026 is to slowly attempt to replace throw-away, cheaply made things with something substantial, beautiful, and probably vintage. This trend of videos and photographs has given me so many ideas. I have a list going in my Lists Notebook of useful items that I might be able to find vintage, and just shopping my own stash of trinkets and random things has been fruitful: an old Whiting & Davis metal mesh cigarette case lined in satin makes a great case for my old Coolpix camera, the quilted Vera Bradley tape measure is so much more pleasing than the free plastic one our realtor gave us when we bought our house.

We humans carry things with us that are both useful and romantic. It has always been this way. The people of the past carried tools, and they also carried prayer books and little charms. But even those things had a use—protection and distraction to keep them away from the worldly sins that surrounded them. I could say the same thing about using “old tech” to keep me off my damn phone.

I wrote a post last year about the history of women’s pockets, and I learned that trying to track down what people of the past carried on their person every day is not an easy task. Material culture of the middling-sort and the proletariat isn’t exactly the most documented area, but it’s getting better. Historians and scholars are teasing out of the records inventories and lists, sometimes found in surprising places. There are diaries and letters, where someone might describe what they carried that day in their pocket: "I always have the last sheet of my Journal in my pocket, and when I have wrote it half full, I join it to the rest, and take another sheet -- and so on. Now I happen’d unluckily to take the last sheet out of my pocket with my letter -- and laid it on the piano forte, and there, negligent fool! I left it. Well, as ill fortune would have it, papa went into the room -- took my poor Journal --read, and pocketted it.” (Fanny Burney)1

But my favorite place to find evidence of what people of the past carried are criminal and court records. The Old Bailey in London has a fantastic searchable online database, and I spent an enjoyable evening a few nights ago trawling through it. In 1693, poor Elizabeth Thompson was tried at the Old Bailey for pickpocketing. She was accused and convicted of “diving into the Pocket of one Ann Bedle, and taking out 4 Iron Keys, value 16d. She took her Hand in her Pocket, and she dropt the Keys; but took no Money; she was found guilty to the value of 2d.”2

The records of the Old Bailey show inventories of both items stolen from victims and items confiscated from those arrested. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, men and women carried an array of objects on their person: coins, bills, tokens, gloves, handkerchiefs (so many handkerchiefs!), charms, watches, buttons, earrings, mirrors, sewing utensils such as needles, thimbles, and scissors, penknives, spoons, keys, letters, and small books and manuscripts.

In E.F. Burney’s Regency-era watercolor, The Waltz, a chaotic scene of debauchery plays out while, in the foreground, an array of objects lie scattered on the floor. A pair of women’s pockets are at risk of being trampled by the dancers, their contents already spilling out. Handily, Burney labeled things nicely for us, just like they sometimes do on TikTok: peppermints, lip salve, orris rouge and coins.

I love to see that despite being separated by centuries, it has always been true that humans have felt the need to carry things with them just in case. I may pack a handheld video game or music player in my bag to use when I’m feeling bored or distracted, just as someone in the past might pack a prayerbook or book of etchings to peruse. The sixteenth century travel writer Fynes Moryson advised that everyone needed to carry “some good Booke in his pocket.”3

A commenter on social media used the term knolling to describe this type of flatlay photograph and I cannot believe I have never once come across this term until now! I do this constantly, arranging trinkets and tools and items into pleasing little perpendicular arrangements. According to the website knolling.org, “The goal of knolling is to create a sense of order and clarity in a space by aligning and organizing the objects within it.”

Knolling is a term coined by Andrew Kromelow in the late 1980s. Kromelow was a janitor in Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica studio at the time, and he came up with the concept of knolling as a way to organize the tools in the workshop when they were not in use. Kromelow observed that the tools in the workshop were often left in disarray, and he saw the potential for a more efficient and organized workspace by aligning and organizing the tools.4

Of course there is a r/knolling subreddit.

How this term escaped me, I have no idea.

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In 2025, I implemented a system for collecting and collating my personal learning and research. A cross between a commonplace book, an archive, and a catalog system, my Personal Archive has grown and shifted slowly over the past year. An on-going and organic project, I suspect that it will shift and evolve even more in 2026.

There seems to be interest in my system whenever I post about it or mention it, so I have been planning this post for a while. In 2026, I will be more regularly documenting my Personal Archive for my paid subscribers, with monthly posts updating on progress, collecting, research, and new ideas for being a magpie of information. This is the first in that series, a complete step-by-step of each portion of the system.

After the paywall is an exhaustive overview of all aspects of my Personal Archive and how I use it, centered around its three main components: my Notebook Ecosystem, the Card Catalog, and the digital portion in Obsidian.

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The weekend before Christmas always feels slightly wobbly. I know we view the week in between Christmas and New Year’s Day as liminal space, a between-time of warmth and disorientation and indulgence, but I also think the days running up to Christmas are equally as disconcerting. Especially when Christmas falls smack-dab in the middle of a week — do I take PTO for those first few days, will anyone actually answer emails, what day is it again? Even though I plan on being in my office Monday and Tuesday, my brain kept telling itself that Friday was my last day at work. It was an entire day of me rushing to get things done and then stopping mid-task as I foggily remembered that I will have two more days to complete things before the New Year.

An archive is a surprisingly busy place over the holidays. People travel home and take advantage of being here in person — college students, PhD researchers, genealogists, and the perpetually curious. I did take the between-time off this year, but only because my colleague will be at work to supervise the research appointments. I need this break — it’s been an insane whirlwind of a year. Hauling an archive into the twenty-first century after decades of stagnation is no mean feat. We’ve been rushing up an incline, making huge strides in providing access, preservation, and museum support, but now it’s time to hit a plateau. We are all exhausted.

I am looking forward to a much calmer year ahead (please don’t let me jinx it), and the ability to focus on more than just putting out fires. I have big dreams for this little corner of the internet, and big plans for what’s ahead. There has been a major increase in eyeballs on these posts in the last year, and I can’t remember when the last time I did an introduction so here’s me closing out the year with a little bit of personal talk:

My name is Katy and I’m an archivist. I am what we call in the industry a “solo-archivist,” which means I am the only trained professional in archives in our institution (though I have an amazing handful of colleagues who are invaluable to the work) and manage all aspects of archival work for a small historical society archives. We are first and foremost a research archive, though we also support a small historical museum. It’s a dream job and I sometimes have to pinch myself that I get to spend a majority of my work days surrounding by old paper and maps and photographs. I love talking about my work and archival work in general, and there have been a few posts in this newsletter that wrestle with some of the big questions I ask myself:

I like to think of myself as a “Jill of all trades, mistress of none,” but in a very positive and affirming way — I dabble in many things, and that’s how I like it. I have a crazy-long list of niche interests, which grows continuously. I think the last time I tried to collate my current obsessions this was the result:

But within minutes of saving that list, I had thought of several more important and necessary additions: card catalogs, personal archives, commonplace books, journaling. That was back in January, and I could probably come up with twenty more additions since — you get the idea. I like a lot of things, and this newsletter is where I explore some of them. I talk about archives, but also about monasteries, children’s literature, folklore, and pockets.

The posts that seem to resonate the most with readers are about my personal archiving practice and personal curriculum:

And those are fun to write! But the posts that I love the most are when I get to lose myself in research:

I hope that these last few weeks of the year are kind to you and full of joy. I’m working on an end of year wrap-up post for my personal archive for paid subscribers that I’m hoping to have sent out by the New Year, and I have many more plans as we shift into 2026. Thank you endlessly for being here and reading and engaging, it will never cease to surprise and delight me that anyone wants to read the words that I write!

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I majored in poetry in undergrad. I like to trot that out at parties to see the expression on people’s faces, the way they cringe and shuffle their feet. “Haha, I know–when I chose a major I was really aiming for the least lucrative,” I laugh, giving them an out. We chuckle together, shaking our heads at the heedless selfishness of youth. Imagine spending your formative academic years studying something as unprofitable as poetry.

If we want to get technical, the degree is actually Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry. So, even worse. I wasn’t even studying poetry so that I could somehow trick it into giving me a career path that might involve teaching or academia…I was studying poetry to learn how to write it.

And I did write it. Constantly. I also had a nascent blog, a continuation of years of spilling my guts online (I’m a product of 90s personal websites and Livejournal), and poetry informed every word that I published. It infused every aspect of my writing, every turn of phrase and vocabulary choice. I devoured collections, memorized lines, carried poems around with me everywhere I went. I was jotting down verses in notebooks, and doc files. Poems informed the prose I wrote in the blog, and sometimes I was even brave enough to share a line or two.

And then, I lost it all.

Looking back, I’m not sure how it happened. Marriage, motherhood, a few career twists and turns. My 30s and then turning 40. One year, two years, three years–all piled one on top of the other until suddenly I realized one day that it had been ages since I had read poetry in any meaningful way other than a screenshot on an instagram post or as a poem-a-day email in my inbox.

This realization coincided with my awareness that my writing had suffered. Back in those early blogging days, I never planned a post. I would just sit down at my computer, open Blogger and write. The words spilled out—messy and wild and always in need of editing, but they came so easily! Now, I stare at the white expanse of my word processor and my mind is as flat and blank as the computer screen. The words are trapped behind some impenetrable wall, and I am starting to recognize that the only way to retrieve them is to read poetry again.

I’ve spent the last few days concocting a plan. I like plans, and I like curriculum and syllabi and lists and goals. So here is my initial planning on The Great Poetry Project of 2026. I want to inject poetry back into my life, so that it is as present and as important as it was to back in my undergrad days.

I am calling this plan a curriculum, and I hope that none of the pedants will scold me and tell me that this silly little personal project isn’t a curriculum. I just like the word, ok? It’s a good word.

Poetry Curriculum 2026

Example Syllabi:

Reading Poetry Goldfarb2014

670KB ∙ PDF file

Download

NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Download

My Are.na board: https://www.are.na/katy-jg/poetry-curriculum-2026

One of my biggest tips for starting a personal curriculum/study project is to do a search for old syllabi online. Take your subject or topic and add the word “syllabus” in a google search, and then scroll through the pages of hits. It’s a fantastic way to get a reading list and schedule. This little project is going to start off in the first few months heavily inspired by the 2014 Reading Poetry course at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, taught by Lisa Goldfarb. The required texts and the weekly list of poems has become a really wonderful base layer to build on.

Initial reading list:

Helen Vendler: Poems-Poets-Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

Edward Hirsch: How to Read and Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

How to incorporate more poetry into my daily life:

• Sign up for the poem-a-day emails from The Poetry Foundation and the Paris Review.

• Keep an on-the-go poetry notebook in my daily carry.

• Seek out poems everywhere, and write them down.

• Read poetry with my daughter.

• Listen to audio recordings or YouTube videos of poetry being read out loud.

• Find media that celebrates and explores poets and poetry, like podcasts or long-form video content.

• Read poems in the morning and before bed.

• Read essays about poetry.

• Share poems with the people in my life.

• See if the local library has subscriptions to poetry publications and journals.

Last weeks of December 2025

Week 1 (12/8-12/4)

Reading:

Vendler, Ch 1 “The Poem as Life” & Ch 2 “The Poem as Arranged Life”

Louise Gluck, Education of the Poet

Poems:

Seamus Heaney, “From the Frontier of Writing”

Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

Emily Dickinson, “The Soul selects her own Society”

Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”

John Keats, “This living hand”

Pablo Neruda, “Poetry”

Emily Dickinson, “The Brain–is wider than the Sky”

William Blake, “Ah Sun-flower”

Pablo Neruda, “Poet’s Obligation”

Jorges Luis Borges, “Chess”

Week 2 (12/15-12/21)

Reading:

Hirsch, Ch 1 “Message in a Bottle” & Ch 2 “A Made Thing”

Vendler, Ch 3 “Poems as Pleasure”

Poems:

Edmund Spenser, “Sonnet 75”

Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

John Donne, “Breake of Day”

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How Do I Love Thee?

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Pound/Li Po, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

Tracy K. Smith, “Credulity”

Elizabeth Bishop; “One Art”

Neruda, “Tonight I Can Write. . .”

Breyten Breytenbach, “Padmapani”

Robert Lowell, “Obit”

Seamus Heaney, “An Artist”

Eugenio Montale, “The Lemon Trees”

Week 3 (12/22-12/28)

Reading:

Hirsch: Ch 3 “At the White Heat

Vendler: Ch 6 “Constructing a Self”

Poems:

Emily Brontë, “No Coward Soul Is Mine”

Yeats, “Among Schoolchildren”

Robert Creeley, “When I Think”

Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

Audre Lorde, “Hanging Fire”

Emily Dickinson, “Much Madness is divinest Sense”

Carolos Drummond de Andrade, “Residue”

Anna Akhmatova, “The Muse”

César Vallejo, “Intensity and Height”

Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

William Carlos Williams “Spring and All”

T.S. Eliot, “Preludes”

Dylan Thomas, “In My Craft or Sullen Art”

Week 4 (12/29-1/4)

Reading:

Vendler, Ch 4 “Describing Poems”

Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury”

Poems:

Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

A.R. Ammons “The City Limits”

Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge”

Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

Allen Ginsberg;, “America”

Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Lemon”

Antonio Agostinho Neto, “The Grieved Lands”

Seamus Heaney, “Bogland”

Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

Neruda, “Amor America”

Elizabeth Bishop, “Brazil, January 1, 1502”

Shuntaro Tanikawa, “Two Tokyos”

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What I read:

Coffin, T. P. (1973). The book of Christmas folklore. Seabury Press.

Hodges, K. (2019). How King Arthur Invented Christmas: Reimagining Arthur and Rome in Early Modern Scotland and England. Arthuriana (Dallas, Tex.), 29(3), 25-42.

Raedisch, L. (2013). The old magic of Christmas: Yuletide traditions for the darkest days of the year. Llewellyn Publications.

Notes:

🌟 In the 17th century, Scottish Protestant reformers tried to use King Arthur to cancel Christmas. No, really. In 1644 publisher David Buchanon wrote in the preface of John Knox’ History of the Reformation in Scotland that the 12 Days of Christmas were an invention of King Arthur, and proof that the entirety of the holiday was nothing but Roman Catholic propaganda. Buchanon and others argued that the twelve days were full of immoral behavior, gluttonous feasting, and debauched escapades.

The strict reformist religion in Scotland was against all holidays and celebrations that had any whiff of ‘papistry’—Christmas and its adjacent feast days were a particular target. They argued that the date was incorrect, it had pagan roots, and was full of debauchery and distraction from the true Sabbath. This had been a longstanding battle, ever since the church in Scotland broke from the Catholic church in 1560. In 1640, Scottish Parliament officially banned the Christmas holiday.

It’s no surprise that taking away one of the largest and rowdiest celebrations of the medieval and early modern calendar wasn’t exactly popular, so the learned men of Scotland started casting around trying to find anything they could use to back up their argument. Christmas celebrations and feasting has always been associated with royalty, so connecting it to the Arthurian court wasn’t difficult. Despite the growing doubt of the historicity of Arthurian legends, the Scottish church were fine to use them to their ends—the fear that King Arthur may not have existed wasn’t as great as the fear that he may have been Catholic. By the 17th century, Arthurian history was being used to show how English adherence to the Roman church had spoiled what they considered to have been an independent and proto-Protestant religion. Scotland, unlike England, had never been conquered by Rome and, according to the reformers, had only fallen under Roman influence because of the proximity of the English. In Arthurian legend, King Arthur appoints a new bishop in York, and the Catholic influence spreads northward.

Four years after Scotland banned Christmas, the English parliament moved to do the same. Like their northern neighbors, the Puritan reformers of England viewed King Arthur with suspicion. Suddenly, the legendary monarch went from being the defender of the faith against Saxon pagans to a figurehead of Roman Catholic corruption.

🌟 Several plants associated with Christmas have deep meanings in plant and folk lore.

1. Evergreen (fir, yew, laurel): with its ability to retain its greenness, even in the dead of winter, is associated with fertility and renewal.

2. Holly: “its pricking leaves, white flowers, and red berries symbolizes the male reproductive urge.” Holly has historically, even in ancient times, been associated with men. It was thought to be unlucky to bring into the house any time other than Christmas, which I think is a very reasonable assumption for the lady of the house to make. Also curative for colic, worms, asthma, smallpox, and dislocated bones.

3. Ivy: associated with femininity. In Ireland, men collected ivy to place under their pillow at night in the hopes that they would dream of the woman they would marry. An ivy leaf placed in water in a covered dish and left from New Years to Old Christmas (January 6) will reveal the future: spots on the leaf predicts illness and distress, while a green, unblemished leaf means health and happiness for the year ahead.

4. Mistletoe: sacred to pagans and a survival into the Christian era. Thought to be effective against infertility and poisons. It became associated with romance and kissing in the 18th century.

   

🌟 The most famous Christmas mince pie ever made was prepared for Sir Henry Grey at his home in London in 1770. It was 9 feet in circumference, weighed 12 stone (168 pounds), and had to be wheeled into the dining room on a specially made cart. It contained: 4 geese, 4 wild ducks, 2 woodcocks, 2 turkeys, 4 partridges, 7 blackbirds, 6 pigeons, 2 rabbits, 2 neat’s tongues, 2 bushels of flour, 20 pounds of butter, and “sundry items.”

🌟 “First footing” or “letting in” at Christmas. The first human to enter a home on Christmas day was important—no one was meant to exit the home until the first person crossed the threshold from outside. Apparently it should be a dark-haired man for luck, which meant that families sometimes hired professional first-footers to enter their houses, carrying a sprig of evergreen. They entered through the front door, walking all through the house and accepting gifts of salt, bread, pins, and money, before leaving through the back door. Whatever happened, the first-footer could never be a ginger (red hair was associated with Judas) or a woman (disaster!).

🌟 I love this cast list of a parade of characters in Ben Johnson’s Christmas, His Masque, performed for the court of James 1 in 1616. It was written and performed as a statement in support of the Christmas holiday, in opposition to the Puritans.

MIS-RULE. In a velvet Cap with a Sprig, a short Cloake, great yellow Ruffe like a Reveller, his Torch-bearer bearing a Rope, a Cheese and a Basket.

CAROLL. A Long tawny Coat, with a red Cap, and a Flute at his girdle, his Torch-bearer carrying a Song booke open.

MINC’D-PIE. Like a fine Cookes Wife, drest neat; her Man carrying a Pie, Dish, and Spoones.

GAMBOLL. Like a Tumbler, with a hoope, and Bells; his Torch- bearer arm’d with a Cole-staffe, and a blinding cloth.

POST AND PAIRE. With a paire-Royall of Aces in his Hat; his Garment all done over with Payres, and Purrs; his Squier carrying a Box, Cards, and Counters.

NEW-YEARES-GIFT. In a blew Coat, serving-man like, with an Orange, and a sprig of Rosemarie guilt on his head, his Hat full of Broaches, with a coller of Gingerbread, his Torch-bearer carrying a March-paine, with a bottle of wine on either arme.

MUMMING. In a Masquing pied suite, with a Visor, his Torch-bearer carrying the Boxe, and ringing it.

WASSALL. Like a neat Sempster, and Songster; her Page bearing a browne bowle, drest with Ribbands, and Rosemarie, before her.

OFFERING. In a short gowne, with a Porters staffe in his hand; a Wyth borne before him, and a Bason by his Torch-bearer.

BABIE-CAKE. Drest like a Boy, in a fine long Coat, Biggin, Bib, Muckender, and a little Dagger; his Vsher bearing a great Cake with a beane, and a Pease.

Plans for this newsletter:

I would very much like to get back to writing and sharing more for this newsletter. It’s difficult to dedicate the amount of time needed for long-form essays or explorations, especially as a mom and working full-time. As I was thinking about how I could show up more, I realized that despite my busy schedule, I always find the time to read and take notes. So, why not share those notes with you? And sometimes, a handful of notes might become something more. I love newsletters and pages where I can discover interesting books and articles to read, so I hope that you will enjoy that aspect as well. I want to show how eclectic and diverse my reading tastes can be, and the strange and wonderful things that I come across.

I am also brainstorming how to provide more content for my circle of paid subscribers, and I think that I have worked something out. Every month I will share a post dedicated to my Personal Archive and how it is building and growing. Detailed looks into my systems, musings on knowledge management and organization, explorations and trials of new additions, and all the fun, nerdy things. It will be an even deeper dive into the research and note-taking that I touch on for my public posts.

I hope that this all sounds fun, and I can’t thank you all enough for being here and reading and supporting and just generally being my favorite little corner of the internets.

This is an AI-free newsletter and it always will be.

I came to a realization recently that should have been wildly apparent much earlier: my favorite type of book and notebook are collections. I love a collation of information and words — compendiums, commonplacing, florilegiums, encyclopedias, zibaldones, any and all types of collecting knowledge in an organized and accessible way. I think it is my magpie nature to gather information and keep it, to store it and archive it. I’m not trying to be an expert on anything, I just want to know. So here are some notes I took recently when I came to this realization:

Compendium (n) a collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject, especially in a book or other publication.

• All encyclopedias are compendiums but not all compendiums are encyclopedias.

Encyclopedic collections of knowledge, collated in a pleasing alphabetized or subject-specific fashion, hopefully with cunning little illustrations and perhaps some pretty headings. I love to trawl through entries on niche subjects, whittling down to the specifics. I could spend hours (and have) reading about folklore practices, or heritage crafts, or beekeeping, or all the different fantasy worlds in fiction. When I am browsing the shelves at the local library, these are always the types of books I am hoping to find. There should be a compendium for every subject.

A carefully constructed intellectual cathedral.1

Florilegium (n) a compilation of excerpts or sententia from other writings.

• Latin: flos (flowers) and legre (gathering)

• “a gathering of flowers”

What a fantastic description of gathering excerpts from what you are reading, just as you would gather flowers for a bouquet. Arranging them together into something pleasing and beautiful, each part lovely in its own right but together something different, something more.

According to Mary Franklin-Brown, scholastic encyclopedism in the Middle Ages was the “exhaustive coverage, the ordered presentation of material, the dissemination of knowledge beyond traditionally learned circles.” The human, intellectual urge to “provide a comprehensive overview of knowledge, to organize it, and to propagate it.”2

My handwritten notes:

The Age of Wonder Meets the Age of Information: What can past eras of information overload teach students about critically consuming content in the present?

A Garden of Verses: As commonplace books evolved into anthologies, they developed reputations as canonical works, their editors curating tomes as vibrant as the loveliest bouquets.

Mapping Knowledge: The Visualizations of Paul Otlet

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Physical media I’ve come across:

My mother kept every issue of Victoria Magazine all through the 1990s, and I loved nothing more than squirreling away with them and poring over the pages. My history and beauty loving heart fell head over heels with the richness, the parlour-craft themes, the beautiful photo spreads and the articles about niche subjects — fountain pens, crazy quilts, a tiny business that still gilded frames the way it was done three hundred years ago. I loved everything about the magazine, from the beautiful center spreads all the way to the pages of ads at the back of each issue. There was something about the collection of black and white ads, spreads of hand-drawn and antique clip-art motifs with their cut-and-paste design that thrilled me. Ads for pinafores and bonnets, reproduction hardware, antiques and bed-and-breakfasts. I wanted to order all of the catalogs and make wish lists and dream. Even now, I wish that I could somehow write to the addresses and cross my fingers that a handmade catalog for lace-trimmed petticoats might show up at my door.

My mother’s collection is long gone — but I pick up any issues I find. I like to flip through them, especially as seasons change, for inspiration. This month, as the Fall weather rolled in and I am suddenly wanting nothing except rich, autumnal vibes, I pulled out a few October issues. I’ve scanned a small selection from October 1994 and put them together into a little PDF download for you:

Victoria Magazine October 1994

132MB ∙ PDF file

Download

A selection of scans from the October 1994 edition of Victoria Magazine.

Download

Currently reading:

🍐 Nuns: A History of Convent Life

Some interesting facts I’ve learned so far:

• Convents were set up in Rome specifically for enclosing Jewish women within a cloistered space, removing them from the Jewish marriage sphere and working to convert them to Catholicism. Economic pressure was placed on Jewish families to send their daughters to these convents.

• During the Reformation, nuns fought to protect their religious institutions, often times resisting longer than their male counterparts. This same trend happened again in Revolutionary France, where nuns proved similarly strong-willed and more reluctant to abandon their convents than monks and friars.

• English nuns fled to Europe after the dissolution of the monasteries and set up convents in exile, where they set up schools to educate the daughters of English Catholic families.

• Quedlinburg Abbey in Germany became a Protestant convent during the Reformation and somehow managed to retain papal privileges.

Recently finished:

🍋 Age of the Cloister: The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages

🍋 The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction

Media I’ve consumed:

Our Aesthetic Categories

137KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Sianne Ngai, 2010

Download

🧀 How to Build a Medieval Castle: Why are archaeologists constructing a thirteenth-century fortress in the forests of France?

🧀 “Border Science” vs. Commercial Occultism: A Nazi Debate // Occultism was widely embraced under the Third Reich, complicating Nazi attempts to wield it as a weapon against internationalism and other undesirable ideologies.

🧀 How the German Peasants’ War Exposed 16th-Century Europe’s Fragile Foundations

🧀 How Close Did We Come to Losing Beowulf Forever?

🧀 Green Sickness, the Disease of Virgins

Noted

Alvin Ailey's Revelatory Notes

Creativity cannot exist without experimentation. Because of this belief, Alvin Ailey (1931-1989) insisted that artists must be allowed to fail. He understood this all too well. As a dancer and a choreographer, Ailey learned that failure is a necessary byproduct of innovation…

Read more

9 months ago · 96 likes · 22 comments · Jillian Hess

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What stories are important? Whose voices matter?

I’ve just returned home from a few days at the New Mexico History Conference, where myself and two colleagues were presenting a panel on three collections in our archive from women who worked and lived in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. It was part of an effort to bring more awareness to the archive and its availability for research, a promotional push we’ve been leaning into in the last year as we try to shake off decades of gatekeeping and bring light to the amazing collections we steward.

As the archive shifts under my management, there have been quite a few changes. Most notably has been the level of access for those outside a select few — historically, the doors have been closed to most in-depth research, everything filtered through one set of hands for decades. Myself and my colleagues have worked hard to redirect our priorities, with access and transparency the center of all.

Part of this shift has been an evaluation of the priorities that drive almost every decision we make in regards to processing and sharing collections. We’ve had to ask ourselves: what is important and whose voices matter?

The answer, of course, is all of them. Everything. Each collection we accession into the archive holds some (non-monetary) value. In the past, that value was weighted heavily on the collections of scientists, community big-wigs, and VIPs. Lots of white dudes, really. Quelle surprise.

But now we get to make new decisions based on current archival theory — and its been so rewarding to prioritize the collections from the shadows. The voices and stories of women and other marginalized groups are getting their chance in the sun.

Archival Debt

“The burden on archival workers and repositories resulting from previous decisions and practices.”

The Dictionary of Archival Terminology, Society of American Archivists

Archival debt can manifest in a myriad of ways — there are many choices made in the history of an archive that have great impact in the present. But for us, archival debt looks like three decades of limited access, a historic lack of resources, an overwhelming backlog of un-processed materials, and hidden collections that we are consistently unearthing.

The archive’s first digital Collection Management System was unveiled in the early 1990s—a custom-built FileMakerPro database, records were manually entered from the paper accession record cards and catalog cards. This was most likely a tedious and time-consuming process, especially at a time when there was only one paid staff member and a handful of volunteers who were most likely not incredibly familiar with emerging digital technology. But it was a project that was prioritized and, over time, the basis for our current digital catalog was built.

The assumption has always been that the entirety of the collections had been transferred over from paper cards to database, but as we began a survey of cataloged materials on our storage shelves over the last year, it became apparent that was not the case.

During the survey of materials in our archival storage, the Newkirk Collection was discovered on a high shelf in the scrapbook storage aisle. It included one document box, one larger scrapbook box, and an archival binder box. The numbering on the boxes indicated that the materials had been donated in 1987.

I opened the scrapbook box and could immediately see two scrapbooks, a handful of small artifacts, and some loose photographs. The scrapbooks were blue, with large Naval ships on the covers.

It was apparent that some processing work had been done over the years: arrangement, short description notes, and re-housing into archival sleeves. But there was no record of the collection in our digital CMS, though we did find the collection in the old paper card catalog. It had never been transferred into the digital collection management system.

Flipping through the collection, its importance was immediately recognized: the creator of the collection was a woman, she had been enlisted in the WAVES during WWII, and there was a Los Alamos connection.

Ensign Cordelia Louise Newkirk, the only WAVE in Los Alamos.

A quick personal note about finding this collection: sometimes we come across collections in the archive that feel serendipitous and connected – this is one of those collections for me. When I opened the first scrapbook and saw the name Cordelia Louise, I got goosebumps. Cordelia Louise was my great-grandmother’s name and both myself and my daughter are named for her – my middle name is Louise and my daughter’s first name is Cordelia. I immediately wanted to know more about this woman, and discovered brief mentions of her in some of the histories of the Navy contribution to the Manhattan Project. But there was never anything more than a perfunctory single line, often just referring to her as “Ensign Newkirk” and that she had been brought to Los Alamos to assist the Navy office.

I felt that it was high time she was introduced, so that there might be something more about her out in the world than just a few words in a history centered around men. So here she is.

Cordelia Louise Newkirk went by Louise—“Lou” to her friends.

She was born in 1916 in Kansas and worked as a bookkeeper and office manager after high school. Judging by the glowing recommendation letters sent to the Navy by her former employers in her collection, she was a skilled office administrator.

In 1942, she and a friend enlisted in the WAVES to do their part during the war effort.

Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services - WAVES

• The women’s branch of the Naval Reserve, established in July of 1942.

• Unlike the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), which had women serving with the Army but not in the Army, the WAVES were enlisted members of the Navy Reserve from inception. Once the WAVES were established, the WAACs became the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) with full enlistment privileges.

• The WAVES were intended to free up men for war duties

  

  Louise’s WAVES service until she arrived in Los Alamos:

  • Jan. 1943 - Basic training in Stillwater, OK.

  • Dec. 1943 - Naval Air Station, Corpus Christi, TX.

  • 1944 - Midshipman (officer) school, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

  • Dec. 1945 - Naval Air Station, Miami, FL.

Louise attended training at the facility in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on the campus of Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University). She went through yeoman training, which consisted of 6 weeks of boot-camp (called indoctrination in the Navy), and 6 weeks of specialized training. Yeoman were the Navy office administrators, and Lou spent eight hours a day in classroom instruction on filing, shorthand, stenography, typing, courses on history, public relations, naval correspondence, and decoding messages.

Her first posting was to the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, TX. She first worked in the Senior WAVE office, and by the summer of 1944 was the leading yeoman first-class in the Administrative Office at the Naval Air Intermediate Training Command Staff, with supervision over approximately 20 enlisted personnel of both sexes.

She was recommended for officer training in August of 1944 and received her Ensign orders on the 28th of September, 1944.

By the time Lou entered midshipman school at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, the women’s officer training program had been shortened to one month (down from three) because the women trainees “proved smarter than expected.” Her days were filled with lectures and exercise drills. In addition to their rigorous courses and lectures, the women were also given a deeper knowledge of “being Navy” – they took a crash course and deeper dive into Naval lingo and etiquette. They also attended the same courses that their male counterparts did, on subjects such as how to recognize enemy ships and aircraft.

After a brief few weeks at her first post as an officer in Miami, FL, Louise received new orders in January of 1945. She was detached from her duties and ordered to proceed to Santa Fe, NM and report to the mysterious “Engineer Project ‘Y.’”

Soon after receiving her orders, she also received a short letter from Hazel Greenbacker, the secretary to Captain William S. Parsons. She was told to present herself to 109 East Palace in Santa Fe, where a Mrs. McKibbin would provide her further instructions. If you know a bit about Manhattan Project history, then that address and the name Dorothy McKibbin might ring a bell.

I won’t give an exhaustive history of Captain William “Deak” Parsons (that could be ten other presentations of its own), but even by the time of the Manhattan Project he was a decorated and well-known Naval Officer. There is a good chance that Lou would have heard of him during her time in the Navy.

He was brought to the Project because of his recognition as a leading ordnance expert. He became the Associate Director under Oppenheimer and head of the Ordnance Division, and was also tasked with leading Project Alberta in 1945—the combat delivery of the bombs.

Most famously, he was the weaponeer on the Enola Gay.

I think many people are unaware of the Navy contribution to the Manhattan Project—it was, at its essence, an Army installation, and the vast majority of enlisted men and women at all project sites, including Los Alamos, were Army. But there was a Navy presence, due mostly to the fact that General Groves needed an ordnance expert and there was no one better than Parsons.

By 1945, there were 41 Naval officers at Los Alamos, and they were tasked with both building the bombs and delivering them in combat. Several big Manhattan Project names were Navy men: Norris Bradbury, Francis Birch, and Frederick “Dick” Ashworth some of the more recognizable.

Until 1945, Hazel Greenbacker had been the administrative assistant in Parson’s office, but by January of 1945 he had decided that he needed an enlisted naval office administrator. He requested a yeoman, but he received Ensign Louise Newkirk. She became the only WAVE in Los Alamos — there were over 300 enlisted WACs that cycled through the site during the war, but Louise was singular as the only enlisted woman in the Navy to be connected to the Project.

We don’t have Parson’s reasons why he felt the need to request an enlisted person to manage the Navy office in 1945, at least not in the collection or from what I could find in his biography or several histories of the Navy contribution to the project. But we can place the request and Louise’s arrival in context:

• Louise reports to Dorothy McKibbin at 109 E Palace on January 29, 1945.

• By mid February of 1945, Parsons is requesting that Louise travel to the Eleventh Naval District headquarters in San Diego “to determine the best procedure to use in handling many details of naval administration which arise in this isolated post.”

• Also in February of 1945, Dick Ashworth flies to Guam, tasked with informing General Chester Nimitz of the Pacific Command about the atomic program and the bombing mission. During this trip, Tinian Island is chosen as the departure point for the bombers.

• Project Alberta is formed in March of 1945.

In many of her recommendations by her leading officers, Louise is noted as being extremely loyal to the Navy and able to be trusted with high-level orders and information. As office administrator of the Naval office of Project Y, she was tasked with handling record-keeping, pay and travel of all naval personnel at the site. One can imagine how being loyal and tight-lipped (as well as enlisted and under oath) could be beneficial in such a high-security situation

Life for Louise in Los Alamos wasn’t all secrecy and administrative tasks.

As an officer, Louise was a member of the Los Alamos Officer’s Club and socialized there and at other clubs around the site. I’ve searched for her in our other photo collections, and only found her in two photographs so far, one of which is this party at the Officer’s Club (on the top left of the collage, Louise is circled standing to the right of the photograph in her uniform).

Despite being enlisted, Louise was billeted in the civilian women’s dormitory. But her photo albums show that her friend group was largely made up from the enlisted WACs. She drove a Mercury convertible and traveled all around the area – there are photos in her collection of visits to Pueblo ruins, river swimming trips and visits to Santa Fe.

The images above show arguably my favorite two slips of paper in all of our collections of Manhattan Project materials.

These two unassuming notes, front and back, show Lou flirting with one of the censors who worked to read all of the mail sent from and received to Los Alamos during the war. Click on the images to enlarge them and read the notes.

We don’t know if the meeting at the La Fonda ever happened, but I hope that it did!

The war’s end saw the lifting of censorship, and Louise was finally able to tell her parents what she had been doing during the war. She attended the “E” Award ceremony to watch as her civilian friends were commended for their roles in the Project.

She also attended the parading ceremony of the Meritorious Service Award for the enlisted service members. She is pictured here with her fellow officers in both the Army and Navy in the second photo I discovered elsewhere in the archive collections. She was easy to spot in her jaunty white uniform and hat.

By December of 1945, many of the enlisted personnel in Los Alamos were receiving their discharge orders. Louise’s superiors wanted her to stay on into 1946 to see the majority of the Naval personnel home. Captain Larkin, Parsons’ deputy and the top Navy officer on site when Parsons was in the Pacific, requested a promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade if she would agree to stay on duty for an additional 180 days.

There is correspondence in the collection showing that the Navy officers wanted this promotion for Lou quickly and before the end of the year – they hoped the could present it to her as a Christmas gift. It was approved on December 18.

By July of 1946, most of the naval personnel in Los Alamos had been sent home. Louise saw them all off, handling all of their final travel and pay details. Louise received her detachment orders on July 17, 1946. Her time in Los Alamos was over.

Hidden Collections = Archival Debt

• The collection of material, comprised of documents, photographs, scrapbooks, and small artifacts, was donated by Louise’s widower in 1987. She had passed away in 1984.

• The collection was originally processed and cataloged in the old card catalog system in the late 1980s, but was never transferred to the digital catalog in 1993 or in any year since.

• In the years it sat unknown, many who had known and worked with Louise were still alive. Several of the Navy Manhattan Project veterans lived into the early 2000s and were in regular contact with our archives. Many donated their own collections of materials. If detailed processing and access had been achieved during that time, there could have been potential conversations about Louise and her contributions to the Project. This is a frustration we feel too often — the lack of prioritization of women’s collections meant that invaluable insight into her life was lost with every passing year.

• Will we ever know the extent of her work on the Project? Her collection is a wonderful addition to the archive, but, like so many of our collections, it raises even more questions.

What stories are important?

Whose voices matter?

Since the decisions were made that caused the archival debt, there has been a shift in archives – now we understand and appreciate the value of these hidden voices. The voices of women and other marginalized groups give us a richer, deeper understanding of history and a unique viewpoint.

It is now our priority and privilege to seek out these hidden collections and provide greater access, so that their stories can be told.

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The library of the Mont Sainte-Odile Abbey is a 12th-century space of vaulted walls and ancient tile floors. Finely crafted bookshelves have been made to fit the arched openings in the walls, fronted by doors that enclose a library of ancient books. The shelves groan under the weight of paper and gilded leather, spines declaring the wealth of knowledge gathered in such a small space: Cicero, Aristotle, Virgil, sermons from Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, theological treatises from the 8th-century scholar Alcuin, and 12th-century biblical scholarship by Peter Lombard. A lower shelf, labeled with a golden plate onto which the word “Incunabula” is inscribed, holds a precious collection of ten 15th-century printed books, from the very earliest stages of European printing. The little library under the arches is a jewel in the abbey complex, which now houses a hotel, restaurant, and a vibrant, busy chapel.

The library is not usually on the regular tours of pilgrims and tourists — visitors are sometimes brought upstairs to stand in the vaulted space by the staff and canons, which occurs often enough that when the woman in charge of cleaning the abbey rooms noticed an empty spot on a shelf, it was assumed a tourist must have pocketed a book. An almost absentminded police report was made, and then everyone went back to their business.

Until the monastery staff began to notice more empty places on the shelves. And then even more. It seemed as if the books were disappearing, one by one, until one morning the entire shelf of incunabulum stood empty, the voids in the dust the only evidence that precious books had once been there.

Was it the work of the devil? An inside job? Tensions were running high throughout the monastery, with everyone a suspect. The local gendarmes instinctively suspected that the thief was knowledgeable about the books, and brought in a special team dedicated to art theft. Locks were changed, keys turned in, windows sealed…and still, the books continued to disappear.

The abbey sits perched on a mountain in Alsace, a fairytale castle replete with sheer cliffs, stone walls, and a storied history. Also known as Hohenburg Abbey, it is best known for the woman who became its first abbess and the patron saint of Alsace and good eyesight, Odile of Alsace.

Odile was born in the mid-7th century to Aldarich, the Duke of Alsace. Like all nobility of the time, Aldarich was hoping for a son, and he was terribly disappointed when his newborn child ended up being merely a girl. To add insult to injury, the poor little thing was blind, so Aldarich apparently decided the best thing to do was to leave her to die. Luckily her mother was having none of that and spirited the baby off to be raised by nuns in a nearby monastery. Odile was raised within the church, and at the age of twelve entered the monastery herself. She was baptized by the itinerate bishop Saint Erhard of Resenberg, during which her sight was miraculously restored. This miracle reached her birth family, and her younger brother was sent to retrieve her. Upon returning to her father’s house, Aldarich became so enraged that he killed his son (this guy sounds like such a winner) but luckily Odile wasn’t finished with miracles, and she was able to revive her brother. You would think this would show Aldarich that Odile wasn’t to be messed with, but apparently, he can’t take a hint — he chased her into the wilderness, where she hid in a cave. Even more miracles happened, including several instances of miraculous healing waters springing from rocks, until Aldarich was injured and Odile, at the risk of her life, came down from her cave and nursed him back to health. He finally gave in and welcomed her to the family (what a guy), founding the monastery in her name and installing her as the first abbess. The abbey went on to have a succession of strong, intelligent abbesses through the seventeenth century when it fell under the control of Premonstratensians canons.

Throughout the abbey’s history under abbess rule, it was renowned as a place of learning and knowledge. The canons continued this tradition and, fast forward four centuries, imagine the horror of the canons and staff as, over a two-year period, the invaluable library disappeared from the shelves. In April of 2002, the cleaning staff entered a scene that must have taken their breath away — entire shelves stood empty, the priceless books gone without a trace. Fr. Alain Donius, the canon librarian (now an exorcist, by the way) knew that something had to be done — nothing up to this moment had deterred the thief. There had to be another way inside the library that wasn’t through the doors or windows.

In a tiny flat in nearby Illkirch-Graffenstaden, a quiet young engineering professor sat at his desk, a sixteenth-century Bible open before him. His name was Stanislas Gosse, he was 33 years old, and he was a self-proclaimed bibliophile. A local to the area, he had been raised a Catholic with a deep connection to the mountain-top monastery nearby. As a child, he had been taken to play along the “pagan wall” that rings the abbey complex, with family picnics on the grounds and mass held in the chapel. As a young man, he had been shown the library, and the images of the books standing on the shelves had never left his mind. The dust layering the books had broken his heart — why was no one reading these beautiful pieces of history? He felt troubled by the way they languished in the library, unread, unloved, and forgotten.

By his own account, the first theft had been remarkably easy. He was visiting the abbey and noticed that the door to the library had been left open. Slipping inside, he found an empty room — taking a book from the shelf had been as simple as opening a cabinet door and lifting the book into his backpack. He walked back out of the abbey, past the guesthouse and restaurant, past the chapel and grounds, and down the winding path to the carpark, where his bicycle waited.

After that, it was merely a matter of visiting the abbey, slipping into the library, and absconding with a book or two or three. At one point, he found a ring of keys left lying about which he used to let himself in after the initial thefts prompted the staff to start locking the door. He couldn’t believe how easy it was, and how much he enjoyed having the books on his own bookshelves at home. He started to view the books as his, even going so far as to create his own bookplates in homemade gothic script, which he pasted over the abbey’s Ex Libris labels.

When the gendarmes changed the locks, he knew that he had to find another way in. He began searching local archives for descriptions of the abbey, hoping to plan a route inside that would bring him closer to his precious targets. And he found a map. A story like this wouldn’t be complete without a forgotten map. And this map held a centuries-old secret: a hidden passageway that led directly to the library. A story like this wouldn’t be complete without a hidden passageway.

When this part of the abbey was constructed in the 12th century, the space that would become the library was planned as a communal gathering place for the monks and nuns. Known as the Cavalry, it was a place for the community to meditate and converse. The builders were instructed to create a small, walled-off room beside the Cavalry, a listening room, where the abbey administration could eavesdrop on conversations and make sure everyone was doing as they ought. The listening room was accessed by a trap door in the attic, and at some point in the abbey history, a passage into the Cavalry was created through a hidden entrance inside one of the vaulted cabinets. All this was laid out in the map which Stanislas found. All this enabled him to continue his book theft, to the bewilderment and confusion of both the abbey staff and the gendarmes.

It’s like something out of a novel — the socially awkward professor, a backpack full of ropes, scaling the exterior walls of the abbey. Stanislas made his way into the attic and found, just where the map said it would be, the small trap door. He fashioned a rope ladder and dropped down into the listening room. It was a small, cramped space — the only exits the way he came, and a small opening blocked by a wooden door. He pushed through and found himself inside the darkened space of the library. Like some gothic villain, he filled his bags with books by the light of candles.

Despite the secrecy of his entrance into the abbey, this was not sustainable – after their initial confusion, the gendarmes began to suspect a hidden entrance. They scoured the abbey, including the attic, and found the trap door. They also found suitcases full of the missing books, waiting for Stanislas to return. Perhaps they all finally prayed to Saint Odile, patron of good sight, who gave them the idea to set up CCTV cameras in the library and in the attic. Perhaps she had been waiting, exasperated, throughout the two years until someone finally realized that security cameras could help them see the thief. However the epiphany happened, the cameras were set up and Stanislas was caught the very next night, taken into custody without a fuss.

At his flat, the gendarmes found over 1,000 books taken from the abbey. Stanislas apparently had no intention of ever selling them, he merely wanted to keep them for himself, in a fantastical personal library of inestimable value. The quiet, reserved professor and his secret library, squirreled away in a nondescript building of flats in a suburb of Strasbourg. In the end, he received probation, a fine, and religious forgiveness from the diocese. At the request of the monastery, he kept his teaching position. Fr. Alain Donius even invited Stanislas back to the library, though this time he would have to use the front door – the secret passage had been boarded up.

The sources for this story all differ slightly on details: was it a secret map or an obscure archaeological study that led Stanislas to the passageway? Did the gendarmes find the entrance in the attic or did a bumbling policeman lean against the cabinet opening? It’s all a bit fuzzy and no one can quite agree (even articles written for the same publication contradict each other) — but no matter how it happened, happen it did.

And a past newsletter that I had a lot of fun researching & writing:

• email: areyoushrieking@gmail.com

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