To get to my materials of writing, I have to draw a distinction in my writing itself. This distinction is crude, but it is honest.
I distinguish between writing that matters and writing that doesn’t matter. (I didn’t necessarily know that I did this until I started trying to come up with a list of materials.) What defines what matters and doesn’t matter, for me, has very little to do with content, and everything to do with form. Apparently — and this is hard to admit, given that one of my academic interests is digital stuff — I place a heavier value on physical artifacts of writing (journals, cards, letters, notes) than I do on digital “artifacts” of writing (emails, online articles, blog posts (!)). This is maybe a relatively common thought among some people, but I don’t know. Anyway, I can determine what writing “matters” based on two totally ridiculous and arbitrary tests:
1. The Zombie Apocalypse Test. Imagine a world (as I often do) that fundamentally and irreversibly stops functioning in the ways to which we’ve grown accustomed. Some sort of cataclysmic, apocalyptic game-changer. No electricity, no Internet, no useful fictions like money or governments. The zombie apocalypse. The writing that survives — that is, the writing that continues to exist — following the sudden and irreversible shift from our world to this post-apocalyptic world, that is the only writing that, for me, has any possibility of mattering. So all my writing done in the cloud, or even on computers, it is eliminated simply by virtue of the fact that it cannot survive the zombie apocalypse. Now, even writing that does survive the zombie apocalypse won’t necessarily “matter.” But this test is a way of narrowing the field, so to speak, of revealing the writing that could matter. So, as far as tests go, the zombie apocalypse test is a necessary condition for determining whether or not I think a piece of my writing “matters,” but it is not a sufficient condition. Which brings me to the second test.
2. The Footlocker Test. (Incidentally, there is (or was) a real footlocker on which this test is based, so it is definitely one of my “materials” of writing). So once the first test eliminates all cloud-computing and digital writing, all text messages and emails, blog posts, online articles and encyclopedia entries I’ve ever written, I still have a massive amount of writing out in the world. I possess some of it, and some of it I don’t. The second cull happens when I think whether or not the physical artifact of writing is something worth storing in a footlocker that my children or grandchildren might stumble upon sometime in the (postapocalyptic) future (it doesn’t need to be a postapocalyptic future). And honestly, this gets weird(er). Because essays I’ve written and of which I have a physical copy, or important notes, sometimes they don’t make it because they’re contextless, or I think they’re something that my children or grandchildren wouldn’t get a kick out of discovering and reading. Maybe they’re too esoteric or they’re too long. Maybe I’m not particularly interested in them anymore, so I figure my kids and grandkids wouldn’t be interested in them. But then, contextlessness and strangeness are sometimes the very criteria by which other things make it into this footlocker. A strange and cryptic note that my wife gave me when we started dating. A weird fortune cookie fortune. A napkin on which I drew a picture of a bat playing quarterback. All of these things are in the footlocker, and I have no idea what my kids or grandkids might make of them if/when they find this footlocker. Maybe they’ll move quickly past them to get at the lengthy, esoteric hard copies of seminar essays that weasel their way in there, I don’t know.
The tests to distinguish between writing that matters and writing that doesn’t matter help me to identify the materials of my writing. In no particular order, they are most often things like: PAPER-Y materials: notebooks (specifically the old Mead-style Composition books — love these), lineless drawing paper, crudely handmade journals that are never finished, small Moleskine books in which I’ve written things like “Gift Ideas” or “Recipes” or “Great First Lines,” Post-It Notes, particularly notes from people, postcards, Christmas cards, Fortune cookie fortunes, cuttings from newspapers or magazines, pictures of my relatives’ kids, workout journals, typing paper (as in from an electric typewriter and unused…I never use this, I only think about what kind of writing-that-mattered I might write on it, but never do), really nice stationery (see typing paper), notecards (see typing paper and really nice stationery); WRITING-Y materials: golf pencils, astronaut pen (just the one, an artifact from a time capsule my dad and I made, buried, and dug up the year we found out he had cancer), Varsity disposable ink fountain pens (the best kind of pen around, I tells ya), Bic mechanical pencils, Roseart drawing pencils, Sharpie markers; EFFLUVIA materials: my grandfather’s letter opener, my grandmother’s letter/pen holder, a lockbox filled with sewing supplies, rubber bands, one of those plastic eggs filled with silly putty.
Really, bricabracy stuff, stuff that might also go into the footlocker with any and all of my writing-that-mattered.
