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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Teresa Munoz about her book titled Archivam, published by Pavilion Poetry at Liverpool University Press in 2025. A book that does a whole bunch of things, actually so many things that I was surprised when the book arrived and it wasn't like 600 pages long. It was incredibly readable, but packed full of all sorts of interesting ideas, obviously, about archives, about the things we find in archives, about the experiences of going into an archive, about the ideas that this generates. Also, it's about Edinburgh, it's about walking along. And what does looking at particular places make us think about? Obviously, some aspects of it are incredibly personal. Some aspects, I think are probably really relatable well beyond that. And of course, many things are both and neither. So we're going to obviously, obviously have a lot to discuss sort of around this idea of an archive. But of course, as anyone who's ever been in an archive knows, that's really just a great way into lots of stories and lots of reflection. So I'm quite looking forward to this conversation. Teresa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:21]
C
Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you.
- [02:23]
B
Miranda, could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this collection? Sure.
- [02:31]
C
Well, I'm. I'm Canadian born. I'm from Vancouver in B.C. in Canada. And I moved over to Scotland to do my master's in creative writing and then a PhD and when I was doing my postdoc work at the Newcastle University, we had a project to do with archives, and we were sent into the Bloodaxe Books publishing archive. And we were. It was a creative project. It was myself and about 20 other poets. And we were asked to write poems about some of the artifacts that inspired us in there. And I guess that's what got me into writing this collection was the idea of what can be found in boxes and what surprises us in boxes and how what we find in archives that were curated by another person, what does that bring up in ourselves? And there's a quote, and the epigraph in my book is from Susan Howe, who said, in spontaneous particulars, the telepathy of archives. Each collected object or manuscript is a pre articulate empty theater where a thought may surprise itself at the instance of seeing where a thought may hear itself see. And so I guess the relationship between expectation and reality when looking at archives made me want to do this collection. And I ended up. Ended up getting a couple of fellowships that sort of bolstered this. And one was the Muriel Spark Centenary Award, which allowed me to go through her archives and the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, where I went to France and lived in the apartment that Robert Louis Stevenson had lived in, and a couple other things that made me want to work in archives and show them as sites of interest and sites of loneliness and sites of decolonization, things like that.
- [04:25]
B
Yeah, there's so much to be found in archives, but that's not necessarily always apparent when one just kind of sees a sign that says archives this way. Right. So for someone who maybe hasn't had the pleasure of being immersed in archives the way you have, what do you think are some of the skills or ways of thinking that develop when you get to have that kind of experience?
- [04:47]
C
I think you have to. I think you have to think about judging your. As I said, I think a bit that you have to judge your expectations against what you find, and you have to really look at the material for what it is. And I think, I mean, you go in there and I was looking at Muriel Sparks letters and things, and I don't know what to expect of this person. And you have to sort of draw everything down and really get into the head of this person and. And things. I remember I was taking notes on all the salutations that are in the letters to her, like, dear Gherkin, Dear Popkin, Dear. I didn't write a poem about it, but I should have. And it was all these different little things and you really get to know someone. And I think, skills wise, I mean, I was documenting everything. I had a. I have this huge work doc on my computer and it has the date and it's everything I found that day. And it goes on for. For a really long time. It goes on for years. And I think in terms of ways of thinking is you have to take what's in the box outside of the box, also physically, but you also have to relate it to personal circumstances or issues that you're facing and. And things like that. You know, reading about Muriel's relationship with her family, like the letters to her family, makes you think of your own family, the relationships with. She had with other people, particularly some men. It makes you think of, you know, your own romantic relationships and things. But I think the biggest thing that I found that I had to keep doing in these archives is not just write poems about what I found on the objects was also to relate it back to me and bring it into this century, into this day and age. I think that was the most important thing. I was looking at old blueprints and things of the Balmoral clock, which is in Edinburgh. It's the one by Waverly Station. It's the one that tells you that you're five minutes early. And I was just thinking, what does this clock mean to me? I pass by it all the time. I'm on the train all the time. And I think it's just relating what you find in the archives to your current life.
- [06:49]
B
Yeah, there's so many things that one can look at and find, especially those little details, as you said. Right. Kind of the salutations or the different sorts of emotions that can come through. One that I really noticed in the collection that seemed to be quite visible to you in the archive is regret, which is such a fascinating emotion to find in physical objects because it's not necessarily an easy one to identify. So how does one see regret in an archive?
- [07:18]
C
Can I ask actually, where you found it? Just so I can kind of orientate myself with what I think.
- [07:25]
B
It just sort of seemed to come up in a bunch of different places of sort of nostalgia, but with a sad edge, I suppose, or wishing something was different or wishing it wasn't sort of one moment where I went, ah, this is the regret page. It was just sort of a theme that seemed to be woven in a lot of the looking back, if that makes sense.
- [07:48]
C
Yeah, that's a really good observation because I'm not typically a regretful person. But I think there is a sadness in archives when you think of a lot of the time you're looking at things from people who have passed, or you're looking at things that remind you of loved ones, you know, and the people who have written the letters, they've usually passed on. I did use the word regret at that. Well, I probably use it more than once. But the one that I can remember is in the poem Register of Corrected Entries. So what happens there in Scotland is this is in about the 19th century, when you get married or someone dies or you register a birth, it goes into one official record. But if there's a change to that record, such as a change of paternity on the birth certificate or the addition of paternity in a birth certificate, you get divorced, which was not very heard of at the time. And then it's in another. It's in a. It's in something called the Register of Corrected Entries. So to me, that was like a book of what some might feel is regret, or some might feel is. Has regret in. In that and disappointment. And it was a book of mistakes. So archives can kind of point that out because you're looking at them in hindsight, you're looking at them after the fact. You know, someone wrote that in real time, 50, 100, whatever years ago, and you're looking at that in. In the present day. And you can, you know, you can see in hindsight what might have been difficult or painful, etc. So, yeah, I guess. I guess regret is there or the sense of. I think a lot of. In the six, six, seven years I worked on this book, I think a lot of it was looking back, especially going through other people's past histories. I think that there was, you know, maybe I'm. Maybe I'm. No seeping in their regret or looking at things they should have done differently. I don't know.
- [09:47]
B
Yeah, it was interesting to see. But of course, the whole book is not. Not all the poems are about looking back, though. I think the one you've picked out there is a really great example of literally, like, this is a register with dates and names on it in the past. I wonder if you can also tell us about a moment of looking forward, the poem, the handover that you have in the book about a moment you look forward to in the archives. So I wonder if you can maybe take us into that moment and that feeling. And if you want to read the poem out, you know, feel free as well.
- [10:15]
C
Sure, I'll definitely read it. Yeah. The Handover was a funny poem because I would do the same thing every day. I would go there in the late morning. I'd have a coffee and I. I'd take the elevator up because that's the only way you can go up to the reading room is by the elevator. And I would just, you know, look at myself in the elevator and fix my hair. It was just. It was a funny. It was a funny ritual that happened. And it didn't stop there. It continued when I went in and asked for my folders. So I. I will read this poem. The Handover. Roadside moss or forest wool, verdant shade of folders. I look forward most to the handover archives. Routine dismantling from submerged box to varied air. The paper's small indentations, evidence of previous musing. And it's the Handover, the invisible ripple from the attendant's hand to mine, our mutual swapping that inspires my step on lime and sea foam carpet. Reading is tiring and endlessly generative. We sit in collective spaces, mind spread as aerial photographs. Out of the box, out of stacks, from typed case numbers and catalogs. Is this life in reverse, which I take in my hands and hold close. So, yeah, it was. I guess it was the physicality. You know, I was trying to talk about the physicality of the items, how I would lift them out of the box every day. I'd be super careful. I'd always wear gloves if there was photos or letters. Although I read later that gloves actually make it worse. Like they actually damage it more. I don't know. But anyway, I. I did that and I guess it was. I always wondered when they were giving me the boxes, if the person on the other side was also interested in what was in there. And I kind of imagine they were. Yeah. I just felt we had. I had to write something about this exchange because it was. Happened so often and it was intimate. It was also personal to me and it was, you know, it was revelatory to me. So, yeah. And it was in the Life in reverse because they stack when something was numbered from 1 to 150. Well, you could look at reverse, but you didn't have to, but it was. I think it's weird to have a life cataloged in different stages like that. So officially yeah, it is.
- [12:36]
B
One doesn't think of one's own life as being like, now I'm in box 78. Right. So it is sort of strange to hear it laid out that way. But of course, you've mentioned, obviously Muriel Spark was a big part of these boxes that you were looking at, so we should probably not just gloss over that. Do you want to tell us a bit about why her archives in particular were such an inspiration to you?
- [12:56]
C
Yes. I was interested at the time when I was doing this postdoc work. I was interested in the idea of legacy. What is legacy? Why do you. Why do the things people do and leave behind? Why do they mean something? How are they able to carry on in living memory? I was interested in that idea. I was interested in authors archives, you know, because the author who writes the fiction and poems and things like that, how are they different in their letters? So the mural Spark archives came from a. It was her sense. And Tinary. She would have been a hundred in 2018. So I. On February 1st, I was doing this project on what I found in there. And I think it was the closest I got to really being in someone's life in. From being in someone's past life. And. And I think that they. It was the one archive where I could really write about process because I did it so much and what it was like to put on gloves and look at things. The other items I looked at, I didn't find a whole archive that you could write about that you could respond to in that way. And it was a big inspiration because it was. It sort of shaped thinking about how we should deal with archives and deal with expectation and materialism and. And how we should view books and objects and how we can also hold them. But they also have a surprise or they disappoint us how these things can play with our emotions. And. And. And I think that the muralspark archives, because they start from when she wasn't a writer really to when she was a very celebrated writer living in Italy. I think they really gave me a sense of an arc of the writer's life and what I could do with that and what I could talk about there. I loved most her diaries because they were. They told a lot without saying a lot. You know, they. She wrote down everything she ate for like a year. And some days it wasn't very much. It was like tomato slices and stuff. And she wrote, she kept. So she had this. When she wrote a letter back to someone, there was an under. I think it's full scap. I think that's what they call it. Anyway, you could pull one sheet off and you would have an imprint of it of what she wrote on the other end. So she knew that these things were being documented and kept. And maybe it was a slightly like, you know, she would have been a Gemini, right? It was like duplicitous. Like she knew that this was an author's Persona. But in some letters, you got the real her, which was also very interesting. And I saw some interesting things. You know, the dress she wore to the Academy Awards when the Primary won the Oscar. I saw all of her school books, her bank books and things, her school photos, things like that, and I just thought they were just wonderful. It was a wonderful way to really look at an archive and be in someone's life. But you also know this was curated, this was put together by someone else. And also her. She directed the sense of this archive. And it brought up a lot of different things. And one. One of the thing was the letters from her male fan groups, which were. Some of them were awful. And it was like, you know, it was like it would have been trolling today. All they needed was a screen and they would just write her horrible, horrible things. And it was just all these aspects of being a woman and being a writer and trying to make it all work that really inspired me.
- [16:28]
B
Yeah, there's so much richness there and kind of layers, and it's actually very much on this theme of sort of the reality of someone's life and how they are, but also then the presentation of it and then knowing the presentation of it that. I'd love to ask you about something that those of us who have not engaged with her archive in the deep way that you have might still know about her. Right. She has the famous comment about kind of, if things are bad, go off to Paris for a few days and that will sort everything out. Given that you've been so immersed in her things and her life and also these questions about why are these the things of hers that have been preserved and all of that sort of thing. What do you think of her advice to go to Paris?
- [17:08]
C
It's quite funny. She was very big on the tongue in cheek things, you know, and it comes out in her. In her books and just an example in her dialogue, she's very funny. Like, she's. There's one thing in Mural Spark where the primate, Ms. Jean Brody, sorry, the crime machine Brody, Gene Brody, has a meeting with the headmistress, and headmistress tells her to come at 5:50. And Gene Brody goes, you seek to intimidate me with the use of the quarter hour. And it's just like layers of irony and everything she wrote. So this Paris quote, you know, it's. It's. I guess she felt it was. It was such a. Where she goes, it's good to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble. And that is my advice to everyone except Parisians. And I think it was just a way of, you know, making sure that you have excitement in your life and making sure that, you know, and everyone can have a good time in Paris. And it's busy and it's cultured and it's. It's wonderful. And I think it was just a way to. It was a sense of escapism, I think. And I thought that was funny. And it was funny because I was in Paris for about a month on this Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, just outside of Paris, by way in a lot. And. And I was thinking, how could this place lift your spirits? And it does. And it's just the way that everybody just moves on and the way they hold their jackets and their scarves and everyone just looks better. And. And it just made me think that, you know, it really does make you move on with things. It's a way of getting you out your body and. And. And moving things along. So I just thought that was really advice. And my poem about that is just about, you know, just trying to. To fit in with my bad French and all this stuff. So I just thought. I thought it was just a funny, funny quote.
- [18:54]
B
Thank you for helping us understand what to make of one of her most famous quotes from your position of expertise. I admit I've definitely come across that quote before, but kind of never known, really, how to take it. Like, was she being flippant or did she. You know, what did she mean by it? So it's definitely really helpful to get your perspective on it, given, obviously, how immersed you've been in her archive and her thinking. And I suppose I wonder if it's because of that immersion. There was one poem, well, obviously many poems that caught my attention, but one in this sort of sense that caught my attention, titled Footnotes Comparing Muriel and I, which obviously, from the title, I had a sense of where the poem was going, and it's literally a numbered list of, like, comparing you and her on a whole bunch of different levels. Why did you decide to kind of put the two of you literally next to each other on a page like that? Was it because of the immersion.
- [19:48]
C
Like what.
- [19:48]
B
What was your thinking for that?
- [19:51]
C
Yeah, it's a good question. This poem came very late and I was actually in the throws up. I mean, I already handed it to my editor. And then I thought, well, I think actually I want to add this. And. And I think I felt there was a disconnect as to why I was looking at Muriel Sparks things at all. You know, we came from very different backgrounds. I'm. My parents are Filipino. I'm Filipino Canadian and I knew. I live in. In Scotland and. And she grew up in Edinburgh and she had Jewish heritage. You know, we grew up in totally. We're totally different people. And I thought there has to be something that. That puts me in the same boat as her. And it was really about the struggle to be a woman writer, which I still see today. There was this, you know, it was a struggle to. To make it happen and to. To make it work and to get your voice out there. And I think it was. I mean, and if it was also the. It was a list of things that you give up really. You know, not always going home at Christmas, not always seeing your family, moving away from your family to make a dream happen, which is I think what we both did. She went down to London to try to become a big writer and she left her son and her. Well, her ex husband and she left her family up in Scotland and her son lived with her parents. So I think it was really a poem about what you give up and. And also what. I live close to Brunsfield and things. And I'll walk along these paths and. And my daughter will eventually. James Gillespie High School. Where the. Where. And that was the James Gillespie School that she is inspiration behind the Primus Jean Brody. So I was looking for things to link me up with her because otherwise why. Why would this archive mean so much to me? And I think that poem also answers that question because I think people wouldn't really understand why you need to move the object closer to you, closer to your. Your. Your desires and your heart and things that you feel. And I think that's what I was trying to do with the poems to make them more. More about myself, because that is the pitfall with writing about objects and archives is that you can take them so far away from you that nobody knows why you've done it in the first place.
- [22:12]
B
That's really interesting to hear. And also that this was a poem you wrote sort of later on in the process because it's in the middle of the book. So I didn't Know that. Which is always a really interesting reason to get to talk to authors, but. But that makes me sort of ask a related question, like, why did you put it in the middle if it was written at the end? Like, how do you decide sort of how it all comes together? And were there any other poems that were written at the end of the process?
- [22:38]
C
Well, actually, it's funny she asked that, because these poems were actually three separate sequences that I wrote all in one, not all in one, but, you know, one after each other. And then there was one on Meryl Spark, there was one on Modern Villanelles and things and with some aspects of Edinburgh. And the third one was on interracial relationships. But I decided to mix it up because it felt like three separate trains that weren't meeting at all. And my editor, wonderful Darren Rees Jones, she said, well, they're all very good, but they're not. They're not intersecting. We need to find a way for this to become more of a whole. So then I ended up reorganizing the poems in terms of theme or which ones were kind of linked and which ones were kind of imagined to walk around Edinburgh. So, yeah, the reason why this poem, which I wrote late is in the middle, is because I felt they built on whatever foundation I had built on what we knew of Muriel so far. And then sometimes I'll come in and say, well, I'm still here writing these poems about her. And this was one that I felt kind of fit in here because it was. It was still introducing parallels in our lives and things about her. So, yeah, so it was a difficult one to fit in there.
- [23:54]
B
Yeah. I think how ideas are organized is always such a tricky and therefore really interesting thing to think and ask about. Kind of going back to what you were saying earlier about kind of what things are kept versus not right. How information is presented to an outside audience is in some ways such a different way of thinking than kind of creating the thing in the first place. And so I wonder if, in examining her archives in these ways and knowing, as you said earlier, that, like, she was part of what shaped these archives being preserved in these ways, did that change any of your own thinking about, like, what you do and don't keep of your own life or how kind of what your archive would look like?
- [24:36]
C
I suppose, yeah, you wonder about that because everything is so digital now. And all these were letters, you know, the beautiful handwritten letters, you know, to her parents a lot, to her son, to her best friend, Francis Niven, who was the inspiration for Jenny in the private machine. Brody, the pretty one. The pretty. And you just think, well, letters have that romantic way of arriving in the post and you're given them and emails just kind of come in and. And so, yeah, it does make me think about what is saved and what is kept and what belongs to us, really. Anyone can read your email, they can hack in and things like that, but no one could read a box of letters if you didn't want them to. And it does make me think if. Because everything is digital now and there's copies of things. If you go out and take a photo and you end up taking four or five photos of the same kind of thing, but if you just take one photo, like the, you know, like we used to, and get it developed and then it's special. So I wonder, like, things are losing their specialness because they're. They're so easily replicated. So, yeah, I think I. I have put together. I've left all my notes and I have copies of the manuscript as I was working in them and I. And I will keep them. Not that anyone is ever going to study me or anything, but, you know, it's interesting to see that. But I've looked at other publishing archives and they have changes from. Changes from the editor and inside margins and little doodles and things like that. And we're missing out on that now because we don't. People don't do that. I mean, people put comments on work docs and things. So, yeah, I'd like my personal archive to be, you know, photos and manuscripts and some notebooks and things like that. But I want them. But I think you actually have to curate your own archive now in this age, if you want it to happen, which I find really interesting. Oh, and interview transcripts, I think those are interesting too. So I still keep those from all the interviews I did with the book.
- [26:32]
B
That's really interesting. Kind of what sorts of things you want to put in your own archive. And clearly engaging with this has influenced your own thinking a lot of sort of what this means for you going forward and what this means for our society and which things we do and don't keep. So that's a key influence of this, obviously. Mira Spark herself, big influence. You've talked a bit about your background being an influence. I don't. I want to make sure we don't miss any out. Were there any other kind of key influences for you with this project you want to tell us about?
- [27:00]
C
Yeah, I was. I really got into looking at interracial marriages in Scotland and things. And one of the things I found was that you can't find any. The word. I don't tend to use this word as much, but the word I use, multiracial. But the word mixed race wasn't even a term in the census till 2014. That is what a sociologist I interviewed told me. And I was looking for evidence of. Of interracial relationships in Scotland. And in that, you know, that poem Register corrected entries, it was me looking for like, you know, names like mine, different cultures and things, you know, marrying. Because in Scotland, when you get married, you're the band, it's called the bands. And so, like, permission to get married is posted outside City hall for three weeks before you get married. Which I didn't know, which is very interesting. But. Yeah, so what I was really looking for were hidden voices in the archive and, you know, as part of interracial relationships. And one that I found was Eliza Jr. And she was the daughter of a former slave owner and a slave in Demerara, which now known as Guiana, Sugar cane farms and things there. And she came over with her brother. They were both, you know, multiracial individuals, and they came over with their father, Hugh, Hugh Jr. And to the Black Isle, to Rose Markey and stuff. And her voice was so interesting. And there's nothing really left of her other than her grave, which I saw in Rosemarky Graveyard on a big monument with all of her extended family.
- [28:39]
B
Most.
- [28:39]
C
Of whom were white and Scottish, and. And. And, yeah, and what I wanted to write about there was her mother's voice, that is the lost voice. And so I wanted some of the poems to talk about the lost voices in. In the archive. And another one was the interracial relationship between Marie Battle Singer and Paul.
- [29:03]
B
Sorry, I keep going.
- [29:04]
C
Paul, but his name's not Paul. James Burn Singer. And Marie Battle Singer was the UK's first black psychoanalyst. So all these were huge influences because you'll, you know, the difference of Mural Spark is that you get the sense of an entire life, but with some of these things, you get one letter and you have to sort of pinpoint them, their circumstances, how it relates to you in one letter, which I thought was really a really difficult thing to do. So. Yeah. And then other things, you know, like looking at some. You know, some like the. Some like a bit of folklore, like going up to gray, not grayfires. The other one, Cannongate Kirk and seeing where the grave of Ebenezer Scroggy was supposed to be. You know, he was the inspiration for Scrooge from Dickens and things, and just. Just funny things like that. But I really wanted to unearth lost voices from the archives, and that was my main thing while doing this. Especially also the indigenous voices that came over from Hudson's Bay and they married Scottish men, men from Orkney, and created, you know, interracial families in Scotland. One of the first documented things of that. And I thought that was interesting, too.
- [30:12]
B
Yeah, those are all really interesting sort of moments, as you said, where it's such a clear window into someone's life and then the window closes. You're like, wait, but then what happened after that letter, right? How did we get to the point where this letter was written? There's so many unanswered questions from finding those particular moments. Is there any other object or moment in the archives or poem in the collection that we haven't mentioned yet that you want to make sure we include, though, before we start to wrap up our conversation?
- [30:41]
C
Yeah, there was one in here that I really enjoyed, and it was this recipe for jam that I found. And it was just written in the 17th century, and there's all these books and recipes in the National Library of Scotland, but this one was written so nicely. It was like, written like your mom would write it, you know, it was just written so politely and kindly and lovingly. It's just like I had to write about that. And the difficulty here in this poem was how to relate a 17th century recipe for jam into my own life. And I thought that was a difficult thing. But if you think of jams and you think of jars, you know, and you think of. You think of ways to, you know, to preserve your life and to keep going. And I thought that was really a really interesting way to think about that. So jam, to me at this point meant, like, time, you know, trying to think about time and where it takes you and things. What else did I find? Obviously, Miro's diaries. The nicest thing I found in Mural, too, I think we did talk about that was a letter from her best friend, Francis Niven, and these little books they made in childhood together and they buried them in. In the sea cave. I think it was just in cramming, but, you know. But anyway, it was just little things from your childhood that her childhood that I found in these, in these boxes, little poems and things. And what else did I find? Yes, and then returning back to the indigenous families that came over in the Orkney Museum and things you'll find indigenous artifacts, they're called grandmothers and things like a beaver felt hat and Snowshoes and things, and you just wonder who held them before you, who, you know, they were crafted out of love. And that's. That's essentially what you want to portray when you write about these items.
- [32:43]
B
That's so interesting to hear how similarly objects that might seem so different can kind of be conceptualized, if that makes sense. Like, you would think that a recipe about jam, like, well, how could that relate to your life? And it's like, oh, well, actually, there are ways to do that. And so much, I think, of the collection is about sort of taking something and going, well, what if we sort of turn it this way? Or what happens if we, like, look at it kind of backwards or something like that, you know, to see, as you said, these voices that might otherwise not necessarily be there or be hard to find. So I suppose as a kind of concluding question on the collection, is there anything in particular that you hope readers take from the book? Any ways maybe you hope, to influence their ideas about archives and memory, perhaps?
- [33:28]
C
Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I don't know if I want to. If I want to change anything about the way people think about archives. I think I wanted to raise awareness of them and what a rich resource they are for. Not just for critical endeavors, but for personal things. But I wanted people to see archives in a different way. Like, you know, whatever's in your pocket can be an archive of some kind. So a box that you haven't opened in your attic is a sense an archive. It's the element of surprise and discovery, I think, balances what we think of archives. The body is like an archive, the way we sort of store memories and emotions and trauma and things like that. And that comes out when we talk and move and talk about ourselves and things. I think. I think in a way that what really got to me was that these things are. They live. The artifacts that people say they live amongst us. And they. They're. They're there when they, you know, they're. They're there for people to remember you. My dad passed away when I was writing this book, and it made me really think about how we are remembered. You know, are we remembered by the things we do or the things we leave? Or is it a mix of both and, like. It's a mix of both. And people really remember. They. They are comforted by these objects when. When someone passes away. And so it just. It just. Actually just gave a layer to, you know, my life and. And other things that, you know, when I. When I talk about archives, I just Wanted to impart that feeling that archives are a way for us to preserve what we had, but it's also a way of looking forward and a way of looking back. There's just so much possibility there.
- [35:21]
B
Yeah, I think that's very similar to what I find exciting about archives. The possibilities, the stories, the discoveries. So a really lovely place, I think, to end our discussion about the collection, leaving me with just a final question of what you might be working on now that this book is out in the world. Anything you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [35:39]
C
Yes. It takes me years and years to write anything. So I'm starting my next book project now. I'll be the next next. I will be right in residence at my old university, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. So we're going there in January and I'm starting a book about goodbyes, what it means to say goodbye. But. But in terms of how we say goodbye to our bodies as we age, how we say goodbye to landscapes as they change and climate change, how we say goodbye. Migration. Migration is a huge issue for me because my parents were migrants and I am one. And I think about, in migration, what you give up when you leave, there's a whole other life that you've given up. And I think it was reading. But if you are. If you are migrant, you live. You don't live one linear life, you live many lives because they're still continuing in the different places that you live. So, yeah, so my next book is always about that, I think, actually archives, which I didn't talk about, but there was a sense. I hope there's a sense of migration in there, too, because it's what really. What I'm really. What really drives me, what's. What I'm obsessed about is, is the different lives we lead and how we look back and forward in them. So, yeah, it's going to be a book about goodbyes. I hope in five years, six years, we'll have it done.
- [37:01]
B
Best of luck with that. It's certainly a very deep topic. You could go in so many directions with that. So definitely not something to do in just five minutes. The time, you know, it deserves that amount of time. So good luck with it.
- [37:12]
C
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Miranda.
- [37:14]
B
Of course. Anyone. In the meantime, who wants to read more of the poems in the collection we've been discussing titled Ark of Him? It's published by Pavilion Poetry at Liverpool University Press in 2025. And obviously I've had the delight of speaking with the author. Theresa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [37:31]
C
Great.
- [37:31]
B
Thank you so much.
- [37:32]
C
I really enjoyed talking about the book and thank you for your wonderful questions. They really opened up my mind and let me talk about some different things. Things.