Basement Treasures: An Inheritance Below the Surface (Creative nonfiction essay for LTST 693)   

I started this self-directed creative writing course with the intention of writing a longform essay about the process of exploring my archives. I thought that I was embarking on a sub-terranean adventure of documenting my great aunt’s wishes to steward and care for the generations of archives. 

“I expected to spend my days digging through the bins of things with excitement and enthusiasm,” I wrote. “I expected to develop a relationship with the things. I envisioned myself finding pleasure and purpose in looking through the bins and documenting my discoveries.” 

Instead, I felt overwhelmed and resistant, so I wrote about that. The piece navigates the tension between expectation and reality, and the challenges of maintaining a creative practice. It’s also where I started to develop my creative relationship with my great-grandmother, Marjorie. 

While working on this piece, I unearthed the small book of poems that her daughters had published years after her death in 1940 at age 48. I had grown up with stories about her, always told in a solemn and reverential tone, and the book of poems was periodically pulled out. For the first time, I sat down with the book and read her poems about faith, nature, and family. I was touched and inspired, realizing that I had a kinship with this woman whose life was drastically different from my own.  

This connection with Marjorie provided the entry point into the archives that I had been craving. “I am befriending my mother’s mother’s mother,” I explained. I dug deeper in my basement and found photos of her. I dug deeper into my memories and pieced together what I knew of her life story. 

I turned to Michel Foucault’s (1977) genealogies to provide theoretical underpinning of my exploration, as he was not “driven by a historical concern to understand the past but a concern to understand the present.” I am driven by both of these concerns. 

I also found a framework in the concept of narrative inheritance (Goodall, 2009), which reminds me that not only did I inherit physical materials of the previous generations but I also inherited their stories. 

To support my archival work, I worked with a therapist who specializes in ancestral discovery and dove deep into rituals and practices to honour and venerate the people who came before me. I also connected with a photography studio in Derby, England, founded by Marjorie’s father, my great-great grandfather W.W. Winter, who sold the business when he relocated his family to Vancouver Island in 1907. Over a century later, it maintains his name and houses a vast archive of his work. 

I concluded the piece feeling less overwhelmed by the archives in my basement and more accepting of the task before me. I also held some ambivalence, at times feeling hopeful and at other times desiring to dump it all in a landfill. I think that the most interesting art and complex emotions take place in the grey zones between black and white. 

References (APA 7 style) 

Foucault, M. (1977). Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews. Cornell University Press. 

Goodall, H. L. (2009). Narrative inheritance: A nuclear family with toxic secrets. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(4), 492–513.