'The archive is messy and so are we': Decoding the Women and Words Collection
04/04/22 • 46 min
Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books holds the rich Women and Words Collection, which contains more than one hundred recordings from the Women and Words Conference in 1983, a decade of WestWord writing retreats and workshops, and a number of other readings, meetings, workshops, and events. Although the audio in this collection has a significant paper archive to accompany it, the absence of pre-existing metadata made it difficult to identify the recordings. This episode is framed by how two research assistants, Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt, encountered the collection—one physically, in the archive, and the other solely with digitized audio recordings and scanned print materials—and takes us behind the scenes of their work to make sense of both its depths and the Women and Words Society’s history.
Special thanks to Tony Power, librarian and curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University, and to SFU's Special Collections and Rare Books.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Kate Moffatt is an incoming PhD student in English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests lie primarily with women's book history and women's writing of the Romantic period. She brings a keen interest in the digital humanities, book and literary history, and archives and archival practices to her work as a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb.
Kandice Sharren is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research focuses on print culture of the Romantic period, and she brings her experience with digital humanities, archival research, and book history to the SpokenWeb project.
Citations:
Beverly, Andrea. “Traces of a Feminist Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media, MQUP, 2019, p. 221, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.15.
"Castor Wheel Pivot." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/100713
"Dust Digger." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 27 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/99584.
"Flipping through a book." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/Zeinel/sounds/483364/
Heavenly choir singing sound, "Ahhh." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/random_intruder/sounds/392172/
"Palms Down." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 15 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/96905
"Record Scratch." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/simkiott/sounds/43404/
Rooney, Frances. "activist; Gloria Greenfield." Section15, 22 May 1998. Accessed 31 March 2022. http://section15.ca/features/people/1998/05/22/gloria_greenfield/.
Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books holds the rich Women and Words Collection, which contains more than one hundred recordings from the Women and Words Conference in 1983, a decade of WestWord writing retreats and workshops, and a number of other readings, meetings, workshops, and events. Although the audio in this collection has a significant paper archive to accompany it, the absence of pre-existing metadata made it difficult to identify the recordings. This episode is framed by how two research assistants, Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt, encountered the collection—one physically, in the archive, and the other solely with digitized audio recordings and scanned print materials—and takes us behind the scenes of their work to make sense of both its depths and the Women and Words Society’s history.
Special thanks to Tony Power, librarian and curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University, and to SFU's Special Collections and Rare Books.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Kate Moffatt is an incoming PhD student in English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests lie primarily with women's book history and women's writing of the Romantic period. She brings a keen interest in the digital humanities, book and literary history, and archives and archival practices to her work as a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb.
Kandice Sharren is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research focuses on print culture of the Romantic period, and she brings her experience with digital humanities, archival research, and book history to the SpokenWeb project.
Citations:
Beverly, Andrea. “Traces of a Feminist Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media, MQUP, 2019, p. 221, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.15.
"Castor Wheel Pivot." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/100713
"Dust Digger." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 27 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/99584.
"Flipping through a book." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/Zeinel/sounds/483364/
Heavenly choir singing sound, "Ahhh." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/random_intruder/sounds/392172/
"Palms Down." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 15 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/96905
"Record Scratch." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/simkiott/sounds/43404/
Rooney, Frances. "activist; Gloria Greenfield." Section15, 22 May 1998. Accessed 31 March 2022. http://section15.ca/features/people/1998/05/22/gloria_greenfield/.
Previous Episode
Listening Communities: The Introductions of Douglas Barbour
Our guest-producer this month, Michael O’Driscoll, invites us to listen to the introductions of the late Douglas Barbour (March 21, 1940 - Sept 25, 2021) from readings held at the University of Alberta. What are we listening to when we hear introductory remarks from past readings spliced together? By asking us to listen to remember, this episode remembers Barbour in his element —in sonic performance — and what we hear in the selected recordings is a combination both of poetic sound and sounds of deep care as he welcomes each writer to the microphone.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Guest Producer: Michael O'Driscoll
Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
GUEST PRODUCER
Michael O’Driscoll is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. He teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories with a particular emphasis on deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and his expertise in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on poetry and poetics as a form of material culture studies. His interests in material culture range from sound studies, archive theory, radical poetics, and technologies of writing to the energy humanities and intermedia studies. He is a Governing Board Member and a member of the U of Alberta research team for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.
AUDIO
Audio played in this ShortCuts is excerpted from the SpokenWeb’s audio collections held by the University of Alberta. The audio is currently being catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers.
Audio of Douglas Barbour reading “The Gone Tune” is from the cassette tape recording of The Bards of March (15 March 1986).
Audio of Douglas Barbour’s introductions are selected from readings recorded in 1977-1981. The poets introduced are, in order of audio appearance: Tom Wayman, Phyllis Webb, Fred Wah, Maxine Gadd, George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka, Penn Kemp, Leona Gom, John Newlove, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and bpNichol.
RESOURCES
NeWest Press: IN MEMORIAM: DOUGLAS BARBOUR (1940-2021), https://newestpress.com/news/in-memoriam-douglas-barbour-1940-2021
Douglas Barbour (March 21, 1940 - September 25, 2021), https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2021/09/douglas-barbour-march-21-1940-september.html
“Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp.” Produced by Nick Beauchesne & Penn Kemp forThe SpokenWeb Podcast and starts with a clip from the Trance Form reading hosted by Douglas Barbour at the University of Alberta (1977).
Next Episode
Moving, Still
SUMMARY
In this episode, ShortCuts returns to a recording of Phyllis Webb in order to re-listen through this season’s question of how the archive remembers. What is held in the ‘room’ of the recording, and how does that differ from the room where reading took place? Or from the room of personal memory? What exceeds those rooms? And what does it feel like to hear their contours? Join producer Katherine McLeod as she reflects upon these questions while listening to a 1966 recording of Phyllis Webb reading from Naked Poems.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producers: Judith Burr and Kate Moffatt
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Phyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.
ShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.
RESOURCES
Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.
McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.
Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.
Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.
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