Hey guys!
So the last few weeks have been really busy for all of us. Papers due, final exams stress and lots of works but we have also gotten the chance to experience different activities like the planned field trip for our ATU class.
The feeling I got from some of my classmates and myself included is that a field trip to the University Archives probably does not sound like a lot of fun, at least it didn’t to me. But the general feeling after the visit was completely different judging from the content posted on our blogs last week.
I personally think that getting an insight if the archives from the Rare Books and Special Collections in the Irving K. Barber Library was unexpectedly interesting and fun. Kennedy mentions that for him it was like “stepping into a time capsule…an organized time capsule” and for Olivea looking at one of the files on Kogawa’s fond was “filled with beautiful hand written letters from the 1980’s.”
To see so many original documents, letters of rejection, newspapers, personal notes, drawings and pictures sent to Joy Kogawa was really interesting. Exploring the contents of the fond was surprising to me and many others. One of the most unexpected articles found in the fond was a letter sent by an elementary school student to Kogawa saying ““Dear Mrs. Kogawa, I did not realy like the book because nothing realy happend in it. Your friend Joel.” which included drawing of a house, what seems to be the flag of the UK and a girl floating around. Go check out the drawing at Ryan’s blog.
The fact that our visit was guided by librarian Chelsea Shriver I think made my experience as interesting as it was. She made the whole thing so interesting explaining how the documents are collected and how they are organized to be kept at UBC.
Being able to access all of the primary sources like several drafts to Kogawa’s novel Obasan was like being witness to the process of the making of Kogawa’s work. She even included a title page, as mentioned in Magda’s blog, where she gave her novel the title “If I must Remember”.
Inneke says in her blog that going to the archives and exploring all of the content used in the writing of Obasan had her like “Wow.. this is what the book that I read supposed to be like..” That was exactly how I felt, the overall experience of visiting that section of the library was surprising and very intriguing.