This week in class we took a little field trip (which sounds a bit like elementary school) to the Rare Books and Special Collections in the Irving K Barber Library. We didn’t just go to look around though, while we were there as a class we got the opportunity to look at the fonds, or the whole archive of papers from an individual, of Joy Kogawa. Kogawa wrote, Obasan, a novel that our Arts Studies class has been focusing on the past couple of weeks. This trip was very interesting because we were fortunate enough to see some of her early works scribbled on the backs on scrap papers or rejection letters she had received from many publishers before one accepted her work.

I thought going to the archives and reading Kogawa’s intimate works like letters and such really brought her to life as a person. Sometimes you look at a book and it seems like it wasn’t written into existence by a human, it feels as if it was willed into being individually of everything else. Seeing her writings outside of Obasan made Joy Kagawa come to life as an author and a person. Reading more writings about the book itself also led me to have a greater appreciation for the novel as a work of memory, allowing people who did not experience the Japanese internment camps to relive Kogawa’s life and her story.

The most amazing documents to me were the rejection letters that Kogawa had received during the early stages of her book, even before it was titled Obasan. Even though the rejection letters may have been seen negatively by Kogawa, I appreciated it because it means that even amazing authors get rejected from publishers and that it may take a couple of tries in order to to get something right. In a way, it’s inspirational that a distinguished author such as Joy Kogawa had difficulties publishing her first book.

These are two photos of documents I took while I was there. The first is document is a short rejection letter that Kogawa received, saying that they couldn’t offer her a deal for Obasan because they saw issues marketing the book. A shame for the publisher because the book has been popular not only in Canada, but in America and Europe as well. The second photo is a document that her editor sent her, reviewing every chapter of the novel. He gave some criticisms but the most repeated phrase of the document is, “Good.”

I would go back to the special collections now that I know what I can find in there and what kinds of stories it can tell about an author or a book in specific.