Robert Root

 

I'm not someone who tends to throw things out. In my youth I proudly stacked my paperbacks in a corner of my bedroom to impress my brother with how many books I'd read and, except for occasionally giving some of them to him, I seldom got rid of any. Accumulating seems to be the standard activity someone like me engages in across the course of his life. But eventually things pile up to the point that they start to interfere with daily living, especially if you don't keep finding spaces to put the new stuff you acquire.

 

Since the first decade of this century, when my wife and I twice downsized our dwelling space in cross-country moves, we often engage in decluttering, reducing the mass of storage items in our home through nearly annual summer housecleaning. We've donated, sold, recycled, and trashed a multitude of possessions, most of it, if not all, easy to dispense with. Having winnowed things down so much, we're getting to the level where, increasingly, some of it becomes more problematic to let go. When I open certain boxes, the artifacts I encounter provoke involuntary time travel into the past.

 

Here are the records I listened to alone in my bedroom, often singing along and hoping passersby would hear only the recording, not me, as the music drifted out my window into the street. I often sang songs that captured my sense of self, the person I wished I might be or the person the lyrics reminded me I already was. Often the songs were about loneliness—that word readily evokes half a dozen titles: "Lonely Boy," "Lonely Teenager," "Lonesome Town"—about unfulfilled longing, about being desired or imagining being desired or about failing to be desired. I couldn't sing along to the album Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely; I choked up on too many of the lyrics. Even if I'm no longer lonely in that space I occupied then, I feel too intimately connected to these records to let them go.

 

Some of the albums are 78s with links to childhood and family. I have both Gene Autry's Western Classics albums and dramatized Western adventures starring Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy, all boyhood gifts; I also have my mother's Al Jolson album on 78 and the soundtrack from The Jolson Story on 33 1/3. Even though I no longer have a phonograph that will play them, I can't imagine not keeping them.

 

The situation gets even more complicated when I start considering the boxes of books. One holds all the plays and literary criticism I used to write my dissertation and eventually my first book, a treasure trove of English Restoration drama material that I haven't looked at in least four decades. Others hold volumes that guided me as a college professor teaching rhetoric, composition, creative nonfiction, and editing. I no longer teach those subjects and won't write further academic articles about them, since I'd need to acquire more recent research. I'm not sure what libraries or used bookstores would take them and I don't want them to end up recycled or shredded. Even though I'm unlikely to write about E. B. White again, I'll still not remove any books by or about him from the shelf and a half they now occupy.

 

Other people created everything I've mentioned, still resonating with me despite my distance from them. I've accumulated artifacts of my own creation as well, writing I initiated and wrestled with and sometimes sent out into the world. I scribbled in abundant journals across decades, some even older than I remembered, all confessing and recording and lamenting and pondering moments in my life. File boxes harbor handwritten manuscripts and typescripts of songs, poems, plays, short stories, unfinished novels, essays for radio, college newspaper columns, movie and book and theater reviews. The magazines and journals where articles and essays and poems and reviews and interviews were published are now all crammed unread into dusty boxes in our garage. So too are the extra copies of the books—the academic publications that advanced my career, the personal nonfiction that mined my experience and my memory—unsold at bookstore readings and unlikely to leave their boxes in the time to come.

 

All these things I value solely for their worth to me, if to no one else, all these things that occupied so much of my time across all those years, all that evidence that I once got both something personal and something professional done in the world. To obliterate all that evidence of my existence seems too much like a proclamation of my existence ending. I know it will. For a while longer, I'd just to like to feel as if I'm not agreeing to disappear, I'm only willing to declutter.

 

My wife and I have decluttered a lot over the years, most expansively during moves from one state to another—after 21 years in our Michigan house to Colorado, after four years in our Colorado apartment to Wisconsin —and we've done it often during our condo years here. It's been relatively painless, donating unused items to various libraries or charities, deciding which recently accumulated items should replace which items acquired long ago, letting the household slowly clutter again. But once you've pared down easily dispensable belongings, you face items that hold special significance, stuff harder to simply discard, such as, for writers, their writing. Lately I've noticed other writers wrestling with this dilemma.

 

In "How to Practice," Ann Patchett describes disposing what accumulated in her house, emptying "closets and drawers [. . .] filled with things we never touched and [. . .] had completely forgotten we owned." She provides a vivid picture of the superfluous contents of their home (like the "thirty-five dish towels crammed" in a kitchen drawer). Her details, likely familiar to most homeowners, certainly resonated with me. Eventually she encounters things more difficult to discard.

 

Because they had "sensed a vacuum in my house and rushed in to fill it," Patchett's mother "gave me a large box of letters and stories I'd written in school. She'd been quietly saving them" and her sister "dropped off a strikingly similar stack of my early work." Patchett "didn't want to see those stories again" but she keeps what they gave her. She also keeps a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter she hasn't used since she was twenty-three, partly because: "The stories my mother and my sister had returned to me: they were all typed on the Hermes. My mother and my stepfather, my darling Lucy, college, graduate school, all those stories—they made up the history of that typewriter." For her, the typewriter "represented both the person I had wanted to be and the person I am." Not letting go of something isn't a question of continued relevance or utility—it's something more intimate and essential to our definition of ourselves.

 

Online, Rebecca McClanahan similarly details efforts "to slough off another layer of the past," and seems more determined than Patchett to let physical relics of her writing go. Each spring she discards notebooks "containing, among other things, descriptions, responses to readings, quotes, unsent letters, drafts of poems and stories and essays, maps, sketches, song lyrics, lists of joys and fears, scraps of dreams and nightmares, and occasional waves of the emotional tsunamis of life." Having already discarded forty notebooks, she's now letting go of twenty more. Responding to a reader's comments, she mentions that, though she once possessed "thousands of ancestral letters and documents" useful in creating what she hopes is "an artful book"—probably The Tribal Knot, her family memoir—she "was ready to let them pass into other hands," just as she is willing to let her journals go. Perhaps those other hands will preserve them a little longer.

 

I remembered McClanahan's remarks while reading John McPhee's recent article "Tabula Rasa, Vol. 2", commenting about pieces he didn't write. "Tabula Rasa, Volume One," his previous clearing of old files, partly triggered my writing this blog. I've recently noted a trend among some writers of a certain age. Joan Didion's Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Vivian Gornick's Taking a Long Look and Unfinished Business, Gretel Ehrlich's Unsolaced, Patricia Hampl's The Art of a Wasted Day, and McPhee's own Draft #4 and The Patch all share a valedictory air by gathering previously uncollected or unpublished material. I appreciate the urge to somehow send things out into the world rather than keep them stored in a file cabinet, computer, or digital cloud.

 

Having just watched Hemingway on PBS, I'm aware that some writers have much of their drafting and composing preserved. My book on E. B. White depended on the archives he donated to Cornell University. But not all writers are asked or are willing to do that. Responding to comments on her Facebook post, McClanahan mentions tearing out pages to give to people who might value them, a compromise with preserving them herself. She argues that "just because we needed to write something doesn't mean we have to save it. If it is/was essential and necessary to write, it now lives inside us." That's an optimistic way to look at it, something I'll think about as I leaf through all the writing I've held on to, before, one way or another, finally, inevitably, letting it go.

 

 

Notes: McClanahan, Rebecca. Facebook Post, April 16, 2021

McPhee, John. "Tabula Rasa: Volume Two," The New Yorker, April 19, 2021

Patchett, Ann. "How to Practice," The New Yorker, March 1, 2021 (March 8, 2021 Issue)

 

A very long time ago I published this brief review of Reg Saner's essay collection Reaching Keet Seet: Ruin's Echo and the Anasazi in the Spring 1999 first issue of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction:

 

"These essays on the Four Corners area of the Southwest vividly recount Reg Saner's travels among Anasazi ruins and give readers both a sense of place and a sense of connection across time, space, and culture. Investigating such Anasazi sites as Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and Keet Seel, observing the summer solstice in Chaco Canyon, he reflects on Anasazi relationships to the natural world and to other cultures past and present (ancient Hebrews and modern Hopis). Throughout the book, in lyrical, insightful prose, he examines the compelling sense of spiritual presence that the Anasazi inspire as well as his own attraction to their abandoned ruins. He feels that 'through Anasazi vestiges we perhaps pay our respects to what's missing in us, thus honoring . . . a people able to live out lives undivided from themselves.'"

 

Reg's book had been published the year before; my essay about the Anasazi had been published in North Dakota Quarterly in 1991, although my wanderings with my then-future wife happened ten years earlier. I'd been haunted by Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon but only the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage to the New World and encounters with its indigenous peoples had prompted me to complete the essay for publication.

 

My connection with Reg Saner was a complicated one. At my colleague Susan Schiller's encouragement, I'd emceed an environmental conference in Estes Park, Colorado, where I met Elizabeth Dodd, who knew and admired Reg Saner, who also spoke there. Years earlier, at the Bread Loaf Conference in Vermont, I had met his former student David Gessner, who mentioned him in his own Colorado book. When writers you admire recommend a writer they admire, you have to read that writer.

 

I was more than a little daunted by Reaching Keet Seel—a work about the Anasazi by a more lyrical, learned, observant, and thoughtful writer than I felt I had been. I didn't think my essay had anywhere near the scale and the depth of what he had written.

 

And then, over time, we moved to Colorado, not far from where Reg lived in Boulder. He met me one day at the canyon where David Gessner had lived in graduate school, the locale at the heart of David's book Under the Devil's Thumb. We talked about that canyon and Reg invited me to join him on a day hike into the Front Range, up to Arapahoe Peak. He offered to take my photo against that backdrop and let me take his. His photo of me is still on my website. A week or two later, when my wife had Labor Day weekend off from her new job, I took her to the same place, now unexpectedly snowy, to show her what Reg had shown me.

 

The truth is that, because Reg lived close to wilderness in the near-outskirts of Boulder and had written lively and vibrant essays about walking his mesa, I never walked that part of Boulder—or for that matter, anywhere else in Colorado—without thinking of walking with Reg or about what he had written about his walks in the Southwest. I spent two weeks as an artist-in-residence at Rocky Mountain National Park and reread Reg's essays while I was there, often setting off to explore the landscape as alertly as I imagined him doing.

 

Last week David Gessner reported on Facebook that Reg Saner died on April 19, at the age of 93. I hadn't been in touch with him in a very long time, but his death struck me harder than most of the deaths of creative people I've learned about in the past year or two. He'd been a generous man and an honest and attentive writer. I wondered where I'd stored his books—The Four-Cornered Falcon, Reaching Keet Seet, The Dawn Collector—and found them on nearby shelves, among other books I value most, as if after all this time I still needed them there, close at hand.

 

I examined the pages in Reaching Keet Seel where I'd turned down the corners to see if I could find what I hoped to recall the first time I read them. In "The Pleasure of Ruin": "Trying to see things as the Anasazi saw them may be like drinking the water of a mirage." In "Hovenweep": "As one of this planet's talking creatures, I've a stake in any loss of beauty and intelligence among us." I again wander rugged landscapes and Anasazi ruins with Reg Saner—feel again all I gained from reading him and, especially, from knowing him.

 

Notes:

 

Root, Robert. "Anasazi," North Dakota Quarterly, 59:4 (Fall 1991), 145-154. Reprinted in Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007: 185-195) and Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012: 83-95).

 

Root, Robert L., Jr. Review, "Reader to Reader: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Field of Vision, About This Life, Thistle Journal and Other Essays, and Reaching Keet Seel," Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 1:1 (Spring 1999): 171-73.

 

Saner, Reg. "Over the Rainbow, My Kind of Place," Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place. Ed. Robert Root. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007: 220-228).

 

Saner, Reg. "Mesa Walk," Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place. Ed. Robert Root. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007: 220-228). Originally published in The Georgia Review (Vol. 55, No. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 290-311) and reprinted in The Dawn Collector: On My Way to the Natural World (Santa Fe: Center for American Places, 2005: 66-93).

 

When I was a high school senior, I took the Beginning Typing course for students, mostly girls, hoping to become office workers. I hadn't done well in shop classes training mechanics but typing also counted as "occupational education." To get me enough graduation credits, counselors placed me in other courses usually taken sophomore year, including Latin I, adding to my two years of German as a foreign language concentration, and Basic Art, as well as English and History, required subjects no one could major in.

 

Every chair was filled in the typing class, every manual typewriter occupied. Another boy was in the room, a good-looking, athletic sophomore, and around twenty sophomore girls, one of them his girlfriend. Mr. Myers, our elderly instructor, instructed us about where to place our fingers, how to hold our hands, and how to concentrate on the text we were copying rather than watching the keyboard or the page being created. Surprisingly, I did well in the class.

 

I had hunted and pecked often on my mother's typewriter or my own, but Mr. Myers made a typist out of me. I adapted his methods to my portable's keyboard, worrying little about perfect accuracy and accepting the need for corrective strikeovers. In college I was more conscientious when submitting assignments to professors or columns and articles to school paper editors, retyping whole pages when errors were too troublesome. In grad school my electric typewriter with dual ribbons allowing easy error correction made me less self-conscious about my typing.

 

Then technology began to challenge my typing skills. The university department where I taught required ditto masters for course handouts, which couldn't be corrected by strikeovers and needed full replacements. Eventually we were assigned computers, Apple IIe models with floppy disk drives. Our faculty training session was in a former typing lab now filled with computers. Typewriters required pulling the carriage return lever at the end of each line to start another line one space lower; computers automatically moved on to the next line, line after line, until you needed a new indented paragraph. That took some adjustment—at least one colleague hit the return button regularly, as if on his typewriter, and hated the choppy look of his paragraphs. Somehow, eventually, the new approach made sense to me. I said out loud, "Oh, my god, I get it." My colleague glared at me.

 

That moment might have been forty years ago. If I ever think of myself as a typist, it's force of habit. I'm a word processor now, though my MacBook Pro keyboard—I think they still call them "keys"—looks much like my old Smith-Corona, except that it's flatter and smaller and has an interactive bar across the top that changes with whatever program I'm using. I often hit some unnamed key that makes a panel appear asking "What can I help you with? Go ahead, I'm listening." I stop what I'm writing to turn off the list it displays before it can talk to me. Like those unexpected ads that show up on Facebook, I don't know what the internet thinks it knows about me and what it thinks I'll fall for.

 

My fingers aren't as nimble as they once were, and the keys aren't so individual that I can get through a paragraph without error but often—not always—the word processing program will correct my spelling without my notice. Lately, it's decided where I should put commas and hyphens and highlights the locations—it wants a comma after "nimble" above. When I write email the program tries to add additional words for a cliché it's sure I intend, to make me sound more like everyone else. Now I not only have to edit myself, I have to edit the word-processing program's revisions.

 

Word processing is frequently more aggravating than typing ever was. I can't trust my fingering as much as I once did; I check my transcription more often to correct what the program won't. Many errors are those I'd never make on a typewriter—the letter "m" instead of a comma, a comma instead of a period, a sudden rush of capital letters, an unintended return command mid-sentence or even mid-word, an unintended deletion of a paragraph. Unlike my old typewriter, my laptop doesn't seem to be completely on my side.

 

This morning, in response to the clatter and thumping of the roof repair around me, I wrote a journal entry by hand. I don't journal often but when I do, I don't think I'm processing words. I think I'm . . . what would you call it? Composing? Recording? Maybe I was simply writing. Just the words and me working thoughtfully together. I was glad I took the opportunity to do it.