Dear friends, family, comrades,
I’m writing this letter over lunch at Fornax Bread Company in Roslindale Village on Monday afternoon. This past weekend included a Friday holiday here in Massachusetts, for Veteran’s Day, and I also took Monday off to give us a four day vacation of sorts (since Hanna works from home on Monday). Beginning in January, I will be working every-other Saturday at the MHS library which means alternating weekends of Saturday-Sunday and Sunday-Monday. Such is the reality of working public services, and I am experimenting with how best to use those two Mondays off each month. Today, I spent the morning sewing while Hanna did data entry, and this afternoon I've retreated to one of our plentiful local bakery/coffee shop venues for a few hours of writing while Hanna is on some conference calls.
Image: A lap-sized quilt in green and yellow draped over a wooden rocking chair.
I've been so busy sewing since my last newsletter! I finished my church auction quilt -- pictured above -- on the last weekend in October and delivered it to a very happy recipient. She assures that it has been thoroughly cat approved (the best kind of approval). It was the largest quilting project I have taken on to-date and I am very pleased with the end result. You can see more photos at #AmSewing.
Image: Quilted hanging in reds and yellows with a cross-stitch panel featuring the character Rooibos, a baby tea dragon, reading a book next to a steaming pot of tea.
My stitching accomplishment this weekend was to finally complete the quilted Tea Dragon Society hanging I have been working on, on and off since last spring, for Hanna's office. It was a project put on hold while I finished my church auction quilt, and I am happy to finally see it come together as a finished piece! I learn something new with each project I finish and this time it was that it is possible to add cross-stitching to an already quilted hanging. Hanna decided after it was finished that what the upper left corner (bare in the original) needed was a teapot. So I worked in a teapot courtesy of the end paper design in the newly-published Tea Dragon Society book! You can read the webcomic (and see all of the adorable art) here.
Next up are some cross stitch projects I have promised to friends, and some charity shop items that I am stockpiling to give away in 2018 as a fundraiser for resistance organizations. Watch the #AmSewing website for the roll-out in January!
Image: Speaking to a group of UMass-Boston students during a recent class visit. In the background you can see our art, textiles, and rare books storage.October was a busy month at the MHS as we saw a record number of individual and class visits by undergraduate and graduate classes. It was a particular pleasure of mine to welcome Marilyn Morgan's archives and public history students from UMass-Boston back to the MHS, where they are working through the semester to create mock grant proposal for digitization of MHS collections as a class exercise.
I also had the pleasure of traveling down to Connecticut on the last Saturday of the month to join three archivist friends/colleagues -- Caitlin Birch, Marta Crilly, and Pam Hopkins -- along with friend and former thesis supervisor Laura Prieto for the New England Historical Association's fall conference where we held a round table conversation about welcoming undergraduate students into the archives. It was a beautiful autumn day, and although I got dreadfully car sick on the way home (apologies to my travel companion!) it was a day well spent.
I am relieved that I can report that as of last week New England Archivists’ has successfully filled the co-chair positions of the Inclusion and Diversity Committee! This committee was established to take over the work I have done for the past three years as the organization’s Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator. The two colleagues who will be stepping into the co-chair position, and the three committee members who will support them in this work, are great people who care deeply about the work of making the organization -- and the archives field more generally -- more accessible and inclusive.
I feel really good about this hand-off and also know that it is the right time for me to step back from the organization and reflect on what I want to do professionally beyond my daily work as a reference librarian. I am clearing my outside-of-work work slate a little for 2018 so that I can have a year of critical reflection and study. Ten years out from my first semester in graduate school, it’s time to hit “pause” and take stock of what I’ve learned and where I need to grow.
Image: Christopher stretched out on our soft yellow eiderdown comforter and a warm hand-knitted shawl from my mother-in-law.
The cats are embracing late autumn (we turned the heat on this past weekend!) by occupying as many blankets and feather comforters and knit shawls and soft pillows simultaneously as they can manage.
Image: Teazle, stretched out on the yellow comforter across Mommy Hanna's tummy as Hanna reads in bed.
Colder temperatures mean tea and book weather! Okay … who are we kidding, it’s pretty much tea and book weather here always … but it is the time of more tea and hunkering down beneath the feather comforter in the evening to read before falling asleep. The best non-fiction book I’ve read in the past month was from my editor at Library Journal: Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018).
In fiction I’ve been reading through Jordan H Hawk’s Hex World series; I think I like the Widdershins books slightly better (after all, Widdershins has absolutely delightful shark princess/secretary f/f romance!) but Hex World has been a nice series to read through on lunch and at bedtime when I don’t want to learn the rules of a new world or an entirely new cast of characters. I’ve already pre-ordered a few delightful-looking romance titles including Cat Sebastian’s It Takes Two to Tumble (I was so excited about this one I tried to pre-order it twice!) and this intriguing work The Doctor's Discretion by new (to me) author E. E. Ottoman.
Image: Campaign signs posted outside our new polling location in Roslindale, Boston.
A year ago we were all in deep mourning in response to the results of the 2016 election; thankfully the first Tuesday of this November gave us the sweet taste of victory in the form of diverse Democratic (and even the occasional Democratic Socialist!) wins at the state and local level across the country. It was so moving to read the litany of firsts for Latinx and African American women, for trans women, stepping into government in their own communities to work hard to make the world a more inclusive, supportive, and healthy place for all of us. Here in Boston we had a local election that resulted in six women of color winning seats on the Boston City Council.
Hanna and I were disappointed that mayoral candidate Tito Jackson only picked up a third of the vote, losing to incumbent Marty Walsh, but we have the distinction of being in one of two city wards that broke for Jackson!
Image: Frost-kissed rosebud on a rosebush in Roslindale, Boston.
The Clutterbuck side of our family suffered a sudden and unexpected loss in early November when Hanna's aunt, Paula Lettelier, suffered a massive heart attack while in hospital for bypass surgery. Left brain-dead by the initial stroke, her body was taken off life support several days later. Paula was 75, the eldest of three (Hanna’s mother being the middle child), and is survived by her husband and three children as well as her younger sister and brother. There was no funeral or memorial service, but Hanna and I did drive up to Maine this past weekend to have lunch with Hanna's parents and give our condolences in person.
Image: Vine on a gatepost, outlined by frost, in Roslindale, Boston.
It’s hard to believe that Thanksgiving is right around the corner here in the United States. After that four-day weekend time will be running down fast to the end of the year! We’re looking forward to a visit from my sister Maggie in early December but otherwise by tradition we enjoy a quiet Christmas and New Year’s holiday week at home rather than hustling to travel during the season of crowded flights and unpredictable weather. This year will be the first year since adopting the ever-acrobatic Teazle that we will hazard a tree -- albeit an artificial birch with LED lights rather than a true fir tree.
Image: A fake birch tree with LED lights woven into the branches.
I am also looking forward to hosting the third annual Twelvetide Drabbles Challenge, where fanfic authors write one “drabble” (100-word stories) per day for the fourteen days between Christmas Eve and Epiphany. This year, we are trying something new and will be donating $1.00 per every drabble submitted to the challenge to the recovery effort in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
I hope all of you are feeling at least a little bit buoyed up by the election results -- the resistance is working! -- and are fired up to work toward even more midterm victories in 2018. #resist and #persist
Be gentle with yourself, be kind to one another, and work toward a more inclusive world,
In solidarity,
Anna