On Throwing Out Old Work
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Maile and I are both at the book shop today—she’s out front working on her middle grade novel while waiting for our shipment of books to arrive, and I’m in the back room at the work space that faces part of our nonfiction section. The top shelf is labeled “Writing and Creativity” and includes some of my favorites—books like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Stephen King’s On Writing, Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, and Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act.
“Call It Dreaming” by Iron and Wine plays on the speakers:
Where we see enough to follow
We can hear when we are hollow
Where we keep the light we're given
We can lose and call it living
In a few weeks, Maile’s mom will be moving in with us. As most of you know, Maile’s dad died last year, and that started what feels like an entirely new era in all of our lives. You can dispense with the mother-in-law jokes because Maile’s mom, affectionately known around here as Mimi, is dearly loved and appreciated in our house, and multi-generational living is sorely underrated. When she’s here she often joins us for dinner, which is great, and as soon as our Littles get home from school they bypass me and race for her apartment in the basement to catch up with Mimi and play a card game and, if they’re lucky, maybe discover treats Maile doesn’t carry in our upstairs cupboards.
Of course, we’re a family of eight (though two are in college) and have enough stuff and things and junk to fully stock the grand opening of a new Goodwill, and now another human being will be joining us, making it nine in the house. This means it’s time to get rid of stuff. A lot of stuff. And we have a lot of stuff to get rid of.
In the midst of clearing off bookshelves and cleaning out storage areas and emptying closets, I came across six binders worth of my old writing from college days. It exists no where else, in no other form, completely un-backed-up—this is difficult to understand in a world of memory sticks and Dropbox and Google storage, where our backups have backups. But it’s true—those old binders full of short stories and papers and poems and one solitary novel hold things that exist only there. Analog only. Printed out on one of those old school printers that had the holes in the side that lined up with the feed on the printer, and after printing you had to tear off the perforated edges before handing your paper into the professor.
But one quick clarification—the writing within those binders is truly terrible. If I died and anyone read what’s in them, I would be mortified (well, I would technically be dead, not mortified, but that possible future reality of someone maybe reading this stuff is mortifying to me here in the present).
The question becomes, What to do with all of this shit creative work?
And, Can I simply throw it all away?