Catherine D. Yates
Studying objects in our lives teaches us to write narrative stories which refine our lives. This ancient, precise measuring tool, descriptive writing, is a compass: describing our lives gives us a map. Through this map, we can study individual culture. When we add research to our descriptive writing, we can bring in art history, aesthetics, and cultural values to provide detail and documentation. Research teaches us actionable skill sets. Each word and phrase we write is a valuable reflection. At the same time, stories shared with us teach us. Stories build understanding and compassion. Stories are sleights of hand, quietly piecing together our values.
The flip side of the mind’s capacity for memory is that it can remind us of loss, tragedy, trauma. There is a fine line between creativity and love, between a day for planting, planning for the future, and a rainy one for growth, assessment, and the power of regret. Often trauma-based writing is the basis for assigned personal narratives as well as college essays. This reflects a tendency to tell stories or recount memories which point towards painful moments which memory assigns to us. Is this a well-intended assignment strategy? Most writing concerns the reconciliation of disparate experiences. Looking into relatable but unfamiliar stories and images, as can be found in a city or family archive, allows layers of experience to be recollected in a freshly conceived form. Memory is clearly intangible, therefore it is not measurable, but memories can be rebuilt from associations with writing. Visiting Nancy Rolfe’s college years in Florida through photos arranged in her scrapbook brought me to reconsider my childhood relationship with clothing. I believe that the casual, visual arrangement of family-curated, organically collected objects, allows us to access information for writing outside institutional confines, which I identify as part of the charm and power of “The History of the World in 100 Objects” project.
Jules Prown writes “therefore, the way to understand the cause (some aspect of culture) is the careful and imaginative study of the effect (the object).”2 In theory, if we could perceive all of the effects, we could understand all of the causes; an entire cultural universe is in the object waiting to be written down. How often are we aware of our imagination being freed up to curate enriching experiences in a creative and collaborative environment? Jules Prown’s creative methods for investigating objects gives writing teachers practical guidelines for how to uncover what objects hold, how they reflect back to us a story. Teaching students to find the connections between the seen and unseen qualities of an object gives their writing power.
