Note from Andrea: Due to some unforeseen problems, the blog post we were originally going to publish today has been delayed to next week. So we hope you enjoy this one instead!
Special thanks to Krista McCracken, Stephanie Pettigrew, and Catherine Ulmer for their help drafting this piece. And thanks to Heather Green, Samantha Cutrara, Stephanie Pettigrew, Sam McLean, Kesia Kvill, Maryanne Reed, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, Pam Calvert, Aisha Wynter, Stephanie Bangarth, Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail, Mary Chaktsiris, Gillian Leitch, Maxime Dagenais, and Dan Horner for answering my random questions!
One of the most common questions that people ask me, (besides how on earth I managed to do the roundup), is: how do you manage to write a new blog post every week? Usually I give my standard response: when you teach four courses a semester, you get really good at writing lectures fast. And a blog post is pretty much just a shorter lecture. But more recently, I’ve started to rethink my approach to writing history.
Academically speaking, I come from a pretty classically trained background. My Cégep degree is even in Liberal Arts, which is a modern version of an eighteenth-century nobleman’s education (because who doesn’t need to learn Aristotelian logic?).
The importance of a logical and intellectual approach to research has been drilled into me for years. We are taught that academic research is an intellectual pursuit of the highest order. That while we may not ever be able to truly understand the truth of what happened (postmodernism and all that), we have an obligation to view the past in a logical and dispassionate way.
And, like so many of us, I carried this prejudice around with me for years. In my undergrad days, I was forced to read A.B. McKillop’s The Spinster and the Prophet: Florence Deeks, H.G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past. Based on legal disputes between Deeks and Wells, a significant part of the book is dramatized. And boy did I hate this book. The fact that I still remember a book that I read as an undergrad should probably tell you how much I hate this book. It wasn’t the history that bothered me – it was the fiction. My baby historian’s mind was offended. I had much the same reaction to reading Linda Gordon’s The Great Arizona Orphan Abductionin grad school, which focuses on a group of forty orphans who were sent from New York to Mexican-American families in Arizona, and were subsequently stolen by Anglo families. Like McKillop’s book, a significant part of Gordon’s work is a fictionalized account, recreating parts of the narrative that are missing from the historical sources. While I like this book a lot more than McKillop’s, the dramatizations still irritate me.
I know I’m not alone in this prejudice. Krista McCracken told me how they took a course in the fourth year of their degree where the professor used fiction instead of traditional academic texts to look at history. As they explained, “I remember finding it super challenging at the time because of how different it was from anything else I had to read or analyze.” Stephanie Pettigrew also hates dramatizations in historical writing, noting “it undermines the whole point of history.” She explained further, that it makes it hard for us to trust secondary sources, and that we end up with a kind of “pseudo history.” What’s more, some members of the public read these books, and aren’t able to distinguish between fact and fiction.
I still have a problem with books that do this, in case you can’t tell, but not necessarily for the same reasons. But as I’ve grown older, and possibly wiser, I’ve been rethinking my position and approach to writing history, away from a strictly intellectual approach. A lot of this stems from some pretty common academic experiences. Few among us actually enjoy writing scholarly work. It’s a bit like running: we don’t want to go, we’re miserable while it happens, but we’re super proud afterwards. While researching, we are often caught in a dilemma unique to academic historians: a desire to find all of the sources while also wishing for the research stage to end before it kills you. And yet, in my free time, I can be found reading historical novels, watching history documentaries, and falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes.
While I was writing this blog post, I did a highly unscientific study by asking my friends on Facebook about what made them fall in love with history in the first place. The most common answer was: stories. Whether this was family histories, or reading popular books like Anne of Green Gablesor Outlander, storytelling seemed to do the trick. The only other response was ‘through a history class or a colleague,’ which, to my mind, is very similar. This definitely reflects my experience. My love of history comes directly from my early obsession with mythology, particularly Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that we, as historians, need to work harder to recapture what made us love history in the first place. I’m not suggesting we throw out our academic work and all become novelists. (You know, unless that’s your thing. In which case, you do you). Rather, I think we need to embrace the idea of historical writing as a creative, as well as intellectual, endeavor, with a particular focus on storytelling.
All forms of writing, including historical writing, are inherently acts of creation. Even academic writing. And there is joy in this. So much of historical writing is about the creation of a compelling and cohesive narrative. We can see reflections of this in our work already. Many articles, chapters, books, and blog post start with a short, often amusing or fascinating story, before getting into the more analytical stuff. It’s a hook, a narrative device used to entice the readers. The same is true for lectures: so many of us will launch into stories, historical and otherwise, with little to no prompting from students. And students absolutely love this. It draws them in, shows our passion for our subject, and demonstrates that history is in fact the opposite of boring.
To be clear here, I am not advocating for a return to traditional narrative history. Quite the opposite in fact. Stories can be interesting while also being analytical and critical and thought provoking. There are countless examples of this kind of work. For example, Katrina Srigley and Lorraine Sutherland use their personal stories as feminist oral historians, based on Anishniaabeg and Ininiw ways of knowing and sharing history, to demonstrate why a decolonized approach is necessary to centre the stories of women and other marginalized voices. Carolyn Podruchny’s recent examination of an Anishinaabe sacred story (aansookaan) about the hero Nene-bush traveling through the air while holding a stick carried by two geese shows how Indigenous cultures and traditions are dynamic and ever changing. One of the many reasons why I love Claire Campbell’s work, despite not being an environmental historian, is because she is such a fantastic storyteller and writer. To take just one example, her article, “Idyll and Industry: Rethinking the Environmental History of Grand Pré, Nova Scotia,” focuses on storytelling as a form of commemoration. Finally, consider the Graphic History Collective’s extremely successful Remember/Resist/Redraw poster project, which uses artwork and analysis to share alternative histories.
Nor am I suggesting that this is a new idea, as this 1998 piece by James Goodmanand this one from the Harvard University Press blog in 2013 have already made a similar case. It’s actually a very old idea that is baked into the very fabric of humanity and common to communities and cultures around the world. I would be remiss here if I didn’t also mention the central role that stories play in Indigenous Oral Traditions with respect to the transmission of history, knowledge, and values from one generation to the next, as can be seen in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.[1] But I think that it’s something that we need to remember, particularly with respect to our roles as historians.
To conclude, there is a concept in yoga called “The Beginner’s Mind” (which is drawn from Buddhism) that I think is instructive. “The Beginner’s Mind” is the idea that we should approach all subjects with an open mind, lack of preconceptions, and wonder – to wit, approaching subjects as if we were beginners, no matter how advanced we are. Historical research emphasizes innovation, but there is still great value in older stories, new angles to discover. Many of us dislike teaching the Canadian history survey courses, because we’re basically just repeating the same information, year after year. But just because these stories are old news for us doesn’t mean that members of the public are aware of them. Stories can be fantastic tools for drawing people in and sharing knowledge. Consider the continuing popularity of shows like Downton Abbey or even Game of Thrones, which stand in stark contrast to declining enrolment in history courses. The popularities of these shows indicate there is a desire for good stories with a historical bent. But I also think that it is important that we recapture the joy of learning about something for the first time, the spark that captured our imagination back when we were children. Not only for our work as historians, but for our own inner lives.
So from now on, I will answer the question about where these blog posts come from differently — I embrace historical writing as a creative endeavour.
[1]See also, for example, Jodi Beniuk, “All My Relations: Reclaiming the Stories of our Indigenous Grandmothers,” Atlantis 37, no. 2 (2) (2016): 161-172; Jeff Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, T’lakwadzi, “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliaion,” ECS: English Studies in Canada35, no. 1 (March 2009): 137-159; and Leslie McCartney, “’You Need to Tell that True Alberta Johnson Story Like We Know It:’ Meanings Embedded in the Gwich’in Version of the Alberta Johnson Story,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 37, no. 1 (2017): 201-235.
This blog post came out of a conversation I had with my therapist a couple of weeks ago. She pointed out that my writing was just another way of my (as she put it) irrepressible creativity. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense! I hope you enjoyed this week’s blog post! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian history roundup. See you then!
Postscript: Krista McCracken and I have been working together lately, and apparently our brains have synchronized. The latest episode of their wonderful podcast, Historical Reminiscents, is all about how to deal with creative burn-out. You definitely need to check it out, since it compliments many of the points I raised in this blog post, and addresses the issues of self-care and creative production. Highly recommended!
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