Case 2 - First and Early Writings: Finding their Voice
A writer’s archive may contain published and unpublished work, personal and professional correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, photographs, and other mementos of their work and life. Some also choose to include their juvenilia, otherwise known as the works they produced before reaching maturity, usually during childhood or adolescence. Juvenilia provides us with a window into the first glimmers of a mind at work. A writer’s early attempts to find their way into literature may illustrate their artistic evolution, or foreshadow the themes and preoccupations that may later come to full bloom in their more accomplished works. Because many lose, discard, or destroy these initial forays, juvenilia within an archival collection is a rare and exciting discovery in the examination of an author’s personal documents.
Margaret Atwood Juvenilia. The Fisher Library is the sole repository for Margaret Atwood’s archives, and has collected her materials since 1970. The archives represent a comprehensive record of her professional life, consisting of files relating to her novels, poetry, and short stories from high school onward. In 2008 the Library received a significant donation of juvenilia from Atwood. As she has noted, the creative efforts during her youth were the result of a childhood spent in the northern backwoods of Quebec and Ontario, where her father was a forest entomologist, as there was little in the way of entertainment outside of reading and writing. On display here is Blue Bunny Comics, dating from around the mid-1940s.
Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Early Poetry. Gwendolyn MacEwen, who is considered by some to be Canada’s finest post-Second World War poet, started to write from an early age. In the biography Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen (1995), Rosemary Sullivan alludes to MacEwen starting to write as early as 1951, when she would have been ten years old. Displayed here are two of her high school poems when she was attending Western Technical High School in Toronto’s west end. One untitled poem written in her hand with some revisions appears to be a submission to a literary contest. The pome "Nefertiti” is a piece she wrote upon having read extensively about Ancient Egyptian mythology and landscapes. This interest in Egyptian mythology remained a theme in her writing; she even went so far as to teach herself modern Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
George Elliott Clarke’s Early Holograph Notebooks. Poet, playwright, literary critic, and academic George Elliott Clarke has been donating his material to the Fisher Library since 2007. His papers contain a significant amount of material that provides insight into his work and life. In his 2012 donation to the library he included a remarkable collection of 291 original holograph notebooks he saved, which contain many first ideas and first drafts of work. Created between 1975 and 2004, the notebooks begin when Clarke was just a teenager and document his early poetry, as well as ideas and notes. Clarke has stated that he first started writing poetry when he was fifteen because he wanted to be a songwriter: "To be a better songwriter I should study poetry," he has been quoted saying in an online Poetry in Voice interview. Displayed here are two images from one of the notebooks, including a poem written on 1 July 1975 titled "Bad (Your Mind Can Only Take So Much)."