What To Do With All the Paper?
Deep winter, when it’s snowy, dark, and cold outside, and the garden is dormant, is when I try to organize things inside, especially all my papers. I don’t dislike doing it, but it takes time from reading and writing, seeing friends, and everything else.
Giving away and throwing out possessions is not unlike editing words and paragraphs in a manuscript. Making a piece of writing read as if it was breathed onto the page takes eliminating nonessential words, of course. It is just as satisfying to haul boxes of unnecessary or expired papers to my bank’s shred truck every year.
Editing the papers in the file cabinets in my office is something I like to do after the publication of each book. After my last book, Word for Word: A Writer’s Life, was published, I didn’t do it because it was when my husband and I put our Westchester County apartment on the market, so I was emptying closets, bureau drawers, and kitchen cabinets instead as well as looking for takers of furniture, making trips to Goodwill, listing items on Craigslist, and persuading the Salvation Army to pick up what nobody wanted.
After the apartment was emptied and we settled into our Connecticut house, I finally tackled the papers I had gathered when writing the memoir. I was glad, of course, when I was writing that I had saved so many letters, documents, and other papers dating back to the earliest years of my life. I had even stored away a trove of flyers and publications from the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement, including the first issue of Ms. magazine.
I started writing and publishing before the beginning of the digital age, so there are still too many papers in my house and barn, including those clipped over the years about gardening, medical issues, and places I want to go.
After writing two biographies of artists, I gave much of my research material to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, but more remains. There are also many papers—inventoried, happily—about my other books: reviews, fan letters, manuscripts, publishing contracts, and more that I’m reluctant to part with for sentimental reasons and because an archive might want them someday.
This February, facing the mountain of remaining papers, I’m trying not to print out so much on paper and to transition to digital files. It goes against the grain because I don’t trust the longevity of electronic files: I worry that a blip or a hack or a virus will cause them to vaporize.
On the other hand, I remember that Georgia O’Keeffe remarked that she wished a big wind would rise up and blow away all the papers in her New Mexico house. Paperwork annoyed her because it took time away from painting. Likewise, I admit that in the back of my mind, there’s the wild—but still repressed—desire that the rest of my papers will magically disappear and even the digital data will vanish with a click and leave me unencumbered and free.
Books to help organize papers:
The Paper Solution: What to Shred, What to Save, and How to Stop It From Taking Over Your Life by Lisa Woodruff, who has been called “the Marie Kondo on paper.”
Organizing Paper at Home: What to Toss and How to Find the Rest! by Barbara Hemphill