On February 14th, 2025, the Committee on Public Awareness (COPA) offered a storytelling event called “Finding Aid to My Soul: For the Love of Archives.”
This is one of the stories shared during that event.

Daydream of an Undergraduate Hustle Monster

So picture this. It’s 2008, I’m a freshman undergrad taking classes full time and juggling five part time jobs to stay afloat. Computer lab assistant, Jimmy John’s sandwich technician, television studio lab instructor, monster makeup artist for Reaper’s Realm Haunted Attractions and my favorite job of them all, a student worker in the university library. I’m shelving books, helping patrons doing reference things, the usual stuff. But twice a day during head counts and book pickups, I would walk past this door with a tiny window in the southwest corner of the library. Peering through the window was this serene looking room full of natural light, peaceful, magical even, I peek through the glass and think, “Wow. Imagine working there,” one job full time, in that beautiful, mysterious space.

Fast forward to my junior year, a new archivist shows up, and he seemed to enjoy the days I came to campus dressed as a zombie. One day, he pulled me aside to give me a gift from his wife’s biology lab, a replica human skull. In hindsight, I realized this may have been a bribe of sorts, because shortly thereafter, he asked me for assistance in the room with sunny serenity. The sunny serenity room was the archives. They have me sorting through old collections, cutting out newspaper clippings, things like that. I’m hooked. I never really thought about archives before, what they were, what they do, what they are, what they do. But suddenly I can’t stop thinking about how and why they preserve history and keep stories alive in such a great way. And after I graduated, I was hired back in the library part time as a clerk, not in the archives, just general stuff. But then out of nowhere, the archivist and their assistant left, like poof gone, and suddenly I’m in the archives alone. Temporarily, of course. I remember thinking, “what am I doing here?” And more importantly, “what can I do to remain here?”

So, I got to work. I read everything I could about archives and special collections, taught myself the basics and tried to figure it out as I went. There was definitely a learning curve, and there were definitely moments where I thought, “This isn’t going to work. I can’t memorize all of this stuff.” But then the director always had my back. She saw what I was doing, and she believed in me, and eventually I even learned what a finding aid was. The director hired a new archivist in 2013. A few months later, I became the archive’s clerk. Around that time, the two of them were asked by another department that anyone in the library had a background in art. I painted in my free time. So they dropped my name and told me I’d be assisting with unloading a truck containing a photography exhibit worth more than my life. Little did we know that they actually signed me up to curate the exhibit, curate as a clerk with less than a year of experience. Almost a decade later, in 2022 I was promoted to assistant archivist, a job I used to think was way out of my league.

Here’s the thing, when I was a student worker, staring into the archives room, I thought it was just a pretty place to be. A quiet, sunny room, but now it’s not just a lovely space. It’s where I found my career. It’s where I found my passion, and every time I step into it, I still feel that same wonder I did as a student. Only now it’s not the daydream of an undergraduate hustle monster. It’s my life, and I’m advocating for UV window film.

On February 14th, 2025, the Committee on Public Awareness (COPA) offered a storytelling event called “Finding Aid to My Soul: For the Love of Archives.”
This is one of the stories shared during that event.

Watching her Die in a Finding Aid: An Archivist’s Duty

In the fall of 2013, I was a poet in Portland, Maine struggling to find a community of poets. Being a poet is lonely enough as it is, but a poet without a community is loneliness squared. Then I saw a notice for memorial of Maine’s first poet laureate, Kate Barnes. I was still pretty new to the state, and I had never heard of her, but my girlfriend was a big fan of the folk singer Gordon Bach, and he was on the program. So even though it was an hour up the coast, we decided we’d go. The event was in the Lincoln Theater in Damariscotta. An 1875 grand hall, it still has the plaster rosettes on the vaulted ceiling where the kerosene chandeliers used to hang. From the moment we walked in, it was like the psychic universe had opened and all the weirdos and lovers of language poured out. And I began to listen to them one by one, poems and stories. I particularly remember poet Steven Petroff. Disheveled, shuffling up to the stage, casually sipping a Diet Coke as he delivered the most tender rendition of Kate Barnes’s poem, “Inside the Stone”. The whole event was warm and welcoming, and it was hosted by booksellers Beth Leonard and Gary Lawless. Gary is also a poet, and he looked like a cross between Allen Ginsberg and Gandalf. I thought to myself, “these are my people.” And before long, I began to see them around, and would go to their readings, and they came to mine. And the Diet Coke guy. He became a friend, and amazingly, now I live down the road from Gary and Beth. But back then, three years after the memorial service, my now wife saw a job posting archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection. She said to me, “can you do that job?” Despite not having a library degree, I had enough experience in literary archives to get the job. And one of my first projects was to process the papers of, you guessed it, Maine’s first poet laureate, Kate Barnes. Here was her literary life spread out in form in front of me in plastic bins, letters nibbled on by mice and poems scrawled on the back of shopping lists. It was now my job to care take the legacy of the woman who introduced me to the community that I was so looking for and helped me feel at home in Maine. I may not have met her in-person, but I would ensure that others got the chance to meet her in the archives.

And since I’m a poet, I want to continue the story with a poem I wrote. It’s called “Archivist Job Description”. [You can listen to Jefferson Navicky’s poem on the Finding Aid to My Soul event recording.]