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.]