Sloane and Riley were 2/3 of the archival team using Omeka, a digital open source library system, to catalogue Ann-Marie Macdonald’s research materials from her time writing The Way the Crow Flies. Below are their individual thoughts on the process, as well as some photo excerpts from AMM’s personal archive.
Notes for The Way the Crow Flies, from AMM’s personal archive
Sloane’s thoughts:
There is something exceptional about witnessing a novel unfold through the rough work of its author. For The Way the Crow Flies, we (the Omeka archival team) sifted through books about the Cold War, LIFE magazines from the 60s, postcards, and only a fraction of MacDonald’s countless handwritten pages of notes. My focus was primarily on those notes, (somewhat tediously) transcribing all of MacDonald’s facts about military airplanes, lists of cultural iconography from the 60s, and snippets of character detailing. It was incredible to see the way her mind worked: crossing things out, extending pages with sticky notes, constantly reworking her ideas and consulting her massive stockpile of books, articles, folktales, maps, and magazines. When you read TWTCF, you can sense her unimaginable breadth of knowledge flowing through its veins.
I think the work we’ve done through the Omeka library archival system, making MacDonald’s research materials and notes available to others, speaks to one of the central goals of the Mapping Anne-Marie MacDonald project; valuing the rough work and the labour of getting to an end product as much as the product itself. By letting us into her personal archives, MacDonald has made her labour visible. All of her scrapped concepts and development of ideas are on display, furthering the concept of ownership of data, and taking pride in the processes that create final products.
Drawing of Henry Froelich, from AMM’s personal archive.
Riley’s thoughts:
MacDonald’s extensive research was of such variety that it was difficult for me to comprehend how so many pieces could be tethered together seamlessly. It was after reading the novel itself that her research transformed into a story. It was extraordinary to view something once so foreign and recognize its significance to the body of work. A map of Centralia suddenly became where the novel’s core characters learned, loved, and lost; a sketch of a man became Henry Froelich breathing on the page. Omeka serves as a platform to appreciate MacDonald’s mind and her exceptional ability to intricately assemble factually relevant data and creatively formulate characters and narratives. As a reader, and also a MAMM member, I am as appreciative and amazed by the quality of her research as I am impressed by the quantity of it.
My greatest takeaway from the work my colleagues and I did on Omeka was that process is just as important as progress. When working on anything, the possibility of failure can be frightening, terrifying even. Reading a novel like The Way the Crow Flies was inspiring, but as an aspiring novelist, it seemed intimidating at some times. MacDonald’s seemingly endless knowledge of all things RCAF, Cold War, Dora, etc., plus the confident surety she had of her narrative and characters, seemed unattainable. But being granted the opportunity to witness and investigate MacDonald’s process work into an award-winning novel was eye-opening, as it reassured me that even best-selling authors like Ann-Marie MacDonald are human.
She was not always an expert on these topics; she had to learn like anyone would. Her work demonstrated that the beginning does not always need to match the end, that revising and making fresh choices are unavoidable. Plot points that were brewing on pages previous may not make it to the final copy, even aspects such as the title, which in the case of this novel was originally “Spitfire”. Her jot notes, her letters and critiques back from editors demonstrated her willingness to be helped. She crossed things out, she changed her mind, she got things wrong, she learned. That is just as impressive an aspect of work to present as the award-winning finished product.
By providing the MAMM project with her personal materials, MacDonald exemplifies what we are attempting to convey as a team, one of the key pedagogies of our work. Process is what creates a finished product, and we should not shy away from sharing it with others or restrict ourselves by fearing failure. I am so honored to have been able to assist in displaying MacDonald’s material publicly and it is in my greatest hopes that viewers appreciate how brave it was of MacDonald to let us in to the not-so-put-together aspects of her brain and can observe the power that such a decision has brought to the novel itself.
