Dr. Samantha Cutrara:       Chris, it’s so great to talk with you today. Thank you so much for making time.

Chris Sanagan:        Thanks so much for having me. I’m happy to join.

SC:        I’ve been thinking about you a lot because of your role as an archivist and your role as a comic book creator. Because of this notion of documentation and the artistic response to this moment, I think that you have a lot of experience that brings in both of those things, so I’m really hoping that we’ll be able to talk about both those areas of your life today.

CS:        Absolutely. Happy to chat about both for sure.

SC:        That’s awesome. So, I’ve been saying to people that I’ve really been thinking about history itself, history as a discipline, and the stories that we tell as history, differently because of this moment. I questions whether we would be able to capture, for example, the anxiety of this moment or the anxiety of any moment in the histories that we have? And a lot of that comes down through records and archiving.

So with this in mind, have you thought of history differently because of this moment? Is that something that you’ve been thinking about at all?

CS:        Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been thinking a lot from an archival perspective about the documentation of this event specifically and the general response to it, because historically, at least when I think of archives, I think of what first attracted me to archives and why I decided to pursue a career in archives, was there was a level of removal of myself from the documentation. There was a gap. There was a literal time gap. We think of items or artifacts of ‘the past’. They were interesting, and they were attractive, and they were fascinating, [but they were in the past].

And so the challenge I think that we are going through now, at least challenges archivists are going to have, and certainly archivists I know are currently working on, is having that sense of removal or distance from the current content which we’re working on.

When I think of the archival projects that I worked on, there’s a real physical and time removal from working on records from 20, 30, 100 years ago, and so now we are currently in the moment of working on records, but also living that life at the same time.

So I think there’s a challenge. There’s a challenge of — I don’t think we’re in the point now of thinking of being impartial to the records that we are trying to capture. We’re in the early stages of thinking about how to best document what’s happening right now, and that is a new experience for me as an archivist because I’ve never been in the moment in which I’m trying to document.

SC:        I’m thinking too about one of the historians I talked to, she said that in her history classes, she’s a history professor, she’ll say to her students: what is an archive? Like, is your Facebook account an archive?

It’s kind of interesting because we are creating so many digital records, which can help young people really think about their documentation and their records and then, in 100 years, what will be the most valuable records for capturing this moment?

CS:        Right. Because that other piece too is the value question, right?

SC:        Right.

CS:        Because we are constantly documenting – well, I should say that through various channels and technologies, we have the ability to continuously document and curate our responses, our lives, what is going on. Some of the more interesting responses I’ve seen to this event. I don’t know why I say “event”!

Some of the more interesting responses I’ve seen to living with the Coronavirus or COVID-19, is, you know, ‘you grab a pen, start a diary, do a daily log of what you’re seeing, what you’re experiencing, what you’re feeling,’ which are the types of primary sources that end up in archives at some point, right? These ones tend to be the really rich sources of social history, or have been in the past.

The interesting challenge of that is, I’m not sure if there is a realization generally of what we’re doing in terms of capturing, sharing, documenting that these artifacts depend on their survival – depending on how technology changes, and depending on how we can capture it and maintain the quality and access to the information that these items in 5, 10, 15, 25 years, we’ll look towards in some capacity to give us an idea of what we were feeling, what we were thinking, to remind ourselves and then to use as resources.

The thing that I’m finding interesting though is we don’t know a timeline yet. We have a pseudo timeline where we understand what’s happening in the world, we get daily updates on response, how things are tracking hopefully, positively. So there is something of an assumption within I think society that hopefully we will see the end of this in two to three months. —

SC:        Fingers crossed.

CS:        Fingers crossed! The interesting thing is I compare that against is the assumptions when the first World War would have ended, and it was ‘oh, by Christmas,’ they said.

SC:        Yeah, yeah.

CS:        So obviously, it’s a different extreme, however, we are experiencing a bit of the same kind of feeling towards engaging with the future possibility of this being over sooner rather than later. And in the meantime, our daily documentation of this is going to provide that recap of now.

The secondary question is the value piece: What is valuable? What will be valuable to preserve long-term to represent what would be going through?

SC:        You bring up some really interesting things here. First, to reference how you talk about ‘the event.’ Like, you keep saying that this is an ‘event’ and that we also want a timeline. And for me, that really highlights how much we think of history as these spaces , these bound spaces, separate from each other.

And I’m just going to bring in some postmodern theory right now, but Foucault, for example, said that we should always strive for a “messy history” because life is messy. And being in this moment right now, this moment where we don’t know how long it’s going to be for, I think demonstrates that messiness. I too have been seeing, for example, things that are saying ‘pick up a pen and write a diary,’ which is so interesting because of how much we’re on our computers and our phones. And when I think about students in K-12 classes and how we can bring them more into the conversation of history, are those the media that they are going to be gravitating towards? Are we going to be able to capture their experiences?

And so you bring up some really kind of interesting elements of how we think of history as very neat and clean, and even archives as neat and clean, but of course, as an archivist, you know that’s not true. But, how can we teach a more messy history?

 I think that is a more rhetorical question, but maybe a better question is how do you think we would teach history after this moment?

CS:        You know, you bring such a great point of the messiness of history, or at least something opposite to the nice streamlined approach perhaps we’ve taken up in the past. I think it’s interesting because when you talk about events or timelines or those kind of pieces, it’s going to really take a change in perspective of teaching moving forward. A real paradigm shift in, or at least I know it’s already out there and there’s been excellent thinking about it, but really compartmentalizing in your head that that activity [of writing history] is not clean.

And that brings in other pieces, because there’s a real mental health response to this event as well. We will talk about anxiety and working from home and trying to juggle the kids and, like, how do you compartmentalize that?

And so, I think moving forward, the challenge is really going to be getting to a place of understanding and being comfortable mentally about dealing with the fact that we don’t know the answers, we don’t have the information, and even the information that we do document is representative of someone’s experience, which is valuable, but may only be represented of their experience, and so it’s not necessarily the narrative.

You know, one could argue that, ‘well, I know exactly what’s happening because I’m looking at my social media feeds and, at any point in time, I can understand what’s going on in Italy, I can understand what’s going in China because I’m getting fed information and I see that and could certainly comment on it.’ But really, those ideas are based on assumption because these channels that we interact with are almost 100% self-curated. We’re choosing the stories we want to hear.

And again, I think that probably goes back to the mental part of it as well, in the compartmentalization and ordering of having that information, the dissemination of that information. But I was thinking about this, I was thinking about how my feeds are absolutely curated towards what I want to hear: my friends, my family, etc. And so the the challenge in the future will be how we are documenting the stories, or the activities of what’s going on, that coming through to us but not just by chance.

SC:        I think that brings up such a great point. I wrote an article a couple years ago called “The Subjectivity of the Archives” based on my work with the digital humanities at York, about how, for example, in history teaching, when we use primary sources, we can bring them in to explore as evidence. But those primary sources are filled with subjectivities. It’s a choice of what you’re choosing to use in class, it’s a choice about what was saved, it was a choice about what was reported, it’s a choice of what the archivist thought was important to add to the description. And I love the concept you’re bringing in reminding us that we’re all in our little mini curated bubbles.

It’ll be interesting after the pandemic to see what the kinds of the narratives float to the top, because something that came up with another video  was how much does a history teacher share the stage with your students? And so, if you’re just thinking about your own experiences and what you saw through your own feed then you are ignoring the fact that your students had a much experience during this time because of their own curated bubbles of content. So anyway, just like thanks for bringing that up.

CS:        There’s another point here too, at least when I joined the gig 15 years ago, that archivists needed to be impartial and unbiased when attempting to document human activity. Now, there’s been much more thinking about that and how we absolutely carry our own biases regardless of being archivist.

So to your point, it is not just what’s being documented, but the access tools, how we describe these records,  the discoverability of these pieces moving forward, are really fascinating challenges to deconstruct.

SC:        That’s really interesting and I think those are cool questions for teachers to pose to their students: what is the value to keep and record this moment? And the decisions that we make a month from being in quarantine, will those decisions be different than if it was a year out? The answer is yes, of course, but these questions are interesting to think about that.

Maybe we can just turn to our last question. This video series is called “Imagining a New ‘We’” because, I argue, we need to find ways to have greater circles of inclusion in our histories, and that we need to imagine a more cohesive ways to imagine being together.

And so I talk a lot about connection, complexity, and care, I talk a lot about using creative nonfiction, I talk a lot about affective, emotional responses to history. Could you comment about this notion of imagining and this notion of ‘we’ right now?

I am bringing up “imagining,” in particular to you because of your own work as the co-creator of The Group of 7 comic books. Maybe we can talk about creative nonfiction and, for example, comic book responses, artistic responses to imagining ‘us’ together at this moment?

CS:        Yes, I think imagining, reimagining, thinking of future approaches to this is really, for lack of a better term, interdisciplinary in the sense where I think —

SC:        — I’m sorry to interrupt you like mid-sentence, but that’s coming up so much and I love that. I love this notion that we need to think of this in more interdisciplinary ways because the more disciplinary things are, the more things get chopped up. But ‘imagining a new ‘we’’ can really be these circles of inclusion. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I like that part! so keep going.

CS:        Nope, that’s good. I’m glad, I’m glad.

I feel like, for example, writing Group of 7, which is an alternative history comic book featuring events and personalities from Canadian history thrown together in a narrative that is completely fictional, yet inspired by real history, I think is an example of an artifact, maybe, going back to the documentary piece that engages in a different manner, to share some of the same objectives as traditional teaching of history would be I think, I would argue in the sense that the response it often gets or it has received when we talk about, you mentioned earlier, we’ve done some in-class sessions with teachers working with different — whether it’s younger grades or, in fact, actually the Comics in the Classroom working specifically with tying into say the grade 10 history curriculum currently in Ontario, we’ve seen just the emotional response that students have given us from picking up the comic book the artifact itself as opposed to picking up a textbook.

Now both have their merits, and one should not replace the other, but going back to your question about what is the future kind of look like in reimagining a we, I think this is where art and culture have a lot to say with delivering impact upon these resources to different audiences. One thing that I’m really noticing being part of this — you know, this is something that I’ve only been doing for the past three to five years, so I still consider myself a bit of a newbie at it, but it’s opened up this other community for me that I was never part of. And by that, I mean other creators. Other cultural creators.

And every day when I check my feeds, going back to our conversation about social media channels, the amount of art that I see coming out of, in my case, graphic art, about COVID-19, dealing with it, the isolation, the physical distancing – I’m seeing the artistic response to it and it’s a really nice compliment to the news feeds that I receive.

The artistic response just makes the whole experience richer and it feeds into this tapestry of what we’re experiencing, or at least what I’m experiencing. And, again this is early days, to see what artistic endeavors and culture responses will come out in the next six months to a year will be really enticing and exciting, and it’s a different kind of documentation. So whether folks are writing a diary or keeping a log or recording video chats or whatever happens to be, we’re going to see even more personal response through artistic needs.

And I think it’s only going to add to our interpretation of how this is impacted transnationally.

SC:        It’s been really cool to see how many artists in a variety of different media are sharing and want to share at this moment. Maybe you can share some creators that you are following right now that you think that teachers might kind of be interested in seeing their responses.

CS:        Sure. For example, we made all six issues of Group of 7 free to digitally download [until September 2020]. So now —

SC:        You should have just started with that!

CS:        I should have started with that, I know!

But offering them for free download came from a place where Jason Lapidus and I, as co-creators, we were seeing what was going. For us, the digital artifact itself is out there already. Why don’t we just don’t take the price off it and say, ‘hey, during these times, just enjoy. Whatever. Enjoy this. This is something that we’ve created, we’re putting this out, please take it as you see fit and enjoy.’

And we got the idea from other comics creators who were making content available. I’m seeing it as an effort to provide art back into the world and to remove barriers for accessing it.

I know you’re familiar with Scott Chantler. He has a Canadian hero called The Red Ensign and he just put a 56-page PDF for free on his website for download, which is a story that you actually can’t get anywhere else. It is the idea to put content out there without any kind of thought as to how it might be used.

People I think, ‘here’s a contribution. If this brings you any kind of joy or relief or maybe feeds into your thinking or teaching or learning, awesome,’ but it’s again removal of as many barriers as possible is the real goal.

I’ve seen also another comic artist named Jay Stephens who does work for OWL Magazine. He has a regular feature in OWL Magazine called Arrowhead, which is geared at 9 to 12 to 14-year-olds. He released the whole Arrowhead comic as free download. Take it. Do what you want to do.

So certainly there are specific things being released in the Canadian comics using history as inspiration that hopefully, teachers can use. But I am just seeing general art being produced. And whether it’s a one-page webcomic or folks are going back into their catalog of work and repurposing art, that’s a really fascinating thing to watch. I’ve seen people release comics that they did three years ago, but now have a different feel because it’s different moment right now. It’s just an interesting response. And I’m very excited selfishly, because I enjoy the work of all these people and I’m excited to see what else will come out of this because I think times like this often spur creativity.

The other thing I’m also seeing, are online responses saying, ‘this is your time to create,’ and then counter-responses that say, ‘at the same time, you’re under no pressure to create.’ It’s a really interesting balance of productivity and mental health and creativity.

SC:        Well, making things accessible can spur the inspiration to be able to do more when you feel like you’re in your best space to do it. And that’s the point of these videos too. Because when I had started, I recorded a video at the end of the second week of social isolation, and I was like, how do we teach history after this? So many people came to me with such great responses that I just thought, I don’t know really what online teaching resources that teachers need, but if you want to listen to some people talk about it, let’s have these conversations.

And so I’m glad we got to talk today because, I was thinking about this mix you have in your life as an archivist and a comic book writer that I thought would provide a lot of valuable insights, and I was right. So thank you!

CS:        Thank you, Samantha. I really appreciate you reaching out.

SC:        I feel so privileged to be having these conversations. Thank you again, Chris.