161. Romance Writing and Library Archives: An Interview with Digital Archivist Caryn Radick

[music]

Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 161 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Caryn Radick, who is the Digital Archivist and the Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers University.  Rutgers is the state university of New Jersey, in case you didn’t know, which is where I live, but I met Caryn at a book signing for Nalini Singh down in New Brunswick.  She has a cool research project where she is investigating how romance writers use archives, and she’s also very interested in depictions of archivists in fiction from the romance genre and other genres as well.  She also has a number of recommendations for any who is looking to do archival research on their own or who is curious about what really cool stuff their local library might have in their archives.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of You’ll Be Mine, a new Green Mountain novella by New York Times bestselling author Marie Force.  Download it on October 20th.

And speaking of the podcast and sponsoring it, if you would like to sponsor the podcast in 2016, you can do an episode, a month, a year, six months, a quarter.  Email me!  Sarah@smartbitchestrashybooks.com.  I would love to hear from you.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the podcast, as well as the show notes, about what song this is and where you can buy it.  I will also have links in the show notes to the different resources that Caryn mentions, and as always, we will link to all of the books that we mention, because we can’t have a podcast about books without talking about books, right?  That’s, that’s why we’re here.

And now, on with the podcast.

[music]

Sarah:  Introduce yourself, and tell the people who are listening a little bit about what you do –

Caryn Radick:  Sure.

Sarah:  – and why it’s cool.

Caryn:  [Laughs] My name is Caryn Radick, and I’m an archivist at Rutgers University.  My title is actually Digital Archivist, so most of my days are occupied with looking at our materials and either trying to put those materials online or trying to put information about the materials online so that people can access them or at least find out more information about them, and at Rutgers, there’re of course the materials that pertain to the university itself, but there’s also a lot of New Jersey history, and where I work there’s also a rare book collection and published materials about New Jersey.  And it’s, it’s cool because, well, I love being able to work with the actual documents, and I really enjoy being able to – and it’s not just documents, it’s photographs and other materials – and it’s great when you connect with people who are looking to do research for whatever reason, whether it’s scholarly or for personal reasons.  And I also, because where I work, librarians have faculty status, which means that we get to try to do scholarship and do research for publication, and one of the areas that I’ve become interested in in the last few years is the romance community, and I’ve been focusing on whether romance writers use archives when they’re writing their works, because when I was younger I started reading historical romances, and I learned quite a bit of history from them, so I figured somebody must be doing the research, and from what I understand, they do.

Sarah:  So you’re looking at how romance writers use historical archives in their writing.

Caryn:  Correct.  

Sarah:  Okay, that’s seriously cool.

Caryn:  [Laughs] It’s, it’s been really fun.  I actually, I constructed a survey which I was fortunate enough to be able to circulate through Romance Writers of America, and I got some really good responses.  I was also interested in whether ro-, how romance writers use libraries, and as an extension of that, since I’m an archivist, I wanted to know about how they use archives, and if they use archives, and whether they like archives, and if they’ve had any issues using an archive, because it – aside from telling me more about the romance community, it also gives me a different view of users, users who we don’t often talk to, which are the people who aren’t necessarily scholars or genealogists or students.

Sarah:  So part of your job is, we have all this old stuff, and we need to make it available to people who are curious about all of this old stuff, and it’s not just for us at the university; everybody can have access to all of our old stuff.

Caryn:  Correct.

Sarah:  But you’re also looking at how romance writers say, I need some old stuff; how do I find it?  Especially when it has to do with these specific types of old stuff that you have.

Caryn:  Exactly.  And I will say that not, not every archive is open to the public.  It depends on the institution, and it depends on the institution’s mission, but since I’m at a public university, our, our materials are open.

Sarah:  Right.

Caryn:  So, exactly that.  So, I, I, we know what we have, and we try to have that information online so that people can at least get to the fact that we have something, because it’s not very helpful if nobody knows something’s there, and then there are different degrees of availability if, if – a lot of people much prefer if something’s digitized and online because then they can just sit at home or don’t how to travel if they have issues with being able to travel, but there are other collections where somebody has to come and look at them in person.

Sarah:  Right, of course.  It, it seems to me that, you know, back in the day, before we had all these cool computers, you used to have to go to the physical library, and you would be looking for, especially if you were looking for a very specific piece of paper, you were looking for an actual needle in an actual haystack made of paper.  And now it’s, you’re basically reducing the size of the haystack so that the needles are much more visible, and you can say, oh, yes!  I wish to, I wish to read about that, or I need to read about that, or hey, that looks cool.  Have you noticed an increase in just random exploration of your archives?  Let’s, let’s just go down the rabbit hole of cool things we have?

Caryn:  Yes, yes and no.  I think part of what happens if I do my job correctly or do it well is that sometimes I never get to interact with the people who find the materials –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caryn:  – because if they actually find what they’re looking for, it’s also that’s one of the frustrations, that you say, okay, I’m putting all this information out there, and the whole point of putting it out there is that the person who’s interested in seeing it may never get in touch with me to – because they don’t need me.  We’ll get more calls or interactions with people who say, okay, I saw what we call a finding gate, which is a guide to the collection.  I saw that you have a box, and in this box there’s a folder with a certain label.  I would like to know what’s in that folder.  And sometimes the answer is, well, really, the best thing for you to do is come here and look at it.

[Barking]

Sarah:  Right, of course.  My dog disagrees with that plan.

[Laughter]

Caryn:  Your, your dog is not the only one.

Sarah:  Yeah, he, he resents having to travel to look for his archived material, which –

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  – most of which is in the back yard.  But anyway.  [Laughs]

Caryn:  Right.  But hopefully if, when, when people come, hopefully they, they learn something and also have a good experience, but it, it’s also an interesting experience, because there’re often a lot of rules surrounded with using archival material because we have security measures in place, and there’s a little more signing in.  It’s, it’s a little different from just going into a public library.  Most likely –

Sarah:  And picking up a book.

Caryn:  Right.  Exactly.  So, so most likely, if you’re the sort of person who wants to just totally be left alone if you go into an archive, chances are you’re going to have to speak to someone.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Aw, man!  Well, you know, most writers are very bubbly, outgoing extroverts, which is completely not true, so.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  What are some of the things you’ve learned about how romance writers use historical archives?

Caryn:  Yeah, a lot of people who responded to the survey, a lot of them just really, said they really want to get those details of time and place correct, but they also like to get a voice that represents the time period or place that they’re looking at.  One of the things I really appreciated was there was a certain amount of, of reverence and enthusiasm for using archival materials which reflects what it was like for me when I was first getting into the profession.  The, the aspect of, wow, this is a diary that somebody wrote in the nineteenth century, and I can’t believe you’re letting me touch this.

Sarah:  Yes!

Caryn:  That’s fine!  It, it’s great.  Most indicated that they would really love it if there was more information available online, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, because I think the expectation these days is that things are online.  People are a little surprised when you tell them that, no, actually, you’re going to have to come in to see that, or, you know, we can try to give you some information, but it, it’s not going to be available online.  And another aspect that, that didn’t surprise me was that some people were very enthusiastic or wanted to know more about how to use archives, but they felt that they didn’t quite know how to get started, which is, which is pretty common.

Sarah:  When you’re working with archives, if someone is doing research –

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and they’re setting a book in a particular location, is the state university of that, of that location one of the best places to start looking for old material that might help make your book more, more real and more vibrant?

Caryn:  I would say it could be a good place.  It definitely depends on the state, and it depends on the university.  There are certainly states that have historical societies that are well known for having historical information about the state, but it would certainly be a good place to start.  The archival community is pretty small, also, so usually if you’re trying to track something down, if you talk to one person they’ll at least know where to guide you to the next place –

Sarah:  Of course.

Caryn:  – and that often happens, where people come in and say, oh, I was at the state archives, and they told me to come here because of, because you have this, or we heard you had this, and then we try to, to locate it for them.  But at, certainly at Rutgers, part of our mission is to collect materials about the State of New Jersey, so I would say it’s probably a good place to start.

Sarah:  What are some of the things that writers would find in an archive that would be useful?  So if there’s a writer listening who’s thought, I never thought of going to my state library or going to a local archive, what are some things that they can find that would help them?

Caryn:  Certainly, depending, of course, on the time period, photographs –

Sarah:  Yeah, I can imagine that would be very cool.

Caryn:  Right.  Something earlier than nineteenth century, not so much.  There’s correspondence, diaries, often histories of, of towns and places.  There are also more specialized archives out there.  I was just looking at the websites for, there’s something called the Leather Archives & Museum, so if you’re interested in the history of, you know, kink or fetishism, you could try there.  And there’s, you know, Lesbian Herstory Archives, so if you were more interested in lesbian history, that might be a place to look.  So it really depends on what kind of book you’re writing and what sort of details you want, so some of it would be that more historical society, the local archives that just talk about the town you’re in, and some of it might be more about the topic you’re trying to explore.

Sarah:  I remember recently, about a year or two ago, seeing a time capsule from Oklahoma that was opened.  It had been stored in the basement of a church, and they actually had to knock out a wall to bring it out, and one of the things that blew my mind was that I was seeing actual items from a hundred years ago in color.  Like, the cord on the telephone was green, and the hat that was, that, that was placed in was a brand-new hat – I imagine at the time it was a very expensive hat – was actually teal with a beautiful ribbon, and, and I was like, I’ve never seen pieces of history in color before.  Obviously that’s not something that you have, but are there things like that that surprise you when you go through the materials that you have, that change the way you think about the history of the stuff that you have in front of you?  I love how my, my reference to archived materials is old stuff.  One of us is a librarian, and it’s not me.

[Laughter]

Caryn:  It’s also, I feel now compelled to mention that a huge component of being an archivist today is dealing with all the digital material that’s out there, and –

Sarah:  Of course.  There’s a ton of it!

Caryn:  Right, exactly, and trying to figure out how to preserve it and make it accessible in the future.  I, I would say, we do have some artifacts, so I know what you’re talking about.  We have things like Rutgers, like, dance cars, cards, from the 1930s, and it really does bring a time period to life for you differently than, than just reading about it.  I think, when I think about some of the collections that I’ve worked on, I think what comes across to me is sometimes people’s voices, reading letters from the nineteenth century and laughing at a joke somebody makes in a letter and realizing that, you know, here I am, 150 years later, appreciating this person’s sense of humor –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caryn:  – and getting a sense of who that person is, and it’s amazed me.  I don’t work so much with the actual collections at this point because my work has become more technical, but really just being moved by something somebody wrote, or –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Caryn:  – laughing at something somebody wrote, it really just brings the, these people alive in a different way because you’re reading their words exactly as they wrote them.

Sarah:  And it’s not just famous people or prominent people, it’s just ordinary people.

Caryn:  It is just ordinary people, ordinary people who we are fortunate enough to still have their records.  That’s another issue in archives, is that often you realize that some people’s voices were not captured –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Caryn:  – for one reason or another if they weren’t considered important or they weren’t able to write letters or, or keep diaries, so that’s a constant issue.  But certainly, some of them are just collections of somebody who had a farm somewhere in New Jersey, and they kept a diary.  There was one farmer who used to draw sketches of his cows, so if you go through his diary, every once in a while he’ll talk about how one of the cows was bred that day, and he’ll have a little sketch of his cow.  And so that’s –

Sarah:  Aw!

Caryn:  – just a detail, right, and –

Sarah:  And that’s something he probably never expected would end up in a library.  Like, if you went back in time and said, you know, dude, your journal and your sketches, they’re totally in the state library.

Caryn:  Right.  Exactly.  I, I think most people wouldn’t have necessarily thought of their materials living on in archive unless you were famous or, or prominent, so it’s really great when you get these day to day types of, of letters or, or diaries.  I know the first collection I worked on when I was a student was interesting because it was letters between a husband and a wife, and I only read the husband’s letters, and some of the details got a little bit personal at times.  It was a bit awkward reading them.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yeah, I can imagine.

Caryn:  And, and realizing that, wow, I am so sure that they never thought that a hundred years from now, some woman in the central New Jersey would be sitting there reading these letters that they wrote to each other –

Sarah:  [Laughs] No.

Caryn:  – and I am not sure what they would think of it.

Sarah:  What are some of your favorite pieces in the, in your collection?  Is it the letters and the journals that are your favorites, or are there things that you like to go visit because the, you enjoy them so much?

Caryn:  I have to say, some of the, I think you’re right, some of the letters and, and journals are, are my favorites.  Occasionally you will just find one item in a collection that really makes you smile.  I know there’s a Rutgers president who, he wrote a letter to, I was going to say Abbott and Costello, I think it was to Costello, who I believe was from New Jersey – I might be getting that wrong – and he’s writing him a letter, and I don’t remember the exact nature of the correspondence, but it was just funny because the letter opened with something like, I enjoyed your movie Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caryn:  – and I thought, that’s an interesting, interesting thing that you’ll see in a, a letter, to see in a letter from a Rutgers president.  And then there was another exchange where this faculty member in the 1960s, I think he had to stay late for a meeting, and he really wanted to be reimbursed because he bought dinner while he was waiting for this meeting, and there’s this back-and-forth correspondence between him and the administration about how he’s owed two dollars and thirty cents –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caryn:  – for his dinner.  So, so there’re things like that that are pretty, pretty funny, and, and then there are collections that are moving.  The one that I was telling you about with the letters from the husband and the wife, the man was a, he was a surgeon in the U.S. Navy in the late nineteenth century –

Sarah:  Wow.

Caryn:  – so, so he was writing to his wife from all over the place, and the challenge with that particular collection was that he was writing on very thin paper, which was pretty typical of the time because trying to make a little –

Sarah:  Paper was expensive.

Caryn:  Yeah, exactly.  Paper was expensive, and people would often, the way they would write a letter, literally the pages they would write on don’t go in the same order that we would do it today, so you’d have to figure out which page was actually the right page to read next.  He was also on a ship, and the ship was tossing a lot of the time –

Sarah:  [Laughs] Oh, gosh!

Caryn:  – and he actually wrote something to her to the effect of how the ship was tossing and he was sorry if it made the handwriting difficult for her – [laughs] – and I rather self-centeredly thought, well, what about me?

[Laughter]

Caryn:  Poor archivist, trying to read your handwriting!  So that was, and then you get the collections, handwriting can really be a challenge.  It’s one of the concerns about the future of the profession, because people don’t really learn how to read handwriting, and nineteenth-century handwriting is something different on its own.

Sarah:  It’s very slanted and, and can be –

Caryn:  Yes.

Sarah:  – and, and it’s very compressed.

Caryn:  Yes, and, and they would often turn the paper sideways in something called cross-writing where they would literally write –

Sarah:  Yes.

Caryn:  – across each other, so, so that can be fun.  But I, I got the hang of it after a while and started to understand how to read the letters and got through the handwriting, but just the details between being in the navy, being in a ship, traveling around, being a doctor, some of the cases he had to treat, and just some of the details, the discussion that he had with his wife were just really fascinating, and I, I felt very fortunate that that was the collection I got to work on when I was just a student learning how to, to work on a collection.

Sarah:  That is very cool.  Where does this stuff come from?  Do people donate it?  Do, does the state, like, have a, have an outreach?  If you find old stuff, we want it?  Like, how, where do the archive collections of different places come from?

Caryn:  Again, places are, some places are different.

Sarah:  Of course.

Caryn:  It, a lot of it is, is funding.  You will occasionally read a wonderful news item about how a library archive was able to buy a collection of a famous writer’s papers, but most of us –

Sarah:  Right.

Caryn:  – don’t have that kind of budget.  So a lot of it is donations.  Some of it is that there are often targeted areas where, again, since we’re New Jersey, we know that we’re interested in New-Jersey-related collections, so if somebody contacts us and says, oh, I have something related to Arizona history, we would probably direct them to someplace in Arizona.  So it’s a combination of what your mission is to collect, what people might donate that’s of interest to your collection, and then also for the university itself, part of the archive’s function is to document the activities and keep records of the university’s activities, so that’s just the natural extension of it.

Sarah:  And it’s, and it’s not like, you know, New Jersey has a boring history.

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I mean, it’s, people have this sort of very limited view of New Jersey, but, I mean, Atlantic City was an incredibly affluent, opulent place for a number of years –

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  – and there was, you know, [sarcasm font] a little, a little organized crime, you know, not too much, just –

Together:  – just a little bit.

Sarah:  Just, just, you know, just a few major crime families and some major political machines, you know.  Not, not a big deal.  [end sarcasm font]  And then you had, like farmers, everywhere.

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  There’s a lot to collect.

Caryn:  Right, and since New Jersey and Rutgers have the agricultural school –

Sarah:  Yep.

Caryn:  – there’s a lot about the, the Rutgers tomato, I believe, in our collections.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, I can, I can imagine the Rutgers tomato and the blueberry.

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  One of the things that you told me was that reading a romance novel caused you to, to go after and pursue the research that you’re doing about how romance writers use archives –

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and, and that the book that you read became a discussion among archivists.

Caryn:  It did.  So, back in, I think it’s 2011, 2012, romance hit the archivists’ radar when Protected by the Prince by Annie West came to our attention, because the heroine of that book is an archivist, and, you know, being surprised that this –

Sarah:  You guys must have been like, wait, what?  Seriously?  She’s us?  Woohoo!

Caryn:  Yes.  She’s an archivist, and we’re, yay, there’s an archivist!  Wait, oh.  She’s wearing glasses.  Oh, she’s kind of frumpy.  [Laughs] And she’s –

Sarah:  Yeah, that happens.

Caryn:  And, and then we got a little bit distracted, and I noticed that this also featured in your blog, because there was a phrase in the back of the book that said that the hero was drawn to the heroine’s burgeoning purity?

Sarah:  Oh, God.  [Laughs]

Caryn:  So –

Sarah:  Got to love some burgeoning purity.

Caryn:  Yeah, it’s the best kind, for sure.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caryn:  So, so that, that may have featured in the discussion as well, so it was kind of a moment of fun for, for the archives community, where suddenly, hey, there’s discussion about, there’s this book, it’s got an archivist heroine, probably a little bit making fun of the book and, and as I said, the stereotype of the archivist in it, and there was, there was even a, a blog had a contest to write your own archival romance, and there were a few other discussions, and then it kind of just went its own ways, as things do, but since I had read romance when I was younger and I, I’ve known some romance writers and I’ve gone to a couple of the events, it was in the back of my mind at the time that, you know, actually, now that I think about it, I know that romance writers that I’ve met seem to also be pretty detail-oriented and care about getting the, their novels right, and I started wondering if they use archives, and I suspected they did.  I think I told you that when I was younger I read Bertrice Small, who was –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Caryn:  – quite an introduction to a lot of things, but –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caryn:  – among them –

Sarah:  That was very, very well put, yes.  It is quite an introduction to a whole lot of things –

Caryn:  Yes.

Sarah:  – yes.

Caryn:  There are a number of, of women my age who were twelve years old when they pulled one of those books off the shelf –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Caryn:  – and –

Sarah:  Whoa.

Caryn:  – it’s quite an introduction.  So, but I read Bertrice Small, and I know, I can absolutely say for a fact, that there are details about history that I know because of her books.  Like –

Sarah:  Absolutely, me too.

Caryn:  Palmyra, Zenobia, I think the Byzantine Empire from Adora.  I, that’s the first time I heard of those things, so with that in mind I thought it would be really interesting to put aside this discussion about Protected by the Prince and just focus on the idea that maybe romance writers are actually interested in archives.  Maybe they use them, and if we find out that that’s the case, what does that mean for us?  Should we be thinking about trying to target outreach to romance writers?  Because I think the romance community, from what I’ve noticed, is pretty active –

Sarah:  Yes.

Caryn:  – pretty well organized –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Caryn:  – and there’re lots of opportunities to, to, to kind of do some sort of outreach activity, and also pretty receptive to, to different ideas and, and different approaches.

Sarah:  Yes.  One of the things that’s very interesting, especially about historical romance, is that Kathe Robins from RT Magazine likes to say that we have been reading about the Regency about five times longer than the Regency actually existed –

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and we’re now seeing more books published in prior periods and, and periods later than the Regency.  There are more Georgians, there are more Victorians, there are books in the ‘20s now, and the challenge is that there is, I think it was Isobel Carr who said that there was a really wonderful familiarity of saying, once upon a time –

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – that you know that there’s this sort of historical fairytale element of going back in time, plus we’ve all read so much Regency that we have this common understanding of the worldbuilding.  The world doesn’t have to be built, because if you’ve read a lot of historicals –

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  – you know how it works.  The problem is that for some readers who really like a lot of historical detail, the details start to fall away because you rely more on other things to, to build the characters, and you don’t add additional details, because there’s such a common understanding.

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  Romance writers that I have met are very attentive to history, and they do want their books to be accurate, and they do want them to be unique and to include little details.  After you read Protected by the Prince, or started working on researching romance and archives, have you read other romances?

Caryn:  I, I have read other romances.  One of the things that I realized I need to do was to start, I’m going to say educating or re-educating myself about romance, because I had read it, I guess, in the late or early, late ‘80s to the early ‘90s.  As I said, Bertrice Small, I think Loveswept, like, Iris Johansen Loveswept books seem to –

Sarah:  Yep.

Caryn:  – stir in my memory, and, and Kath-, and Kathleen Woodiwiss at the time.  And I didn’t really know that much about romance as it was being written now, aside from hanging out occasionally at these romance conferences, so as I had mentioned to you, I, I had read the Beyond Heaving Bosoms book and found that was really great for learning about all the changes, like the old school, new school, and all the issues around consent in romance that weren’t there when I was first reading it and the, I’m going to say I’m, I’m kind of grateful for the, the movement on from the virginal eighteen-year-old heroines.

Sarah:  Oh, yes, me too.  Ohhh, yes.

Caryn:  [Laughs] So as I’ve been trying to learn more about romance and thankfully going to a couple of conferences where I realized they like to give you free books, which is very helpful – [laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, yes, that’s the best reason to attend a conference.  You pack your suitcase and then put that suitcase inside another, empty suitcase and use that one to bring home the books.

Caryn:  I, I went to RWA Librarians Day, which was great, but I was blown away when I got to my seat, and there was a place setting that literally consisted of eighteen books.

Sarah:  Yep!

Caryn:  And then I think another seven showed up at some point during the day.

Sarah:  Yep.

Caryn:  So, so I’ve been trying to, to read more romance, and I, I had got some, let’s see, I read a, I read Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie, which I really enjoyed, and I know that’s not historical, but I just thought it would be fun to read a contemporary.  I’ve got some Eloisa James, I, who I read and I also enjoyed.  I’ve become interested in reading Beverly Jenkins; I’d really like to, to see more about her books.  And there’re also authors that are on my radar for just their writing about history, like Loretta Chase, and the, the Two Nerdy History Girls, I think, would be a really fascinating blog to have a look at.  So I’m trying to read more, and I’ve been reading more than I had in the past, but I’m also trying to shuffle it in with the rest of my reading, which, probably like everybody else, there’re a lot of books in my to-be-read pile.

Sarah:  Yes, it’s a, it’s a common affliction.  One thing I love about Beverly Jenkins’ books is the amount of history that’s in there, and, for example, her Destiny series –

Caryn:  Mm.

Sarah:  – is set in pre-state California, and there’s so much history about what California was like before it became a state and how different it was –

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  – from the rest of the United States at the time.  It, it, I was fascinated, especially because in the first one, the heroine takes a train from Philadelphia to, I forget exactly what station in California, but it takes her more than a week to make the train journey –

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and she learns all about the history of California on that trip, so I was like, okay, so we’ve got historical and a road trip and an arranged marriage.  I am so here for this book.

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  It, it was, it was like a perfect storm of catnip for me.  But I loved thinking I had no idea about the history –

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – of California.  I also think that there’s more interest among readers in American-set historicals –

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  – because there’s a lot of history.  What are some of the things that you’ve read that you think might make a good book?  Have you noticed anything that you thought, oh!  That would be interesting in a, in a romance novel.  That would be cool.  Have you noticed anything like that?

Caryn:  As far as, as looking at archival collections?

Sarah:  Yeah!  Anything that you’ve noticed and thought, oh, that would be cool in a book?

Caryn:  Hmm.  Well, again, I, I think the, the naval surgeon I was talking about before, that would probably make for an interesting story between his travels and the medical issues.  Of course, they were separated.

Sarah:  Yes.

Caryn:  There was a letter in that collection particularly memorable for me which I’m thinking might be an interesting detail in a romance novel was that he, I think he was in California at some point, and every once in a while he would write her a letter from California where he would talk about how the women in California were really pretty, and, and I –

Sarah:  Dude!

Caryn:  And that’s exactly what I thought at the time.  I sat there and thought, dude, stop telling your wife how pretty the women are in California –

Sarah:  Dude!

Caryn:  – and, I mean, I, I totally should have gone and, and looked at her letters, which I have not done ‘cause somebody else was reading them, but apparently she yelled at him –

Sarah:  Good for her!  [Laughs]

Caryn:  – big time, and, so I’d start reading these letters from him where suddenly he’s, oh, my darling, oh, you, you love me with a passion!  I didn’t realize that!  Now that I know that you love me with a passion, oh, that’s different!  And it, it was just really –

Sarah:  Oh, so that makes the girls less pretty, eh?  [Laughs]

Caryn:  I, I, I guess it does –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Caryn:  – or I guess it was just the fact that he was, he had been married to his wife for however long but did not realize that she had any passion for him.  Or, or just kind of felt that passion maybe wasn’t for wives.  I’m not exactly sure what the issue was, but it was kind of, that’s where it started getting personal and, and kind of amazing, and he would say things like, you know, be a little pagan, my darling, I want you to.  [Laughs] And so –

Sarah:   Oh, dude.

Caryn:  – so, so that kind of line, I think, would be totally perfect.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I should think, and I want to read her letters now.  I want to know what she said.  I will march to California, and I will kick your behind, if you don’t stop.

Caryn:  Yeah, it just, it just, he would go on about oh, the women here and how they dress and this is so nice and that’s nice.  Like, you need to stop –

Sarah:  Dude!

Caryn:  – wife about it.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Dude, no, not cool!

Caryn:  So I was not surprised when I hit the letter that said, oh, okay.  I, I gather you don’t like that.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Nope, nope, nope, nope.  I don’t think anyone would.  

If someone is listening who’s curious about reaching out to their local archive or finding an archive in their state university or where they live, what should someone do if they want to connect with an archive?

Caryn:  For, for state universities, I would say pretty simply to go to their library and look for special collections and archives.  Different universities have different placements for, within, usually within the library for their departments, but I would just say to try that.  Also, just probably Googling historical society and the name of the state would probably bring something up.  I, I think that would be a, a good place to start.  The Society of American Archivists probably also has lists of repositories, and I’m, there’re probably lots of things that I’m blanking on that I can probably send you information –

Sarah:  Cool!

Caryn:  – that you could put up.

Sarah:  So, it doesn’t have to be romance, but I always ask, what are you reading right now that you’re enjoying, that you would recommend?  It could be any genre; it doesn’t have to be romance.

Caryn:  I, right now, I’m actually reading Yes Please by Amy Poehler –

Sarah:  Oh!

Caryn:  – which I am – [laughs]

Sarah:  I like that book!

Caryn:  – I’m really enjoying.  I also, I didn’t realize, I’d started reading it, and I realize that she’s maybe a month older than I am, so a lot of her memories just sync perfectly with mine, but of course she’s just so much fun to read.  I’m reading three chapters into it, and I’m just really enjoying it.  If you pick up a copy, it is, for some reason, I think because the paper, there’re a lot of photographs, it’s a really heavy book.

Sarah:  Yes.

Caryn:  It’s amazingly heavy.  I just finished reading Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, which I also enjoyed ‘cause I had, I’d read The Shining and actually talked about it at an archival conference.  One of my interests is the intersection, as I call it, between archives and fiction, so I like to read books and talk about aspects involving archives that are in the books that maybe don’t come across on the first reading.  So I had read The Shining, and then I thought, okay, I should probably read Doctor Sleep because it’s the sequel, and I enjoyed that also.  And then, let’s see, what else have I read recently?

Sarah:  How, how do archives play a role in The Shining and Doctor Sleep?

Caryn:  Not, not so much in Doctor Sleep, as I discovered, but in The Shining, what I found when I read it was that the character, the father, Jack, one of the things that fed his kind of obsession and also his insanity was that he found the archives of the hotel in the basement –

Sarah:  Ah.

Caryn:  – and he kept going back to them because he wanted to, he wanted to write the history of the hotel, so he’d spend hours and hours down there, and as he spent more time down there, he would become more secretive, and he would sort of revert to his, his drinking behavior, because he’d been an alco-, well, he was a recovering alcoholic, and then there was this wonderful episode where he decides to go into the local town to look at the, the newspaper at the library, and they have this great detail about how he goes to look at the newspapers, and some of them are actual print newspapers, but some of them have been microfilmed, and then the microfilm machine gives him a headache, as it does.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, I remember that headache.

Caryn:  Right.  A lot of people – and then there’s this, there’s a scrapbook in the basement also, which is archivally an interesting piece of material, because scrapbooks can be very tricky, because they’re often falling apart, and things get pasted in in all sorts of weird ways, and they’re cut out of –

Sarah:  And then the paste becomes something else entirely.

Caryn:  [Laughs] And often you get, people will fold up newspaper clippings, and then when you try to unfold them, they fall apart in your hands.  So there’s this, this huge aspect of his obsession is about, he’s really fascinated by this scrapbook and how he really wants to know who compiled the scrapbook, and, you know, he meets the ghosts of the hotel, who sort of imply to him that the manager will give him more material if he only plays along.  So that was fun.  Yeah, I also wrote a paper about reading Dracula as an archivist, so –

Sarah:  Really!

Caryn:  Yeah.  [Laughs] Which was a lot of fun to write, because if you’re an archivist, you read Dracula, and it’s one of those books that’s set up as lots of different records, like diaries, journals, and letters, newspaper accounts, and it’s all put together, and there’s a lot about gathering, doing research, gathering material, putting the research together, so I’d like looking at books and, and trying to figure out, if, if it jumps out at me.  Sometimes, obviously, a book is just a book that I enjoy reading, but it’s fun when I read something and I’m not expecting to see archives in them and then suddenly they kind of jump out at me.  So it was like exploring that.

Sarah:  Have you read the series – of course now I’m, I’m frantically Googling –

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – because I cannot remember the name, but I can remember so much of it.  No, this is not it.  Argh!  There is a series of books where the hero is an immortal vampire, but he works in archives, and so he –

Caryn: Oh, I want to read that.

Sarah:  So if you haven’t read it, okay, now I have to find it.  Okay, so, vampire, rare books library, romance.  Let’s see if I can find this thing.  This is going to make me – aha!  Oh, I am the best!  Okay.  [Laughs] So pleased that I found this!  It’s called A Hidden Fire by Elizabeth Hunter, and he, the hero is an immortal vampire.  His job is to track down rare things and transcribe them, so he goes into the rare books area and transcribes books for people who, and he can take his notes of the book out of the library when a book can’t leave the –

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – the space that it’s in, ‘cause it’s in that sort of special, pressurized, low humidity –

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  – super funky room, right.  Well, he’s immortal, he has no place he needs to be, so he is totally fine to get paid to copy a book.  Like, that’s totally fine.  The heroine, the heroine is a librarian, and they end up following a mystery that takes them from the archives and rare books of their library into other parts of Italy.  So I think they go from the U.S. to Italy, and there’s, you know, there’s this kind of vampire and that kind of vampire, and there’re battles –

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and things happen, but they’re totes in the library.  My favorite scene in that book, though, is one of the hero’s really good friends is also immortal, but they happen to love the WWE professional wrestling –

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and they watch professional wrestling on TV like a standing appointment.  That was one of my favorite scenes, but you would probably really, really like this.

Caryn:  It sounds like a – ‘cause I’m always trying to keep a list of books that also take place or portray archivists so that, that – or libraries – that sounds like a lot of fun, and it does sound right up my alley.  I know I’d read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, and that’s also a vampire and involves a lot of – well, it’s Dracula – and it involves a lot of libraries and archives, but it’s, I, I would not describe that as a fun book, although it was a good book.

Sarah:  No, it’s not fun.  I’m, I’m also guessing you’ve seen The Librarians on TNT?

Caryn:  I haven’t watched the show.  I see commercials for it.  I have to admit, that’s the sort of thing that makes me roll my eyes slightly, but also looks like fun at the same time?

Sarah:  It is totally fun, the, the TV series especially.  The, the biggest frustration I had with the television series was that it was aired out of order, and so the character development starts and stops and goes back, and it’s really obvious in one way that you can tell.  One of the characters’ hair moves from being very tightly tied back and very tightly contained to being looser and looser as her character changes, but her hair keeps changing from buns to loose, then sort of loose, ‘cause they, they aired it out of order because of some scheduling network thing.  But the, it knows exactly what it is, and it’s very silly, but at the same time, they jump into, into different periods of time and into different places in the world to retrieve specific magical artifacts and then bring them to the Library.  And what happens in the first episode is that the Library basically collapses in on itself and disappears to protect itself from an invasion by someone who wants to destroy it.

Caryn:  Hmm.

Sarah:  So the library has this sort of sentience that will allow it to hide and collapse in on itself or become as large as it needs to be to hold something based on what’s happening around it.  It’s super fun and silly to watch them sort of, like, okay, now we’re in a small town that’s stuck in a time warp run by Nicola Tesla –

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and then here we’re in another time period, and we’re stuck in a haunted house.  It, it, it’s, it’s a really cool mix of history and sort of Indiana Jones campy adventure, and when I was, before we started watching and recapping it I was like, I’m not sure this is for me, and it was entirely for me.  It might have had, might as well have had my name on it.  It was wonderful.

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Plus, it’s also written by a romance author named Kate Rorick, who writes historical romances as Kate Noble.

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  So there’s a lot of history and a lot of – there’s also librarian humor.

Caryn:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  John Larroquette plays a person who is in charge of the annex that they’re using, and he really does not want any humans near him.  Like, really would like them to go.

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Like, really, but he’s incredibly well-dressed, and there’s a whole bunch of layered mythologies.  I think you would probably dig it.

Caryn:  Sounds like it.  It’s another, another one for my list of, of things to check out or, or read or watch, but that does sound like –

Sarah:  Would you want, if anyone’s listening and they have ideas of books that feature archivists or librarians, would you like to know what they are?

Caryn:  I, I definitely would.  I know of some that are out there.  I think there are one or two posted on Goodreads, and I know that Wendy the Super Librarian maintains a list, but I would definitely be interested, and especially archivists, because I think that’s, that’s not something that we’ve been tracking so well.  I know Protected by the Prince, and I read about another one on your blog that I can’t remember the title of, and I’ll have to go back, that said the person was an archivist.  But those are always, they’re fun and interesting to read from the, the point of, without trying to really dissect the person’s archival practice.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yes.

Caryn:  It’s kind of neat to see, oh, look, they, they have an archivist as the heroine or the hero.  I don’t if there are any archivist heroes in romance novels, they seem to be more heroines, but I would love to hear more about if, if there are.

Sarah:  If someone wanted to contact you, do you have a preferred way of being contacted, or should they go through me?

Caryn:  I can, should I just declare my email address, and just let –

Sarah:  Sure, go ahead!

Caryn:  Actually, you can, you can find me at caryn.radick@gmail –

Sarah:  All right.

Caryn:  And you could probably track me down through the Rutgers website as well.

Sarah:  All right, cool.  That’s awesome!

Caryn:  And one other thing I also wanted to say is that I’ve also become very interested in how the romance community is being documented, because there’s a lot going on.

Sarah:  Yes.

Caryn:  And a lot of it reflects other, other things that are going on in society and the world, and it’s really fascinating, and I’m a little concerned sometimes that it gets dismissed because it’s, oh, it’s just women’s writing, whatever.

Sarah:  Yeah, that still happens.  But what’s –

Caryn:  So –

Sarah:  – what’s interesting is that you see the, there’s a documentary about the romance industry and about the authors who write it –

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  – and then there’re journalists at major online publications, like Kelly Faircloth at Jezebel, who are determinedly writing about women’s writing and romance and the intersection of women who are reading and who are writing about other women.

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  And the more there are people talking about it in a way that is not dismissive and not condescending, I think that generally elevates the discussion about the genre in the larger world a little bit at a time.  So each time something legit shows up, the tone of how romance is discussed gets a little bit better each time, just a little.  And there’s still, like, the, oh!  It’s Fabio and hair –

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and bodices and boobs, and then there’s sex, teeheehee, there’s still a lot of that, but –

Caryn:  Right

Sarah:  Because of the ability of the romance community to also document itself, we can create our own histories of how the genre works, and a lot of people do pay attention to how it’s changed in the past five or ten or thirty or forty years.

Caryn:  Right.  And, and just the issue of how, fifty years from now, when somebody wants to know about, you know, how did self-publishing become a thing?  Will they, to make sure that it points to the fact that romance writers took it on as a way to get there needs met when they couldn’t publish through traditional channels –

Sarah:  Yep.

Caryn:  – and it’s really fascinating, so I’m very excited to be exploring this area.

Sarah:  It is pretty cool.  One of my favorite things about the romance industry is that it is an enormous community of entrepreneurs assisting other entrepreneurs in a, in very different types of paths to publication.  So there are people who do a lot of mentoring for self-publishing, there are people who do mentoring within different publishing houses, there’re large houses and digital-first presses and small presses, and all of, all of the community focuses on helping other people in the community figure out the best path for them.

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  And so there’s this enormous community education element that I have an, an, huge respect for.  That itself is, is documented in just the ways that people have been publishing themselves online, and not only just writing books but also writing things about their books.  Like, there’s a, an author named Rachel Aaron who did a series of blog posts about how she upped her word count per day by analyzing the data of when did she work most efficiently?  And what were the things that she did prior to writing that created a really great turnout for the three hours that she had to write?  So she took those blog posts and expanded them and turned them into a book, 2k to 10k, raising your daily word count, or I forget the exact title.  So she’s writing about writing and writing books about writing.  I mean, that’s just incredible.

Caryn:  It, it sounds, it sounds great.  I’m also thinking I probably could use a book like that because I’m still trying to figure out when, when I’m most productive and how.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Data.  Apparently data is the way to go.

Caryn:  So –

Sarah:  And there’s also an app that might help you called Rescue Time that tracks what you’re doing and then, and then assigns it a category and then once a week will tell you, okay, these how many, these are how many hours you were productive, and these are how many hours you were distracted, and here are the things that you spent the most time on, and then you can look –

Caryn:  Right.

Sarah:  – and be like, oh, well, I need to uninstall that app from my phone now –

Caryn:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – ‘cause that was, like, seven hours of time that I could have been doing with something else.

Caryn:  Hmm.

Sarah:  So there’re a lot of options now I, which I like.

Thank you again!  This is, this is really cool.  I really appreciate it.

Caryn:  Well, well, thank you.  I’m glad that I was able to, to speak on your podcast, and I’d absolutely be very happy to answer any more questions or, or have further discussions.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s episode.  I want to thank Caryn for taking the time to talk to me, and if you have suggestions or questions or ideas of books that feature archivists, you can email me at the podcast at sbjpodcast@gmail.com.

And if you would like to sponsor the podcast or the podcast transcript, please email me.  You can email me at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or Sarah – that’s Sarah with an H – at smartbitchestrashybooks.com.  Either way, I like when you email me, so feel free.

This podcast was brought to you by InterMix, publisher of You’ll Be Mine, a new Green Mountain novella by New York Times bestselling author Marie Force.  Download it on October 20th.

Our music each week is provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is the Peatbog Faeries.  This track is called “Spiders.”  You can find this album, Blackhouse, at Amazon or iTunes or wherever you like to buy your music.

Caryn emailed me a few more links, which I will include in the show notes, but I also wanted to say a few words here.  She says, as far as a good place for people to get started, I looked at the Society of American Archivists site and they have a “Finding and Evaluating Archives” page, which I will link to.  And the ArchiveGrid in particular is good for finding local resources because it lets you search by state.  If you have archives that you would like to spread the word about that you found useful, you can absolutely email me.  Do you need the email address again?  I bet you do, ‘cause I’m going to give it to you.  It’s sbjpodcast@gmail.com or, if you feel like typing more letters, sarah@smartbitchestrashybooks.com.

In the meantime, on behalf of Caryn and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[whirling music]