Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Caverns of Memory: Erin McBrien’s Archival Journey

• Natalie Zett • Season 3 • Episode 97

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In today's episode, I speak with Erin McBrien, Interim Curator at the Upper Midwest Literary Archives (University of Minnesota), to explore the fascinating world behind preserving our collective stories.

Highlights:

  • Step inside a real-life treasure vault: 80 feet underground in limestone caverns(!) where priceless historical materials are preserved
  • From famous horror magazines to immigrant stories: Erin shares her path from South Dakota to becoming the guardian of Midwestern literary history
  • Learn why preserving "ordinary" people's stories matters just as much as famous authors
  • Discover how my research for both my family and the other people of the Eastland will find a permanent, accessible home at UMLA
  • Explore the challenges of preserving digital history in an AI age (and why that matters to all of us)
  • Find out why you don't need to be a scholar to access these amazing collections - they're for everyone!

Fun Facts:

  • The archive is housed in underground caverns with perfect temperature and humidity control
  • Erin worked with materials from Forrest Ackerman, the legendary founder of Famous Monsters magazine (I had a total fan moment about this!)
  • The collections include everything from handwritten letters to protest materials to adoption records
  • Every piece of history they preserve becomes publicly accessible - no gatekeeping here

Quote of the Episode: "There is no point to us saving this if people do not engage with it." - Erin McBrien

Whether you're a history buff, writer, researcher, or just curious about the stories that shape our communities, this episode offers a glimpse into how we ensure important histories aren't lost to time.

Links:

Natalie Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well, and we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to Flower in the River podcast. As you know, I've often championed the importance of incredible institutions, libraries and museums, mostly in Chicago, because that's where the Eastland disaster took place. The importance of these types of institutions is that they can do what I, as an individual, cannot do. They can safeguard and preserve these fragile pieces of history, as well as the research behind them. Some places are simply better equipped to preserve and share history in ways that truly serve the public good. I've worked on this podcast for the last year and a half, uncovering hundreds, maybe more, of untold and undertold stories, and as I've done this, I've realized that, beyond preservation, a bigger goal revealed itself, and that was to make sure these materials and information are accessible to anyone who wants to learn about the lives touched by the Eastland disaster. While Chicago was ground zero for this tragedy, as we've learned, its impact was huge and it went way beyond the city limits, and indeed it stretched across the globe. I would have never known that had I not done the deeper dive into the history of the people whose lives were changed forever by the Eastland disaster. As I've been wondering now what to do with this mountain, or several mountains of information that I now have, a series of very fortunate synchronistic events has led me to wait for it. My own backyard that would be Minnesota, not Chicago right.

Natalie Zett:

And today, yes, I want to introduce you to this wonderful institution right here in Minnesota, and I've only recently discovered and learned about them, and I've started working with the Upper Midwest Literary Archives at the University of Minnesota. And today I have a special treat for all of us. I have a guest, a living one this time, which is a rarity for the Flower in the River podcast. But today I want you to meet Aaron McBrien, the interim curator at the Upper Midwest Literary Archives at the University of Minnesota. Erin, it's great to see you again and thank you for joining us, and I was hoping you could start by just introducing your wonderful organization to our audience, which is Global, and then talk about your own journey. How did you end up sitting where you are now?

Erin McBrien:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it and I'm super happy to be on here. So, beginning with our organization, the Upper Midwest Literary Archives is one of the special collections within the University of Minnesota Libraries. The University of Minnesota is a public university, a research institution, I believe one of the biggest public universities in the country, and we at the special collections collect on a number of different subjects across our various scopes, and my particular scope is literature of the Upper Midwest, and this is specifically dedicated to the multifaceted creative and literary history of creations books, poems, creative nonfiction, interpretations, different types of journalism, anything to do with writing and storytelling that is about or coming out of the quote-unquote upper Midwest.

Erin McBrien:

And the formal definition of the upper Midwest is South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and then sometimes Michigan, but I am very interested in trying to champion the Midwest as a whole. We have a lot of really incredible institutions that are collecting and preserving creative works that come out of the coasts and we don't have a lot of those institutions collecting and preserving things that come out of the Midwest as a whole. So the combination of you being in Minnesota and the work that you are doing, its impetus focusing in Illinois, is a really incredible synergy of those different things for its place in our collection. We're very excited about it. Some of the things that we do, our collection we're very excited about it.

Erin McBrien:

Some of the things that we do. Our primary purpose is to collect, preserve and make accessible all of these different literary papers, from the works and rough drafts of different authors to photographs and journals and film and the odd little 3D object every so often of many different writers and poets across many different styles and genres, all coming from the Midwest, and we champion them and make things available to people. People can make appointments to come see things in the reading room, access things, go through different papers for different research or curiosity or learning about their literary history, and it's very exciting. A little bit about me, this is one of those careers that is like not in little books for children.

Natalie Zett:

So tell us whatever you want to share about how did you get to where you are?

Erin McBrien:

Absolutely. It's one of those things that, like you, don't necessarily know about until all of a sudden you're kind of like mugged by the discovery of it, and I quote you that's a great quote mugged by the discovery Love.

Natalie Zett:

It Continue please.

Erin McBrien:

I initially went to school for writing and publishing always been a great lover of books and storytelling and I just realized it wasn't for me where I was like I don't really want to work on this side of publishing. I don't really want to work on this side of publishing. I don't really want to do that, even though I love this thing. The more I'm learning about it, the more I see that it is not compatible with me. And I started working for a couple of different nonprofits, particularly with the Iowa Youth Writing Project in Iowa City, which is a wonderful institution, and I was working with the Iowa City Public Library as a volunteer. And the more I learned about libraries and the more that I learned about this kind of space for sharing resources to everyone and anyone, regardless of financial status, was it really spoke to me and I felt really, really strongly about it. I went to grad school for a master's in library science. I did a lot of different things. I worked for a couple of different public libraries. While I was a student I did an internship with the Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center, which was really incredible, and actually that internship was with literary papers and was specifically with the enormous correspondence collection of a particular literary agent, forrest J Ackerman, and that was really really fascinating. And then I left Syracuse in June of 2020, and I moved to Minneapolis. I have family here and I really wanted to go back to the Midwest.

Erin McBrien:

I was very unhappy in upstate New York for a lot of different reasons, but I was looking around and scrambling to apply to anything.

Erin McBrien:

There was a hiring freeze in a lot of libraries during 2020 for obvious reasons, and so I was applying everywhere, and one of the places I applied to and the place that I was hired by was the Anoka County Historical Society, and a position like the Anoka County Historical Society is what is referred to in archives and special collections as a lone arranger position, which is a joke on the lone ranger but is also extremely accurate. You are the one person working on the collections and it is like Archives Boot Camp. You do everything, you do absolutely everything, and it is exhausting and it takes a very particular person to be in that kind of position for a long time, and I was there for about a year and a half. I really enjoyed it, but I also really needed health insurance. Working with the University of Minnesota, I got a job as an assistant in their archives, and then that led me to be in a position where I could internally apply for the Upper Midwest Literary Archives curator position.

Natalie Zett:

And.

Erin McBrien:

I've just kind of been running with that for almost two years, really trying to get the collection out there, show people that we exist. Get the collection out there, show people that we exist. Previously, the curators of this collection have also been curators of two or three other collections.

Erin McBrien:

So it hasn't necessarily gotten the full dedicated attention of a curator before, which is totally understandable. When you're working with that amount of stuff, it's hard to be proactive you can really only be reactive stuff it's hard to be proactive, you can really only be reactive. And when you are proactive it is siloed into other situations, like other collections, and not necessarily on all of them. So it's been very exciting to have the opportunity to be the first dedicated curator of this, to be able to really seek things out, really think critically about what is literature? What is literary? What does that mean across mediums and genres and subject matter? What is literary research? What is research that could be done with literary collections? It's been really amazing, and so being able to talk to you and hear about the Flowers on the River podcast and all the amazing work you're doing and the archival research you're doing and how this all fits together has been really amazing.

Natalie Zett:

Thank you. And right back at you, and I was going to say you mentioned Forrest Ackerman. That can't be the same person I'm thinking of. That used to be the famous Monsters guy that founded this.

Erin McBrien:

Oh yeah, it's the same guy, absolutely the same guy.

Natalie Zett:

Oh my gosh.

Erin McBrien:

He was a literary agent for a lot of different speculative fiction authors, which was a very interesting situation because he was L Ron Hubbard's literary agent. We got to talk some more.

Natalie Zett:

Oh my God.

Erin McBrien:

Oh yeah.

Natalie Zett:

Forrest Ackerman. He introduced me his his famous Monsters magazine because I love, love, love old time horror films like from the 20s, 30s, whatever.

Erin McBrien:

Absolutely Big magazine horror lover, like like big, big name fan before he was anything else. A really fascinating guy.

Natalie Zett:

And yeah, to the point where, you know, when you look at somebody like that, you can just kind of say, oh, of course you know. But by the same token, are we benefiting from his, let's just say, single-minded focus? Yes, we are. Now, may I ask are you originally from Minnesota?

Erin McBrien:

I'm originally from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, so, like you know, a number of different connections within that like South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa sort of situation and I got a very good scholarship to Syracuse University. That's all right.

Natalie Zett:

A lot of us do our grad work? Yeah, absolutely, and as you're talking, I'm thinking this. One of the things I noticed is that how, when we start yeah, absolutely almost melded into the story and I wanted to ask you, how has this type of work? You've gone through boot camp. I think I have some idea of what you've experienced, and there's a lot to this work. That's not just performance. It's sitting there doing the nitty gritty. Oh my gosh, how do I match this up? How do I document this? And the thing that I shared with you when we initially met is how little of the Eastland disaster stories of individuals have been actually source cited. So tell me about how this is. It's a calling, but I think you have to love it, right.

Erin McBrien:

Yes, absolutely. Oh gosh, where do I even start? It's really multifaceted work there is. You can basically split it between curator work and archivist work, and in my position here at the university of minnesota, I am doing both, which is, I would say, pretty common where, like, the curator work is talking to people, working with people who donate materials, working with people who want to donate money, sometimes working with the descendants of people who donate materials, working with people who want to donate money, sometimes working with the descendants of people who made things, who want to donate things or have donated things, and you are also really doing a critical eye on stewarding the contents and the mission of the collection into the future.

Erin McBrien:

You're looking at what does our collection scope mean, like what are the things we should be collecting? What is the reality of the literary landscape of the Midwest? What does that mean right now? Where are the things that we're lacking in our collection and how can we address that as we continue forward? And so it's a lot of that big picture stewarding and shaping work and really it's a lot of people work. And then the archivist work is the logistics and the organization. It is okay, we have 30 boxes. How do we get those 30 boxes in? How do we find safe space for those 30 boxes? Do we have safe space for those 30 boxes and then going into the 30 boxes and saying, okay, do these folders have labels that actually make sense? What part of the label already on this folder can we keep and where do we need to add a little bit to it so that someone who's not in the mind of the original creator can actually understand what's in it?

Natalie Zett:

Whoa, that's good. That's good instruction, Erin, and could you, when you describe I don't want to interrupt, but I am interrupting Would you describe your space?

Erin McBrien:

Absolutely so. We are extremely fortunate at the University of Minnesota we have an incredible archival facility. So if you were to go into Elmer Anderson Library, you are going to see a building that is essentially a giant stack of rings where it has four floors and each floor is just a big ring that you're walking around the center of a big atrium and there's exhibit spaces and offices and all kinds of stuff like that. But the real thing, the real thing and the cool thing is 80 feet below in the cliff face, is our storage facility, also our initial like intake dock. The storage facility is built into the limestone of the cliff that the library is built atop. It is reinforced by prefabricated concrete slabs that were designed specifically for our facility, and it is broken into a series of big storage areas, one of which is two different floors of normal seven or eight foot tall shelves that hold boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes of material, and then, when you go through that and you go into a much larger chamber that is really where the name caverns comes from, which tends to be how we discuss it is the caverns is a space with 20-foot-tall ceilings and 20-foot-tall shelves, also full of boxes upon boxes upon boxes. And then there is also a second cavern that is about maybe twice the size of the first cavern that currently holds a bunch of books for the Minnesota Lending Library system, but those are actually getting moved out within some timeline.

Erin McBrien:

They keep moving it. Be able to put more boxes there, which is great, because in Archives and Special Collections the goal is to keep things forever, or at least as long as there are people, and because of that, space is a premium. You can't just throw things out and put in new things. That defeats the whole purpose of it. Being able to have more space that is perfectly climate controlled, perfectly, 50% humidity, 55 degrees, that is sequestered off from pests and mold, that is in this incredible space where we can keep things protected and then readily pull them and make them available in the reading room, that's really amazing. And so being able to have more of that space so that we don't have to look at the stuff we currently have and go, oh no, what do we do? And look at all the incredible stuff still being made and go, oh no, what do we do. So it's very exciting that we're going to be getting that second cavern at some point.

Natalie Zett:

Your organization here has been in place since what? 1971, according to your website. Yes, not probably on the form, but right yeah.

Erin McBrien:

And we've been in well technically, the manuscripts division. Quote unquote of which the Upper Midwest Literary Archives was originally part of, has been a bit. Yeah, it's grown, and we've been in our current library since I believe 2000. So that's a long time though.

Natalie Zett:

Yeah, to me it just sounds like just incredible, almost like heaven on earth, that you get to do this.

Natalie Zett:

And also, too, you brought up something else. You get to do this and also, too, you brought up something else. I had to have some advocacy, too, when I was doing a lot of my freelance writing, like the Park Bugle in St Paul, because it was sort of the Studs Terkel thing, the community stuff, and there was this great division between literary and then what I'm doing, and even the people of the Eastland very much immigrants, working class like me and it's just like there's a way where what I love about your vision, erin, is that there's an inclusivity and it's just like, look, it all belongs together and not this great divide that there was. That's kind of old school, too, that that's rather disappeared, but that's how it was, and I did have advocates that got me into places. But these stories of people who quote are regular folks with extraordinary stories are very, very important, and that's what I'm doing now. So I love your inclusivity. And the other question I wanted to ask you is about the strength of positioning an organization like the Upper Midwest Literary Archives.

Natalie Zett:

That is a mouthful.

Erin McBrien:

We also call it.

Natalie Zett:

UMLA. So with UMLA being located at the university as opposed to a freestanding museum or whatever, to me does it strengthen that? Tell me about what you think about that. Am I wrong about that there?

Erin McBrien:

are pros and cons to both. Yeah, where, being part of the University of Minnesota, there are a lot of much smaller organizations. You end up with a situation where either people are cycling through very quickly the way I did in terms of the scope of this kind of work like a year and a half is not long enough, but they have very little choice for that or you end up with people who are there for a much longer time because essentially they are being supported by their partner and there's I'm not trying to knock people who have that situation. That's great, but but it is a reality of you are really limiting the people who could feasibly work at your organization, when you can't pay them very well and can't give them a retirement fund or health insurance because you're so small and you only have three employees.

Natalie Zett:

I just want to interrupt you for a second, because we have an international audience and for many of these people it's like what?

Erin McBrien:

yeah, that's the reality of life here, and it makes it really difficult for people to have a certain amount of mobility because they're tied to health insurance for instance, the impetus of my leaving the Anoka Historical Society, which I I really enjoyed working in and my co-workers were really, really wonderful and the collections and the mission were really incredible. Wonderful organization turned out okay, but I got slapped with a $1,300 bill and that was more than I was paid in a month and it was one of those things where I turned to my husband who works at a small bookstore and I was like one of us has to have real insurance.

Erin McBrien:

We got to do something. I felt really bad about it, but I had to go to my director at the museum and be like I have to apply to other places and she understood. And it was just one of those.

Natalie Zett:

It's sad but our benefit that you're here. But I understand, and of course we don't have the answers for that, but you're curating literary treasures. You are John Barrowman, carol Block. Those are names that are known in Minnesota, maybe beyond.

Natalie Zett:

But what does that feel like to you? To be like I'm touching this stuff that they once touched? I mean in regard to the people of the Eastland that I've been profiling. Every so often it washes over me that I'm doing this for these people whose stories, well in all likelihood, might be lost, and sometimes that feels overwhelming. How do you feel? Is it just me feeling that overwhelmed?

Erin McBrien:

Absolutely. It's really fascinating. As I said before, I have a really deep love of literature. This is a position where this is my dream job, regardless of the practical considerations we were talking about. This is my dream job, I am so happy to be here and I'm very excited about it, and the literary collections are incredible, because the literary collections that we have are not just the creative works, but also everything that informs the creative works.

Natalie Zett:

I love that.

Erin McBrien:

Yeah, so things that are very deeply personal as well and you are really with. These collections are the writer collections. You are getting a very, very deeply intimate look at a person. It is about as close to writing alongside with someone in their own head as I think is possible. It is not that, but it is very close and you know because you have their journals and their letters and you have everything that they, you have everything and how they expressed themselves to themselves and to all the other people in their lives and to the public in their creative world.

Natalie Zett:

That's. That's mind blowing. And also, when you told me that when we first started talking, it was like you're kidding. I mean that to me, it's not just my papers here, erin, take my stuff on the Eastland. It's like this is who I am. This is how I got pulled into this. This is how I thought about this. This is messes that I made. This is all the stuff. But the other thing, too. I noticed on your website you have some lovely things that are available for download. In terms of most of my stuff here is not just paper, it's basically audio, it's MP4, mp3s, and so what are we doing? What are you doing about things like AI, things like the modern landscape of how information is created, consumed and stored? I'm just wondering.

Erin McBrien:

So we have a really amazing digital archives, we have a really amazing digital archivist and we have a digitization department.

Erin McBrien:

And in archives and special collections. There's a distinction between digitization and born digital and born digital. So digitization is things that originate as physical analog media paper, photographs, etc. And then we get a digital scan or photograph a copy of them somehow and are able to share that digital version of that physical thing. Born Digital is like the work you do and many of the writers that I am talking to right now of typing things on Word documents and making digital recordings and taking digital photos with your phone and writing digital emails. All of that is Born Digital, and so we are very fortunate to have both a digitization department and a born digital archivist to kind of give.

Erin McBrien:

And in regard to what we are doing and the amount of knowledge we have on that, I'm going to give a little bit of a scope where, for instance, we have, as a profession in archives, several thousand years of learning how to take care of paper. It's a very old profession. It is not the oldest profession, but it's up there. It's pretty old 200 to 150 years of learning how to take care of various types of film, and then we have about 50 years of learning how to take care of digital. It's a really different scope in terms of what we know about things and digital archives are rapidly and always changing and developing. Rapidly and always changing and developing. We as a profession are in many ways grappling with how do we and what facets of AI technologies do we use? We tend to be a profession, particularly in the last 25 to 30 years, a very intensely ethical we really try to be.

Erin McBrien:

There's definitely I'm not going to pretend that there aren't some deeply unethical historical practices and we are really trying to move forward in a better direction and so taking into account what are the environmental and legal impacts of AI? What is a way in which we can do this and not take away jobs from people? What is a way we can do this and not exploit other people's work? What is a way we can do this and not contribute to the harm on our planet? And so we will see what happens with that. I think there's going to be some really advanced changes in the next 10, 15 years, and we will probably be one of the slower adopters, because we never have that much money. We can't move as fast as a for-profit corporate kind of thing or a small creator, because we are an enormous institution, and so we will be slow. But we will also be trying to adopt what is the very best that this technology can do, and I would say that's where we're at at that.

Natalie Zett:

I think that's enlightening, but also it's realistic too. It's basically, this is where we all are. It's new to us, and I use quite a bit of it in my creations, like creating films, but I always say this was created by Sora. Then I match it with a film that's from, say, the Wikimedia Commons. This is public domain, so I always try to do that. But, like you, I have been really disturbed Once you go deep. Often things are done that it's like no-transcript. I work for one too, and I have found, working for the government, that people really do care.

Erin McBrien:

Yeah.

Erin McBrien:

And that is something where, like everyone or at the very least, like 99%, because you can always find someone where you're like what are you doing here? 99% of the people who are currently working in libraries, archives, special collections, museums, all these different places we really viscerally care about protecting our shared history as human beings, about being more expansive and more inclusive, about what that history looks like and who that history encompasses, that that history should encompass everyone and not a narrow ruling, unspoken ruling class. And with talking about ethics, ethics in archives is deeply important. We are carrying really highly personal and sensitive information on a organizational and a personal level. That is, our shared history and the complexities that is being an individual and the complexities of of encountering other people's experiences and how they clash with your own experience.

Erin McBrien:

These are all things that are are really powerfully ethical considerations, and we're people and we screw up sometimes, but also always trying to do our best and learn more about how we cannot screw up in the same way in the future, make some new screw ups for God. Exactly screw up in a different way.

Natalie Zett:

That's okay. I always say genealogy is basically one nonstop course correction, because all it takes is that one document to like oh there goes my whole line of people that I thought I was related to and you have to be willing to just say I'm wrong. And what I like about what you're saying is not just the expansiveness, but you're able to formulate what this looks like and be realistic. And yet there's a path, and yet there's a way to continue going onward. So I think it really has probably changed you, probably more than what you realize. I do see this type of work as a genealogist, historian, archivist, whatever, they're very similar as a calling.

Erin McBrien:

Yeah.

Natalie Zett:

Nobody in their right mind would do this if they didn't.

Natalie Zett:

No no Mind, you know, I was talking to Krista Cowan, the barefoot genealogy. She's wonderful and she was just saying it takes a different type of person and she was being genteel about it. But she's talking about people who want to get to the truth of really what happened and then basically taking your biases, throwing them away and it's like I have to report what I'm finding here folks and I have to report the way that they spoke in 1915 and all the isms and stuff and we think we are so enlightened now but it's like you know, in some ways they were actually ahead of us.

Erin McBrien:

Yes, the truth. Sorry, I just like have latched onto that and I'm not sure if you've experienced this, but I'm sure you have when you are going through so many different primary resources, accounts from different people like, for instance, in our archives we have the collections of many people who were contemporaries of each other, and sometimes we have the collections of spouses and ex-spouses and and you are getting, as I said, this like very in-depth look at a person and like all the things that were were driving them and all of their motivations and what their particular truth was.

Erin McBrien:

And you, you find that in the specifically in the realm of human emotional experience and human memory, the truth is somewhere in the middle, that it is coming through their perspective and is coming through their biases and it's coming through where they were at the time and influenced by the age they were living in pretty much so yeah, that, that this is, this is what you are able to glean and you can read into it, and you can still don't live in their brain and you'll never know completely what is coming from them or what they meant by it, even with as deep a look as you can get, as in like someone's papers, you are so I've said that many times.

Natalie Zett:

Thank you for echoing that, because it's it's the most responsible thing you can do.

Erin McBrien:

Yeah, absolutely.

Natalie Zett:

And I just did a woman last week who women couldn't vote, but she and her fellow women you know labor union people were raising concerns about ships like the Eastland. They were saying these things are dangerous. Nobody listened to them and then she kept advocating and wanted people being brought to justice and she did that in a sense in a powerless position. But she really wasn't. But the thing is stories like that that need to be saved and secured I think that's what you're talking about and also to say look, we don't have everything and no one was alive in 1915. That's walking around now.

Natalie Zett:

No that would be wow, that'd be wild, that would be interesting. But you know, ai is not that good yet, so bring them back. But that's really important. And, again, it is responsible, and I think the one thing I learned as a young journalist is to get out of the way and let my subject speak. And I do that with this Eastland work too, because I'm a curator maybe one of my curator I don't know what I am, but I'm a curator.

Erin McBrien:

I would say you are, yeah, visit, is it students All?

Natalie Zett:

kinds, Tell me, tell me who's the audience for your folks.

Erin McBrien:

Absolutely so with special collections. It is genuinely anyone interested in the collections, it is everyone. We do get undergraduate students sometimes, often for assignments, when we are able to wrangle and hogtie an instructor and be like we exist, put us in your class. But more often we are getting graduate students, professors and a vast array of professional researchers and community members. So we get people who are I'm going to speak about the special collections broadly, please do. Yes, are I'm going to speak about the special collections? So we get people from all over the world who come to us and research our immigration collections. Yeah, and this could be to follow the diasporic patterns of different groups throughout history, why they left one place and went to another. What kinds of communities did they establish? How were those the same and different from the communities back home? Quote unquote.

Erin McBrien:

But also we have the social welfare archives, history archives, which is on adoption and sexual health, but all kinds of social programs and food stamps and all of these different things and we have people come in and research those all the time, ranging from scholars to practicing social workers and therapists, in the same idea of trying to learn about the mistakes and progresses of your profession in order to be better in the future. We also carry the incredible collections of many different identity and cultural groups, where we have the Treader Collection of LGBT History, which has a specific focus on the Midwest's facet of that religious identity and history and culture. We have the Givens Collection of African American Literature and Life, which collects on the arts and creations and histories of the African American and African diaspora communities. We have so many different incredible collections and the researchers that I specifically get have been as broad as genealogists discovering for the first time that an ancestor of theirs wrote a book, showing up to read their ancestress's book for the first time and being so excited about it. That was really fun.

Erin McBrien:

Sometimes people do have, say, letters to and from a child of theirs who passed away or things that are really sensitive and we do take that consideration. And we also get a pretty wide variety of incredible literary scholars and also scholars on different subjects that our writers were involved with, even outside of writing where I got an email from a Scottish doctoral student in religion who was really fascinated in Robert Bly's conception of pagan maleness that he was interested in and she was like I really want to study that. And I was like, yes, please, someone should. There's so much here, it's so fascinating. I would love a theology doctor's viewpoint on this. I would love to know. We also get really incredible scholars who are interested in the work of anti-war protests in many of our collections.

Natalie Zett:

Is this accessible? Does a person have to travel to your facility or can they do a lot of this online? How?

Erin McBrien:

does that work? We do a lot of scans via email. Definitely the best experience is visiting in person, but we're able to do a lot with scans for people. Yeah, we can't put nearly as much as I would like to up online because of copyright considerations.

Erin McBrien:

Because it's a lot of contemporary literary collections for us. So many of them are under active copyright and while they can be accessed for free at a library, like we are, they cannot be accessed for free on a library's website because that has far less control over the potential for copy and distribution, the specific law with that. But that also depends on what the donor signs off on. We got in a collection a couple months ago where the donor said I am allowing you to copy and freely distribute all of my handwritten notes on my books, if not the text for the books.

Natalie Zett:

And so.

Erin McBrien:

I'm really excited when we get to digitize those and put those up, and so we do what we can with that, but it's the reality of a modern, contemporary collection.

Natalie Zett:

I think that's awesome, and I see we're almost out of time, Boy. We could go on forever. Now I want to ask you this, Erin, in closing is there anything I've not asked you or anything you would like to say? This has just been super informative, as I'm working with you on this stuff. It's like, oh my gosh, but I really need to keep certain things in mind in terms of like okay, I want you to be able to look at this and know exactly what I was thinking, and I want it to be a stress-free experience for anybody who accesses my stuff when the time comes.

Erin McBrien:

Absolutely, you know. I think the main thing I want to reiterate is that Archives and Special Collections is a very intimidating name and is a very old type of organization that has a lot of historical privilege to it privilege to it, but also in this day and age and with the people who are currently involved. With them. They are, and particularly with a place like ours, in a public university, in a public library, we be for the people in a way that we historically were not, and part of that is, if you have the desire, not hesitating to see and get involved and reach out and access the things that you're excited about.

Erin McBrien:

You don't need to have a big research project.

Natalie Zett:

You don't need to have a reason. Yeah, Just in case you're looking right, yeah absolutely Like.

Erin McBrien:

if you want to see a thing and it sounds interesting or exciting or fun, or you're just curious, this is for you. There is no point to us saving this if people do not engage with it.

Natalie Zett:

Well, this has been beyond informative. It's inspirational. I mean inspirational meaning that I want to take more action, and I hope people that listen to this also will go to your website. I'll put a link in the show notes for what you do and I'll promote the heck out of you guys. This is now a part of what I'm doing. Absolutely Be a part of what you're doing. That's all it takes. It's like the whole thing about the spark that gets the fire, yeah, and we pick up the fire.

Natalie Zett:

I'm going to officially end this and thank you again, and some more, for your valuable time. I know you got other stuff to do, but to talk with me and I'm sure this would mean a lot to a lot of people, erin, and I want to thank you again for your time and I want to thank the listeners for joining us on this conversation Again. We've been speaking with Erin McBrien. She is the interim curator at the Upper Midwest Literary Archives at the University of Minnesota. I will put a link in the show notes so you can visit their website and make sure to check them out, because even if you don't live in Minnesota, they have a lot to offer, and also check out the resources in your own community, as mentioned. I didn't even know they existed until recently, and that's kind of embarrassing, but it just shows that there's so many resources. But sometimes we have to look right in our own backyard, right? So take it easy.

Natalie Zett:

I hope you enjoyed this and I will be back next week. Hey, that's it for this episode and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes, and for more information, please go to my website, that's wwwflowerintherivercom. Wwwflowerintherivercom. I hope you'll consider buying my book, available as audiobook, ebook, paperback and hardcover, because I still owe people money and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of 1915. Goodbye for now.

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Natalie Zett

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