Francis Cooke
Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 256pp, $35
In ‘The Raw Material’, one of the essays sitting at the heart of Flora Feltham’s Bad Archive, the author takes her first lessons in weaving. ‘Weaving is a process of transformation,’ she writes, ‘of two entities morphing into a fresh, surprising third. Warp, the lengthwise threads. Weft, the crosswise threads. And then, just like that: finished cloth.’ Feltham takes us through her process as a novice weaver—meeting her teacher, working for the first time with her loom, reading Anni Albers’ writings on the craft—and the new awareness the process gives her of objects in her life, of the way that different warps and wefts create different forms and functions of materials.
We are not too far into the essay when Feltham lets us know more about what is happening outside of her class. ‘I’d been crying a lot at work recently. Tears gurgled out of me in the toilets and as I reshelved collections in the basement … It was bad archival practice but while I was underground it felt safe to weep.’ She sets out the details: her husband has been unfaithful (she writes simply that he ‘had kissed someone who wasn’t me’), and now the two of them are reckoning with what this means for their relationship. Feltham’s partner has been a presence in several of the earlier essays in the collection—she recounts the delirium and uneasiness of a multi-day party in Croatia at an earlier point in their relationship, and his handiwork crafting the seashell headphones that appear on the cover of the book at a later point—and now she details what their marriage goes through over the following months. There are recriminations, counselling, apologies, personal realisations and adjustments and, eventually, a new understanding of their relationship. Two entities, together, making a surprising third.
Bad Archive has a number of such essays where Feltham, with incredible honesty and emotional clarity, sketches out significant moments in her life and the lives of those closest to her, often through what initially appear to be innocuous angles. She visits a Meccano convention, tests the Proustian qualities of food from Newtown New World, goes to a display of Victorian studio portraits of children and their hidden mothers and, while clearly deeply fascinated and inquisitive about all of these things in and of themselves, also finds through them ways to reflect on intensely personal events and relationships. The external inquiry and the autobiographical self-reflection intersect and overlap one another, consciously reflecting the warp and weft of her weaving practice.
This self-inquiry necessarily, and skilfully, brings the reader very close to Feltham and those she cares about—her family, her partner, her friends. Her mother, in particular, is a prominent presence in the book, vividly and tenderly drawn across multiple essays. Feltham details her particular habits, her intellect and her caring for those around her (from her children to indoor spiders) but also recounts some of the hardest parts of her life, as viewed through the author’s teenage and present-day eyes. It’s a portrait that evidently springs from a huge amount of love and trust on behalf of both mother and daughter—in particular, in another of Bad Archive’s central essays, Feltham writes about her sister Charlotte, who died in infancy and her mother’s commitment to remembering her as one of her five children. Feltham reads her mother’s own writing about Charlotte in the 1991 New Zealand Pregnancy Book and her meticulous photographic archives, writing that she:
has papered the kitchen walls with photographs of her children and grandchildren. It’s her one-woman archive, her shrine, gathered from hundreds of emails and WhatsApp messages. We’re all there, me and my three brothers.
The altar of my mother’s kitchen shrine is her fridge. The best photos are printed in A4 and stuck on the door with ceremony. Among these, five small baby photos sit in a neat row, right at eye height … When people ask about these photos, [she] says I have four children, but I had five babies. She doesn’t add that she still thinks of Charlotte every day.
Many of the people who appear in the book are archivists of one sort or another, from her mother’s photography collections to her father’s Meccano to Graeme, a DOC marine bird expert cataloguing the gulls and other bird flocks of Pōneke. Feltham’s day job is as an archivist at Alexander Turnbull Library, which she discusses in the book’s opening essay, ‘On Archiving’. In her work, she comes across the diaries of nineteen-year-old Ella Watson, in love with Christchurch bricklayer Harry Marshall and sent to London in 1893 to find a more suitable husband. Much of the essay lays out the story told in Ella’s diaries—both the actual contents, as she meets potential suitors and writes coded references to her ongoing correspondence with Harry, and what Feltham imagines may sit just outside of the page:
[T]he longer I do this work, the more gravitational pull every gap exerts: a practice born of certainty has only led me further and further away from it. According to archival theory, this makes me a bad archivist. But I think I’ve just found a way to interpret what feels like an emotional, if not literal, truth—a way to open my arms and enfold all the library’s ghosts.
The story told in (and outside of) Ella Watson’s diaries is gripping, a miniature romance narrative that keeps the reader on tenterhooks until the end of Feltham’s essay. The care and fascination she has with the diaries is typical of all of the subjects she finds throughout the collection, including worm farming, landfill (you’ll never look at inner-city Wellington parks quite the same way again), and the essay that closes the collection, appropriately returning us to the question of love and romance (and the slippery, uncertain notion of romantic conclusions and certainty) at the annual conference for the Romance Writers of New Zealand. Talking to the authors and aspiring authors at the conference, and discussing her own attempts to write a romance novel, while also considering the conventions and escapism of romance writing against and alongside the complications and joys of real-life relationships, Feltham once again finds insights into the subject itself while also using it as a lens to discuss her own life and sexuality, along with a sidebar on the music of Shania Twain for good measure.
Bad Archive is driven by curiosity and emotion and is a book that in turn draws strong emotional responses from the reader. I’ve seen at least one person crying while reading it; at a writing festival, another attendee stopped me when they saw me reading the collection to say that they thought it contained one of the best evocations of being in a long-term relationship they’d ever read. It’s a book that would be hard to read without having an emotional response, as Feltham writes openly and directly about some of the more personal aspects of herself, her relationships and her family. Describing writing as ‘emotional’ is a loaded and gendered term—perhaps more likely to be used to describe the romance writers and books showcased at the RWNZ conference than a work of creative non-fiction published by a literary press, in the same way that Feltham writes that allowing emotion and uncertainty into her reading of nineteenth-century diaries makes her a ‘bad’ archivist. But it was the word I returned to as I read and thought about Bad Archive, both in terms of the writing itself and the response it drew out of myself as a reader and those I knew who had read it.
What makes the book such an engrossing—and, yes, emotional—read is what Feltham brings as a writer to her subjects, especially in the interlacing of both the external objects and people that fascinate her and the intense honesty and clarity of her writing about her own life and the lives of those closest to her that these external subjects invoke. Back in the weaving class, she tells us that:
[w]hat makes every weaver distinctive is how they approach the raw material. This is the wool and the cotton used to construct the cloth, but it’s also more abstract than that … A weaver’s craft comprises the way she draws from this well—how colours, words and volume preoccupy her mind. How do you plunge your eyes and hands into the world around you?
Bad Archive is a book that creates from its material a collection that is both intimate and expansive, inquisitive about overlooked or forgotten documents, creatures and crafts and what they mean both in their own right and what they draw out of Feltham as their observer and archivist, plunging her eyes and hands into the world around her.
FRANCIS COOKE is a Pōneke Wellington writer and a co-editor of Starling journal online.
Leave a Reply