Excavating Memories

[00:00:00] Paula: Welcome to “TesseLeads” with your host, Tesse Akpeki, and your co host, me, Paula Okonneh. “TesseLeads” is a safe, sensitive, and supportive place and space to share, to hear, and to tell your stories and experiences. Tesse and I get super curious about the dilemmas that we all face. And we love to find out and hear from you how they shape the future and the journeys that we are all on. Today, we have an amazing guest and very inspirational guest. Her name is Elizabeth Mosier. Let me tell you about her. She’s a novelist and she’s also an essayist and she has logged 1000 volunteer hours processing artifacts at the Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archaeology Lab for her latest book which is called “Excavating Memory Archaeology and Home”. That book was published in 2019. So this experience trained her to see how we construct identity and express what we value through the things we keep by choice or by accident. She’s a graduate of Brian Mars College and the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College, where she explores the complex ways our lives are entangled with objects. She writes about that. And she also teaches workshops on the role artifacts play in family, in community, or in history. And she also leads sessions with physicians on everyday objects as tools in the practice of listening, witnessing, and healing. You can get more information on her and her work at her website, which is “elizabethmosier.com”. Thank you for saying yes to being a guest on “TesseLeads”.

[00:02:18] Elizabeth: Oh, thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure to spend the morning, or my morning, your afternoon, Tesse, with both of you.

[00:02:26] Tesse: Yeah, Elizabeth, I am so overjoyed that you said yes to coming on the show. And I had the privilege to read your book, “Excavating Memory, Archaeology and Home”. I totally loved it from the first page. Maybe because I love history, maybe because I love archaeology, maybe because I love people, and maybe because I love being curious and finding out new things. A combination of all. Your book had it all. But you know what? I left looking at your book and reading your book with a deeper question and that’s a curiosity about you. What brought you on this pathway of support, of inquiry? Because it’s not easy, it’s not the easiest of things. Tell all, hold back nothing, say everything.

[00:03:17] Elizabeth: How much time do we have? That’s a good question. Because I’m not an archaeologist. I have so much respect and admiration for archaeology and archaeologists. But this project that I got involved with was something, I think, because of my love for Philadelphia and my interest in Philadelphia’s history. I volunteered as a technician at the lab just after the National Park Service in Philadelphia. Archaeologists had uncovered the foundation wall of George Washington’s house, which when I was in college, was a women’s bathroom for the national park. Like people had forgotten that it had been there. You know how things, once you tear them down, you just, people forget that they were there. So I had no past experience with this building and the dig was a very exciting event in Philadelphia. And when I took my daughters who were young, they were in middle school at the time, downtown to see the dig. It was this big hole in Independence National Park and Jed Levin, who was the head archaeologist, stood in the pit for 45 minutes in the hot sun and talked to me and my daughters about their dig and told us all kinds of interesting anecdotes. He said that they’d been digging for five weeks and they had found nothing and they were afraid that when they renovated the park, they’d scooped all the artifacts out and they, you know, never to be recovered. And then they’d found a penny from, I think he said it was 1830, which was what masons would lay a penny in the ground when they were putting a new floor in. So that’s how he knew that that floor was preserved, they were getting into the colonial part. He also made the space real for me. He told us that the bow window, which you could see the remnants of in the ground, was something that Washington had added to the house, so that he could meet people, citizens, at an equal level on, you know, equal footing, not on the throne like a king. And then he told us that that bow window where Washington stood meeting the public was what architectural art historians cite as the precedent to the Oval Office in the White House, that they’d taken that idea and brought it to the White House. What was striking to me about it as a writer and as a human being is that it was five feet from where the enslaved African named Hercules was cooking Washington’s meals. So the juxtaposition of that symbol of liberty and the symbol of enslavement is irresistible to a writer. I wanted to get to the bottom of that and to have some part in telling the story of those lives that were lost without going into it wanting to write about it per se. I wanted to be part of the recovery process. Looking at the objects, what my job as a technician, as I said, I’m not an archaeologist, they trained me, everything I know. I learned from these people, to wash, label, catalog, organize, document the lives of nine enslaved Africans, whose, I always feel like I need to say their names, Oni Judge, Moll, Austin, Richmond, Giles, Paris, Christopher Shields, and Joe Richardson. In some cases, the only evidence that they lived in Philadelphia is from that dig. So I commended the archaeologists for the work they were doing. I wanted to be part of it. And because I am a writer, I think my supervisor might have been a little suspicious of me that I would just come in and just write about it, I had to make very clear that I was in it for the long haul. I wasn’t there as a writer I was there because I was going to put my hands in dirty broken greasy water that I was, you know washing and mending, we also mended things and I ended up staying for seven years and during that period as we were documenting these objects, building a memorial, which you can see in Philadelphia. It’s on the corner of 6th and Market Streets. And it tells attempts to tell the stories of these Africans who lived in the house, using artifacts and documents and letters even if there was only one fact, that’s included in the memorial. It’s just called the President’s House Memorial. While I was there, I had the benefits of just listening to archaeologists talk and learning from them why they do what they do. And as I said, I wasn’t intending to write about it. But when Jed Levin, the head archaeologist, told my daughters, you know, gesturing to the ground, he said, “this foundation isn’t just bricks and mortar, it’s a tangible link to the people who lived in this house and a link between the enslaved and the free”. That made the hair on my arms stand up and just elevated the project for me. Made me feel kind of zealous about it and about what they do to recover these stories. It’s very similar to what a writer does. And so even though I wasn’t technically writing about it, I was sitting there engaged in a process that is very familiar to me. Tedious work of attaching things to people, thinking about meaning, all while my own mother In Arizona, so 3, 000 miles away, was descending into Alzheimer’s, and I was coping with the loss of her memory, and therefore, you know, some of the shared memories that, from my childhood, and also the loss of her, because there was a point, of course, as anyone who’s had a loved one with Alzheimer’s knows, there was a point where she forgot who I was which immediately just unsettled my sense of identity because I am her daughter. Who am I if she doesn’t remember who I am? So none of this was spoken really. I was sitting at the lab, as I said, for seven years, washing broken pieces of glass and writing little numbers and thinking, thinking about what memory has to do with archeology, what the purpose of writing is and recovering stories and telling them or writing them and passing them down. Why we keep what we keep and why we throw away what we throw away. And some of the things that I started to see as connections with my own work were, the archaeologists explained to me, especially in urban archaeology, they said the true treasure isn’t the object at all it’s the stories it tells. So they’re looking at these objects as information about people, not about just a pretty thing to put in a case. So that became sort of a, that was a paradigm shift for me. I always thought it was sort of Indiana Jones and like finding whatever the, you know, the relic. And they’re like, no, this is just people. We want to know about people. So the, whatever can help us tell the story. So that resonated with me as a writer, we construct identity through things we keep by choice and by accident. So if you look in a person’s desk drawer, you look at the way they decorate their home. A lot of it is choice about identity and the way we put that together, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally. And I started thinking about how when you spend your entire day washing and labeling things from the pretty pit, this is where all of this stuff comes from. You realize that the things that are most important to people are the things that they used and broke and threw away. Not the things that were carefully preserved in a display cabinet. So the things that we put in display cabinets might speak to our status, or people like to have things that show that they’ve arrived. That’s a different kind of identity, but if something’s broken, because it’s been used every day, that was actually important. And so I, it sort of flipped my sense of, in my own home one consequence of that is I went home and took my wedding china, out of, you know, it’s very plain China. Like, I don’t know why I was not like using it, but, you know, you bring it out on special occasions and I said to my daughters, how will you know that this was important to me unless we use it and break it? Like, so it actually had a consequence that was, I started using these plates that I had been given when I was in my twenties. And there’s been kind of brought out at Christmas and Easter every day. And if they break, they break that shows what’s important to me. If they’re scratched up that’s evidence of use. And then the other thing that they let me see is that the archaeological record is often created in a crisis when we’re, you know, moving to another country or we’re divorced and splitting our things or we lose someone and we have to clean out their place. So because it’s a crisis situation, there is necessarily emotion involved. This is not a sort of cold, scientific process of deciding what to keep and what not to keep. It’s both pragmatic and forensic, and often that’s how writing is. I never, for example know what, and I’ve written novels and essays and, you know, interviews, and I never really know what I’m writing about until I’ve done the research. I go in with a vague idea of something i’m curious about, and while I’m in there digging around, I discover that there’s something that, some truth that I’m avoiding that is really the subject, or something that I think is true but that actually isn’t true, and I find that out, you know, through research. So that is what sitting there for seven years processing archaeological artifacts helped me to see, and it allowed me, and it was a gift really, to write about the painful process of losing my mother in a way that I had been avoiding. Why would you want to write about something painful that you’re actually going through? Then you sort of suffer twice, right? But archaeology gave me a lens in, so that I could start thinking about objects as revealing something, about digging and processing artifacts as a process of recovery and repair that is similar to grief. And once I had that method and that lens, it wasn’t easier to deal with my mother’s alzheimer’s, but it gave me a way in that I am so grateful for. My book, “Excavating Memory”, has one essay that’s very specifically about that. It’s called “The Pit and the Page”, and that’s the first one I ever wrote. And I showed it to the archaeologists and I said, I want you to read this and make sure I haven’t, you know, misused the terminology or the intention of archaeology. Does this feel to you like I’m misappropriating your field for my grief? And because they’re kind, they said, you know, it was important to me that I got their approval, that they didn’t think I was using what they do in some inappropriate way. I think they were moved by it, because as I said, their work is very much about people and about relationships, and that is not what I had thought before. Obviously, Jed Levin, who inspired, the head archaeologist who inspired me to volunteer, was telling me about the tangible link. That’s what makes him get down in the ground and dig and brush things off and literally, you know, our job, my job was like separating pieces of brick from pieces of burnt bone. Like, it’s very tedious. And these people are stewards of our cultural artifacts, as well as, you know, these personal stories that mean something to us as humans. So they did understand, and they did somewhat approve. And then I started writing the other essays in the book, which were really just my using an archaeologist lens to look at the objects in my life, everything from a date book that I, this sort of was a record of my life to a friend of mine who had to bless her had like on super eight film had filmed her nine year old birthday party, which is I had remembered like it was yesterday, and then to find out that she actually had the film and I could see it and compare my memory with what was actually on film. So it was a way of looking at my own life as though I were in a, in an archaeological dig and my life was a feature. And so it did help me, you know, writing, not all writing is therapeutic. Often when I’m writing it is hard and sad, but finding that lens helped me to do what I needed to do, which was process my grief about my mother and really about myself, right? You know, I’m human too. I’m mortal. I will someday not be here anymore. What do I want to what’s my legacy? How do I want to be remembered? What is important to me that I can pass on to my children? All of those things are things that you cannot avoid thinking about when you’re in archaeology lab digging through 250 year old broken stuff and contemplating what’s important in life. And then as a writer, too, to remember that the stories in the margins, the people who often don’t have a voice, or who don’t own property, or who aren’t in the public record, you have to work to get those stories. You have to go find them. You know, I think writers are, that’s why I am a writer. I’m interested in those stories. But it’s a good reminder that there, sometimes those stories can be found, and can be told, and that it’s worth the enterprise of doing it for lots of reasons, including cultural memory, you know, and so we’re inclusive, but also so we don’t make mistakes we’ve made in the past for a variety of reasons. So does that, does that answer your question in a long writerly roundabout way?

[00:17:03] Tesse: It’s a beautiful narrative, you know, as you’re speaking, I usually think in pictures and as you’re speaking, I see a river meandering and sometimes hitting the stones. Sometimes flowing downhill, sometimes going over, and it’s hitting the rocks and it is, that’s how you’re telling this. That’s how it’s touching me. Paula.

[00:17:29] Paula: You know, she’s the poetic one. And so I sat there listening to you and saying, you know, because “TesseLeads” is a personal story, which you’re doing such a great job excellent job at. If you don’t mind, would you share with us at least one or two things that you are planning, and let me know if this is too personal, that you’re planning to leave for your children. So, you know, through grief cleaning, as you said, it’s the objects that mean something to those who are left behind or those who are still present while remembering the past. Do you have one or two things that you can share with us?

[00:18:10] Elizabeth: Big question. And yeah, of course I do. You know, I have a whole box of my writing, that’s a big part of my identity. But this process has forced me to come home. You know, I’ve cleaned out five houses in the last ten years. And dealing with those, all those objects has made me a little zealous about my own things. I’m not going to leave that to my daughters to do. They’re tired of me saying when I die, but you know, I think it’s useful to talk about death because we will all die, and I have put together a box of artifacts and I’ve said to them, everything in this box is important to me, but it might not be important to you. So you might want to get rid of these things. Give them away. But I want you to know that it’s all in the box so that you don’t have to go through the house hunting for what was important to me. Your task will be to hunt for what’s important to you. And then my part is done. I’ve done it for you. And I will try to get rid of as many things as I can, you know, so it’s not a huge organizational task. And some of the things in those boxes, the writing is everything from, you know, I have things I wrote in first grade up to like books I’ve published, you know, so it shows a journey. You know, it shows somebody who was writing from the time she was a kid who thought of herself as a writer as a kid, to pictures to certain artifacts that are important to me. And one example is, you know, one of the last times my father visited before he died, I took him to a Phillies game and we sat in two seats that one of my students, I don’t have season tickets, but one of my students did and she let me sit in her seats with my dad and it was a great memory. And now whenever I go to the Phillies, I usually go once a year before they’re winning when I can still get a seat. I sit in those same seats because I’m very much about rituals like that. So those tickets are in there. So I know exactly what seats, what date, and that’s something that my daughters may not be important at all, except that I’ve told them the story. So they’ve got the story whether or not the thing is something they need to hold on to. Objects, to me, are a way to access people I love. In my drawer, I have my father’s watch and my mother in law’s watch, so I can remember them. They still, my mother in law’s, the leather of her wristwatch still smells like her Charlie perfume. And that, you know, I can conjure her up immediately. But those, my daughters may choose to remember their grandparents in other ways and it seems to me important to have that conversation while I’m living to say, I have done this. But you may need, you know, you may for whatever reason, make sure you give my writing to Brynmore College, or keep it if you want. But the other stuff, it’s, you know, it’s up to you.

[00:20:59] Tesse: Wow. What a beautiful response to a really elegantly crafted question. I mean, or of both of you really. Cause we are kind of in this trajectory, and I’m smiling right now because it’s not often you are in a place of talking about grief and having a smile. This is actually a very new place for me to be, you know. But it’s what you’ve created Elizabeth with the kind of way you’re expressing objects, the way you’re expressing what could happen, what is possible. So in the spirit of knowing what could be possible, I’m thinking of you, objects, reimagining the future and next steps. You know, what lies ahead for you? What are the objects telling you about you and your journey ahead?

[00:21:47] Elizabeth: That’s a great question. I often when I think about my life, it often is a writing project. I think I’m a writer because it gives me an excuse to talk to people and they will answer my questions. And it gives me a sort of project. So sometimes like as with the archeology, I didn’t know it was a writing project. I just wanted to be part of the memorial project. And then it became a writing project because I found a way in to something that was personal to me. Another project that I had to put on hold during the pandemic shutdown that I’ve returned to, is telling the story of the demise of my father’s hometown. It’s this tiny little farming town across the border of Ohio and Indiana. I scattered his ashes there after he died with my daughter, my eldest daughter, and I was so upset by what had become of this town. You know, it’s one of those, you know, towns that just existed for a while because it was on a train line, and there was industry. In fact, the biggest industry is coffin making there, which is sort of ironic from a writer’s point of view. I was doing a fellowship in Indianapolis called Religion, Spirituality, and the Art, where we were creating a writing or art project based on reading Genesis together with a Rabbi. It was people from all different religions gathering to do this project. And it gave me proximity to my father’s hometown and the upset, it’s sort of symbolic of a lot of small towns in the United States. But really, I see it as a grief project. You know, it is very obvious to me every time I go back there and I interview people, I’m really just trying to access my father, who I loved. And the ethics of doing a project like this as a writer have to do with my proximity to the material. You’re sort of like a participating anthropologist. People tell me things that sometimes they shouldn’t, simply because that’s my father’s hometown, and I have a map that he drew for me. So, the main project, this is what I was doing when I was visiting our mutual friend, Marta Maretich I was resurrecting interviews that I’d done, and trying to think about how to do this work in a way that’s responsible, that tells a story of a town that where my father grew up, but never went back to, so he’s part of the exodus from these small towns that sometimes fail because the work was elsewhere. We have to tell this story with love and respect and without exposing things that people told me because I have proximity to the material that they would rather not see in print. So, that’s what I’m working through now. This is a personal story, is what a friend told me. When you’re writing memoir you’re always following yourself through the story. So it might be about my dad and about my dad’s hometown, but it’s really about me and my grief. And the demise of this town is really, you know, obviously the demise of my father, but it’s also an interesting story. So that is my current project. And as I said, just a way of working through it. At this point, you know, when I was in my 20s, this is not what I wrote about. I joke, like, if you want to talk about death, come sit by me. Like, this is like where I am, you know, now that I’m 60 a lot of water under the bridge, you know? So people who’ve seen my earlier work think, what happened to the, you know, that writer? But this is the subject matter that I have now, you know, is a lot of, it is grief and hope and love and the cultural context of the world we live in now. My sense of social justice and trying to be responsible as a writer, but also, you know, work through my feelings, which I always do on the page. This is just how I do it. I don’t think I would know how to grieve if I weren’t a writer. This is just what I do.

[00:25:45] Tesse: I love it. Oh, I love it. I wouldn’t know how to grieve if I wasn’t a writer. You know, I love classical music and one of my musicians, my favorite musician is Mozart, and Mozart’s Requiem, when his father died, and the change in gears and everything. Now you’re speaking to me, I’m remembering Mozart that had that really jolly, fast moving, you know, music and then his dad, the love of his life dies and everything gets dark. But you know, what you’ve done differently from what Mozart did is that you brought a shade of light and hope and optimism. And I love the way you’re talking about this, it’s absolutely beautiful. Paula.

[00:26:29] Paula: I echo you, because when Elizabeth speaks, there’s hope. You know, looking at death as inevitable, but also looking at it as ways that we should cherish what has gone on in the past and put stories to it. I love that so much that, you know. One thing that you suggested, I don’t know whether it was here in an earlier conversation with you, is that when we have holidays, because sometimes those are the hardest times if you’ve lost someone. We can spend some time remembering them through an object or objects and how much that object meant to that person when they were alive. You know, I think that is so helpful.

[00:27:14] Elizabeth: Absolutely. And though it’s not a national holiday, my going to the Phillies every year to watch the Phillies versus the Mets and sitting in those seats. I have invented a holiday.

[00:27:25] Paula: Yeah.

[00:27:25] Elizabeth: And it’s what I can remember my father and sit in those same seats. And, you know, as we talked about grief being kind of a spiral, I keep returning to that moment and experiencing it a little differently as I journey through the spiral of grief rather than the line that we, you know, wish it were. And it is just a, you know, it’s a way of laying pleasure over pain or joy over sadness and having them all mixed together instead of it being one thing. The both and as opposed to the either.

[00:27:58] Paula: Yes, yes.

[00:27:59] Elizabeth: So you’re welcome to celebrate the Philly’s, Philly’s versus Met Day yourselves if you’d like to. But I think it’s important that we have these personal rituals that, you know, are commemorative, you know and in a joyful way.

[00:28:15] Paula: Absolutely. And so that’s why we do “TesseLeads”. And to our listeners, we want to thank you so much for listening. And as you can see from talking here with Elizabeth Mosier, your precious stories and your lives matter. We ask you to continue to share them with us, and we also ask that you know or hope that you realize that you’re supported and encouraged and nurtured when we hear each other’s stories, because none of us is without a story. And so we ask you to head over to “Google Podcasts”, “Spotify”, or “Apple Podcasts”, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, please subscribe. And If you have found what Elizabeth has said or any of the other stories helpful, we ask that you write a raving review for us. And if you have any topics or questions that you’d like us to cover, please send us a note. And last but not least, if you’d like to be a guest on our show, “TesseLeads”, that’s this show, please head over to our newly developed site, which is “TesseLeads.com” to apply. Elizabeth, this has been awesome.

[00:29:30] Elizabeth: Thank you.

[00:29:31] Tesse: Yeah. Thank you, Elizabeth, for giving me back Tony. You know, I can reimagine him in a different way. Thank you. Love what you’re saying. Thank you.

[00:29:40] Paula: Absolutely.

[00:29:41] Elizabeth: And the gift was the chance to spend time with you in this weird little Zoom room, which feels somehow, because we’ve spent some time together, now it actually does feel like you’re right there.

[00:29:53] Paula: Yes.

[00:29:53] Elizabeth: I know you’re a ways away.

[00:29:55] Paula: Yes, this has been really good.