Mary McSparran has always been captivated by stories and the ways in which they’re recorded. An assignment in college took her to the special collections reading room to explore an Alabama plantation journal and write about what she learned from it. The journal listed crops and livestock next to the names of enslaved people, and one of the entries casually and cruelly described the whipping of an enslaved woman named Caroline Ellis. “Reading that line in the journal both horrified me and convinced me that primary sources are vital not only for academic research but also for learning from the past on a personal level,” she said. That course was co-taught by an English professor and an archivist who together modeled an extremely attractive career path for McSparran. Ever since, she’s followed in their footsteps, pursuing her interests in both the written word and archives and combining them whenever she can.
McSparran, who holds an MFA in creative writing and an MLS in rare books and manuscripts, has taught literature and writing to high school, college and community classes and worked in archives at a state library, a church, a historic house museum and a public university. As the curator of manuscripts at Special Collections and University Archives, she teaches with primary sources, curates several subject areas, including literature and journalism, and preserves collections so that visitors can engage with people’s stories in tangible, meaningful ways.
What advice would you give someone just starting out in your field of expertise?
My first piece of advice is to find a way to work hands-on with rare materials, whether that be through volunteering, interning, or simply visiting libraries and archives to engage with primary source material hands-on. There are many different types of archival institutions and jobs within the special collections world, and getting as much experience as possible can help you find which direction to take. I am very grateful for the many people who gave me opportunities and mentored me as I pursued this career path.
My second piece of advice is to ask a lot of questions. The archiving world is full of unique processes as well as strange terminology and acronyms, and gaining familiarity with that world and asking questions about how things are done will serve you well. As a supervisor, I appreciate being on the receiving end of those questions. It allows me to pause, think through why things are the way they are, explain best practices, and consider potential improvements.
Who, or what, inspires you professionally?
The people represented in archival collections inspire me. I am especially passionate about finding overlooked stories or names and making them visible. Caroline Ellis is one example. When I worked at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, I came across another haunting story while processing a Tennessee Supreme Court record from 1944. A scrap of cloth, stained dark brown, fell out of the tightly rolled case file. As I skimmed the file and began creating a descriptive record, I learned that the cloth, stained with blood, had come from the dress of a murder victim named Octavia Sellers. In life, neither Octavia nor Caroline was treated with the dignity and respect she deserved. With the archival record, we can at least make it possible for people to find names like theirs and honor them.
I also love discovering vulnerable, human moments in archival collections. In an 18th-century letter in the James Robertson Papers here at Vanderbilt, I stumbled across a story that sounds as though it could have happened down on Lower Broadway this past weekend. Two friends were drinking together in a Tennessee tavern when one insulted the other, who punched him, hard. When they got sober the next day, they quickly made up. In a stroke of ironic serendipity, one of the friends was a white man named Mr. White, and the other was a Cherokee man named Yonega Adihi, which translates to White Man Killer. No matter the time period or the location, people are always complex, emotional, relatable creatures, and archival collections can help provide connections and understanding between the past and the present day.
Finally, I am inspired by my colleagues, who do incredible work to make the rare materials here at Vanderbilt more accessible. Each archival collection is unique and requires special attention, but there are standard processes that always come into play. I’m grateful for the opportunities to collaborate and improve our workflows for acquisition, processing, digitization, preservation and engagement.
What role does creativity play in your life?
I am a poet, so I tend to take a creative yet structured approach toward my activities, which is extremely helpful in an archive. In poetry, each word carries the significance not only of its literal meaning, but also of its connotation, sound, emphasis, etymology and more. All the chosen words work together to express the poem’s meaning, and each word’s characteristics carry more weight because of the ways in which they relate to the characteristics of the words around them.
Archival collections are like poems in that way. Each item in an archival collection contains its own meaning, origin story and materiality, but the collection’s items have even more significance when viewed together, as an interrelated whole. The items’ arrangement can tell us a great deal about the collection creator’s thought process, intention and approach toward those items.
I have been delighted to bring creativity into Special Collections through my Buchanan Library Fellowships, which I’ve titled “The Special Collections Laboratory: Turning Primary Sources into Poetry.” In these fellowships, students engage with rare materials and write poems inspired by those items and their experiences with them. I use the word “laboratory” in the title very intentionally. That word first appeared during medieval times to refer to spaces used for the practice of alchemy—attempts to turn base metals into gold. Now, of course, laboratories house scientific procedures. These fellowships are places where similarly significant transformations occur. Students have the opportunity to engage with and be changed by the past, and they also take items in our collections and transform them—alchemically, as it were—into poems.