This is the raw and original first draft of a letter of interest I wrote for a Master's Degree program admissions application. A brain dump to answer the most nebulous of questions: why?

Cliff jumping at Dickson Dam, Alberta, summer 2004

When I walk into a people's homes I can often sense a kindred spirit. Someone here takes care of all the family lore. Often, all I can see is archives made out of credenzas and sideboards. Card catalogues stuffed into dollar-store coil notebooks. Seeds protected season after season in reused envelopes from the bank. Family trees diligently written in family bible's or typed out on pages. I know these things are here and I want to see them.

The people who do this, they are the Knowledge Keepers. I am a Knowledge Keeper.

When I was 8 years old, my Opa finally relented and gave me two of his Canon 35mm SLR cameras. His darkroom long dismantled and stored in the rafters of his woodworking shop. He showed me how to load the film, set the aperture and shutter speed. I took photos on our hiking and fishing trips. Of the dog laying on the living room floor, my lens at the end of his snoot. I took photos of my cousins and the tree house we dearly loved. But I didn't know how to see those photos once I had depressed the shutter release, and 1/100th of a second had been recorded on film.

That impermanence set something off in me for the rest of my life. It has often felt so comforting but also always felt like a low laying form of panic. An urgency to preserve and take care of those fractions of seconds of time, like they held the answers to the past, present and future.

Panic only subsided when a classmate's dad set up a small darkroom in our elementary school's basement and taught a handful of us how to process and develop black and white film. I held my breath through the whole set of steps every time. Film coiled onto a spool, chemicals poured in and sloshed about. Film strips hung on lines with clothes pegs. Then finally, fed through an enlarger, the lamp showing me the inverse of a memory, so important it was committed to both film and mind. Still more steps to get the image onto paper. I wouldn't breathe again fully until the image appeared in the pan, liquid waving across the paper and the image appearing like the tide coming in.

My family, decadents of German and Welsh farmers, didn't hold those pieces of paper as close to their heart as I did. I realized too late that not every one in the family was an archivist like me. Many, many important artifacts have been lost to time and travels in the Scheidt family. My personal archive only begins in the early 2000s, when I was old enough to hold on to binders of negatives when I moved across country from Calgary to Ottawa, then again to Toronto.

Scheidt brothers on the farm in Saskachewan c. 1925

Imagine how hard it is to be a Knowledge Keeper in a family where things can so easily be thrown out, without an inquiry as to who they belong to. Family photos from the 1800s, showing marriages in the Volga river valley in Russia, water damaged after being left in a house no one lived in after Opa passed away. Every negative of every photo my Opa ever took in his 70 years, gone shortly after he died during heart surgery.

Because of this pain, my archiving cannot be stopped.

I archive all sorts of things. Seeds from my husband's family, for vegetables originally from Japan. Plants grown in secret in Internment Camps during WWII. I save programs from film festivals, ticket stubs, shinkansen (bullet train) fair receipts, 'zines and recipes. If I could go back in time I would record and save conversations with my grandparents, my great-grandparents. I'd save the pages of writing my grandmother wrote, and keep in her room. Fiction, and short stories, and accounts of painful events from her past.

Only when I speak with other Knowledge Keepers, do I feel some kind of peace. For a moment the panic of impermanence subsides. Or when I can answer the question of "Is so-and-so a real cousin, or just a cousin?" I feel powerful. So-and-so is an actual cousin, your second cousin, once removed. When family says, "Ask Yuli" it is the highest form of praise I could wish to receive.

I don't claim to be some oracle, with all the answers. I'm just a magpie for knowledge, saving history from the present for the future. I want to meet other Keepers, and ask them where their happiness is found. To document the documentarians in our world.

STATEMENT OF INTEREST - FIRST DRAFT

A HOLE IN MY HEART 35MM WIDE