This week鈥檚 edition of Slow Digest is written by C21 Graduate Fellow Jamee N. Pritchard.
Grief is an ongoing process that ebbs and flows depending on the day, the month, the weather, a random song, or the unexpected encounter with my mother鈥檚 handwriting in one of her sewing journals. Last September, in my essay In the Wake of Slow Care, I wrote about sitting with her in her final hours, bearing witness to her life through story and memory. I ended with the belief that grief asks us to sit with it, to appreciate the quiet moments when we are compelled to remember, to feel, and to listen.
In the year since, those quiet moments have taken new form. They have emerged through my participation in Story Cart: Attention workshops with Symphony Swan, a Milwaukee-based artist and community archivist. In these spaces, memory is not static or fixed; it is activated through looking, through storytelling, and most recently, through listening.
At the Stills in Milwaukee workshop last weekend, we practiced what Swan described as 鈥渓istening as archive.鈥� Each participant brought an object and spent five minutes describing it. Afterwards, photographer Terrance Sims photographed those participants with their objects. What began as a simple description unfolded into something more expansive. Objects became entry points, portals into memory, emotion, and lived experiences. Stories stretched beyond the material, connecting personal histories to broader questions about why we hold on and what it means to remember. Through listening, we activated memory.
My object was one of my mother鈥檚 favorite purses: a small black leather Coach bag she purchased thirty years ago. I started carrying it a few months ago. It holds my phone, my keys, my wallet, but also something less tangible. I remember her at my age, carrying this same bag. Now I carry it as a version of myself she will never meet. The object collapses time. It brings past and present into conversation, while quietly gesturing toward a future that feels both connected and incomplete.
But as I listened to others, I began to question the role of the object itself. One participant, in describing the difficulty of letting objects, and the memories attached to them go, said, 鈥淭he memory has served its purpose.鈥� Another asked, 鈥淚f you let the object go, do you forsake the memories? Or can they be addressed in a new way?鈥�
These questions lingered with me.
The essence of Swan鈥檚 listening as archive workshop reminds me of Tina Campt鈥檚 Listening to Images. In her work, Campt invites us to think about listening not simply as hearing, but as an attunement to the quiet frequencies of everyday life, the affective, often overlooked dimensions of experience that resist traditional forms of documentation. For Campt, archives are not only visual or material; they are sonic, embodied, and felt. They reside in the subtle vibrations of memory, in the pauses, in what is carried forward through attention rather than possession.
This framework shifted how I understand what I am holding onto. Perhaps the purse is not the archive itself, but one way into it. The archive lives in the act of remembering her, in the stories I tell, in the way I listen for her presence in my own gestures and routines. Space, too, becomes archival, holding layers of time that can be accessed not through preservation, but through presence.
I still have some of my mother鈥檚 things. But I have started to let others go.
Not because they no longer matter, but because I am beginning to understand that memory does not reside in objects alone. It moves. It surfaces. It listens back.
The views, information, and opinions expressed in Slow Digest do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin鈥揗ilwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System. The Center for 21st Century Studies supports scholarly debate about, and engagement with, the pressing issues of our time.
Work Referenced:
Campt, T. (2017). Listening to Images. Duke University Press.