Essay by Author, Darien Gee

While I was writing The Avalon Ladies Scrapbooking Society, I was putting some of my own photos together and realized that if my house were on fire and I only had time to take one thing from the house, this would be it (this, of course, is assuming everyone in the house is outside and safe). You hear that all the time, even in this digital age. It’s not the clothes, your tax return, or even the house itself. It’s the albums, the letters, the photographs, the baby blanket, the locket. The memories alone are never enough—we need these triggers, the solidity of something we can hold in our hands and feel the weight of it.

As I got to know my characters in writing Avalon, a new question arose: how do we hold on to things that are slipping away? In this day and age our memories are proving unreliable. But when we see it on the page, in an album, on the wall, we remember. The Avalon Ladies Scrapbooking Society is about connection—with ourselves, our past, our present, and our future. It’s about how we interact with the world around us. Scrapbooking (which ranges from journals, photo albums, sketch books, and so on) is really about documenting those moments. It’s the evidence that we exist and are alive in the world. It reminds us of the people who have been part of our journey. It reminds us of who we are.