In Praise of Makeshift Finishing

The waxed linoleum of my office floor in an old wooden framed building at the University of New Brunswick was sticky. On a hot and humid summer day in July 2017, I sat, cross-legged, in shorts, for a week, sorting and re-sorting scraps of paper, fighting a growing wave of anxiety. I had organized the scraps into thirteen manila envelopes in rows on the floor. They were too many for my cheap, particle board desk. Each envelope was tanned, half the size of a sheet of paper, dated in permanent marker, and stuffed with photocopies of notes and observations, questions and analyses, ideas and theories, scenes and characters, interviews and descriptions, facts and references, and the other myriad of forms that ethnographic field notes take. I had no idea why or how to begin writing what I hoped would become a book. My second. The challenge, I thought, at the time, how to bring everything together into one thing. That was my first mistake. John McPhee (2017), the venerable father of creative non-fiction, puts it well, reflecting on his own crisis of structure on a picnic table under an ash tree in 1966. From his crisis, he turns to a discussion of structure and method as a solution to the problem that “[y]our last piece is never going to write your next one for you.” What order should the papers or the manilla envelopes go? Which should come first? What was the point? What was my argument? What literature did I want to contribute to? I had ideas. But soon learned that new books are no easier than books written. In fact, they are worse; they are unwritten. Rather than McPhee’s craft, structure, and tools, both analogue and digital, here I want to dwell on the importance of finishing, however imperfectly. I had written the notes in May 2017 during a visit to friends in the Chocó, a region of rainforest and rivers in northwestern Colombia. I had gone to the Chocó as an anthropologist between 2010 and 2012 to spend time in a village on a stretch of river populated by Afro-Colombian communities in northwest Colombia to learn how to mine gold. I took the photographs, conducted the interviews, collected the documents, filed the folders, and wrote in the notebooks and in the files on the computer. At a red plastic desk, on a sweat-soaked mattress, unable to sleep, during meetings, during interviews, during breaks while learning how to mine gold, and at other times when I could grab a moment, I wrote. In 2017, I had gone to share a manuscript of my first book, which was about a gold rush on the river. I had sat, gossiped, looked at photographs, and I had read the book aloud to friends. Later that summer, I came back to Fredericton with so many ideas. As with earlier and subsequent visits, I had much I could write about. So, for a week, the envelopes and papers and I were spread out on the floor, sticky. Stuck. Too much to write about. All unfinished. Worse, there was much more: to my left, a bookcase with a shelf of notebooks in the lower right-hand corner: journals with creamy paper and plain brown covers from a stationery shop in Ottawa, and notebooks with thin paper and brightly coloured covers from corner stores in Colombia. Each was filled with my impenetrable hand. On the top shelf, two boxes of index cards about Medellin were in a box gathering dust. My computer had files and folders of clippings and articles, maps and photographs, and enough audio …