The Journal of the Unknown Founder

I’ve been working with 826DC on the design of its creative writing center, which will open in Columbia Heights in late September. The storefront for the center will be “The Museum of Unnatural History,” and it is, of course, a take-off on the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, or any museum of natural history. Its specific conceit is that it preserves and continues the work of “The Unnaturalist Society,” a group of explorers and thinkers who reject the strict constraints of the scientific method and instead employ their intuitions and imaginations to discover new worlds. This genius idea was hatched by 826DC volunteers Minh Le and Oliver Uberti. My favorite thing about their idea is the way it allows us to play around with Victorian sensibilities. That whole era is such a rich source of inspiration and ideas.

One of the ideas I had for the museum was to reproduce the journal of the founder of the Unnaturalist Society. I imagined an old leather-bound journal that, when you scrutinized the text, told a funny story about the founding of this unlikely society.

But almost as soon as I started to write the text, I ran into a problem. The idea seemed to require that we invent the character who founded the Unnaturalist Society, and that we tell his or her story through the journal. But any character we invented would inevitably stand over the museum, imprinting it, indelibly, with his or her narrative. Also, no single narrative could successfully embody the diverse qualities we wanted to reflect in the Unnaturalist Society. In short, rather than expand the world of the museum, the journal would narrow it down. Instead of adding to the fun, the journal would take away from it.

What to do? It was one of those moments that comes in every creative project, where the simple and easy idea that you’ve taken on, and that seemed obvious and clever, suddenly becomes impossible. But you press on anyway, trusting that somehow it will come together.

I finally hit upon the answer — to make the founder’s identity anonymous. In our case, the name on the “if found, please return to” label on the inside of the journal has been rendered illegible, making the identification of the journal’s author impossible. Once I had that idea, it all came together. Even the title of the exhibit — “The Journal of Unknown Founder” — just wrote itself.

I also borrowed liberally from the storyline of the founding of the Unnaturalist Society developed by Ross, another volunteer. He imagined eight leading unnaturalists converging in a small Latin American town in 1826 to begin the society’s work. Because our journal author is anonymous, he or she can be any one of the eight original founders, and because the journal only identifies three of the eight founders, he or she can really be anyone at all.

In any case, my friend Thekla brilliantly crafted the object itself from a leather-bound journal we ordered on line, and aged its pages with brewed tea, a technique that, I noticed last night, Amelie also uses to age the fake letter she writes to her downstairs neighbor. I liberally borrowed from Ross’s storyline, and Ross made excellent comments and suggestions for the text, and Eleanor, another volunteer, donated her skills as a calligrapher. (In a separate post I will tell the hair-raising story of how I got the journal into Eleanor’s hands.)

I really think the journal is going to be amazing. Hopefully visitors to the museum will come across it, flip through its pages, and be amused by what they read. I believe it will be finished on Tuesday, and I’ll try to post some pictures here that don’t give too much away. If all goes according to plan, when 826DC opens later this month in Columbia Heights, you can visit the Museum of Unnatural History and, when you are not entranced by the many other activities and exhibits, page through the journal yourself.