BC novelist, poet Suzanne Matson writes her first work of nonfiction
The decluttering phenomenon in the United States, a widespread cultural counter-response to rampant consumerism, has evolved into a lucrative organization industry, a viral social media trend, and a popular mental wellness movement focused on discarding excess possessions to reduce stress and live more purposefully. Decluttering has been analyzed, critiqued, and popularized through seminal, best-selling books.
Now, Professor of English and prolific author Suzanne Matson—who has also published a new book of poetry this month—has added a new narrative perspective to the literary canon with her first nonfiction book, Winnowing. It is not a “how-to,” as she makes clear, but a personal, reflective account of her process sorting through a lifetime of possessions.
On her website, she describes Winnowing as “a book about how we desire, acquire, live with, manage, and get rid of our ‘stuff,’ and what that process does to our quality of life, our psyche, and the environment.”
Winnowing examines our personal, cultural, and environmental relationship with material objects. Matson shares her experience tackling items accumulated over some three decades in the home where she and her husband raised their three now-adult sons. As she sorted through closets, cabinets, bureaus, the basement, and other storage sites, her intentional winnowing included donating, discarding, and recycling, as well as holding onto objects with particular significance.
The title is apt, Matson explains early in the book: “The word ‘winnow’ means air moving through grain to separate the heavier kernels from the lighter chaff. It is a sorting action to keep what nourishes while letting what is worthless blow away.”
Rather than a celebration or condemnation of material goods, notes the book’s publisher (Duke University Press), “Winnowing is a meditation on the personal and universal struggles and rewards of separating the chaff from the grain.”
Part of the publisher’s “Practices” series—on activities or pursuits which help us understand ourselves and the world—the book evolved after Matson downsized her mother’s possessions prior to a transition to assisted living, which she recounted in a 2019 Boston Globe Magazine essay.
Upon discovering the “Practices” series, Matson said in a recent interview, “I loved the notion of writing about a practice that enlarged our understanding of both the self and the world. When I landed on the idea of writing about our charged relationship to material objects—desiring them, dealing with their accumulation, and discerning how and when to part with them—it struck me as a good fit with this nonfiction series that was meant to be both personal and public.”
Matson wrote the book as a series of reflective chapters on the complexities of ownership, “using stories about activating this in my own life,” and intersperses her 15-day Winnowing Log. “It was never meant to be a ‘how-to,’” she explained.
In addition to her meditations on simplicity and letting go, she incorporates the writings of philosophers and teachings in Buddhism and Christianity to underscore the impermanence of possessions and examines the environmental cost of mass production and disposal.
"There are things we need, things we want, and things we are attached to because they are conduits to other places, people, and times through the associations they hold. Each of these factors generates its own type of magnetic field around objects.”
Her book dedication—“For my family, in all its generations”—is fitting, as she writes of “the stream of objects left behind by three grown boys,” and the task she and her husband faced after the death of two sets of parents: “to empty two houses that had been filled with the belongings of those family lives.”
Matson also writes of her attachment to inherited collections of mother’s mementos: “Her past comes alive for me in these tactile objects.” And though she has long parted with her mother’s well-used typewriter—now retained in her “mental museum of loved things”—she hung onto her dentures (for now).
As for Matson’s personal artifacts, and those of her children, winnowing necessitates “a curatorial process of choosing what gets to stay,” Matson writes, as “we are all our own memory keepers, tending and sorting the richly imbued objects in our care.”
She acknowledges her appreciation of and weakness for well-designed handbags and, in turn, the difficulty in negotiating our relationships to the material world. “There are things we need, things we want, and things we are attached to because they are conduits to other places, people, and times through the associations they hold,” she explains in the book. “Each of these factors generates its own type of magnetic field around objects.”
Matson’s thoughtful approach “began with the idea of lightness, of feeling freedom and enjoyment.” That goal, she writes, was the guiding light of her book as she set out to physically, mentally, and spiritually lighten her life while reflecting on the tethers that make winnowing so hard.
“It’s not just about the aesthetic or spiritual satisfaction of unweighting,” Matson writes. “It’s about shifting a whole mindset away from getting and owning, as well as loosening my grasp on (at least some of) the many possessions that speak to me through memory and attachment.”
Matson hopes readers enjoy the stories and bits of memoir and find them useful corollaries to stages of their own lives—and that Winnowing feels more like a companion than a guide.
“I am not suggesting that my own house is now winnowed.” she said. “From the beginning I recognized it as an ongoing process, a way of being in touch with my own stories, legacies, and priorities, and not a finite checklist of tasks to be accomplished.
“I’ve come to peace with the idea that balancing the urge to acquire and divest is part of life’s long work,” she writes—and notes that she came to enjoy the process of paring down and lightening her family’s communal load.
“If we’re ever really ‘done,’ then we’re no longer living our lives,” Matson said. “As I say in the introduction, I’d much rather be ‘in-process’ than ‘over.’ As soon as a closet or drawer is clear, new things arrive to refill it.”
“I want some stuff around me,” she writes in the epilogue. “Life is a great journey, and I need to bring a bag.”