Deborah Way and The Keepthings

Hello, all! You are in for a treat!

It’s my pleasure to introduce you to the lovely Deborah Way as our guest here today. She is curating a beautiful project over on Instagram called The Keepthings, and I’m betting more than a few of you will want to follow these stories. She’s also posting The Keepthings here on Substack. Honestly, it’s a marvel of a thing she is doing. I’m in love with her whole idea. But, here, I’ll hush up and let her tell you about it!

I met Rebecca Gummere without physically meeting her, the way you do when you’re a magazine editor. She’d sent an essay over the transom to one of my colleagues* at O, The Oprah Magazine. I read it as a top editor. I don’t recall marking it up much at all. It was one of those rare pieces that made me put down my pencil and just read.

We published the essay in April 2017. It was called “Cooper’s Heart.” (Oprahdaily.com republished it earlier this year; you can read it here.) It is a wondrous story, encompassing and enlarging, about life and loss and the search for meaning after loss and the human heart as both an astonishingly elegant, incomprehensibly industrious physical object and the metaphorical site of our deepest suffering and joy. 

In a nutshell, Rebecca had a baby boy who died of a literally broken heart, and seven years after his death—standing in a basement alongside a pathologist who, unbeknownst to her, had preserved the tiny organ as a teaching tool for his students—she was able to hold that heart in her hands. 

I’ll go make a cup of tea while that sinks in.

—————

In April 2021, I launched an Instagram-based literary magazine called The Keepthings, keepthing being a word I coined to mean an object you keep because it connects you to someone you cared about who died. The print version of O had closed the previous December, and I wanted to continue working with stories, but only stories that felt important and meaningful and impossible to turn away from. 

To me, as I age and understand more about life (cue Celie singing in The Color Purple: “Got my eyes though they don't see as far now / They see more 'bout how things really are now”), no stories are more important than stories of love and connection. Loving and connecting, I’m certain, is why we are here, the endgame of being human. And no stories of love and connection are more affecting than stories where death has entered the picture, where love and connection are so strong, they transcend the supposed end. 

These are the stories writers send to The Keepthings: A daughter whose adored father died when she was eight writes about a Christmas card he sent his best buddy in 1961, and the ripples of family love the card represents. A granddaughter writes about a honeymoon photo of her grandparents, people who “were modest and never wasteful.” (“Grandpa wore a uniform for work—navy pants and a light blue shirt—and he continued wearing it long after he retired. They were still good clothes.”) A son writes about the hunk of turquoise his father found on one of their strained summer visits “years before our relationship had frayed beyond repair”—and how, two summers later, his father gave him the treasure: “when I was ten and we were at the Denver airport and I was sobbing, because as much as I hated visiting him, I often found myself filled with sadness when I said goodbye.” 

So much feeling fills these 600-word stories. The writers work so hard to get them right. Not that they’re all written with the same intention. Some are salutes to a life well-lived or adversity overcome. Some are thank-yous: You saw me, and I’ll never forget. Some are an attempt to make meaning of a complex or difficult relationship. Some are rollicking joyrides. Some are bereft. Some are a way of bearing witness, testifying that this person was here and mattered. The story I published a few days before Christmas is about the plastic snowman that links a 60-year-old woman to the little brother who died when he was 6. “As the years march on,” she writes, “fewer and fewer people remember Jerry. It is my goal to keep his memory alive as long as I can.”

To date, I’ve published just over 100 stories—generally a new one each week. I chose Instagram because I love its elegance and intuitiveness, and because it’s accessible and free. Every story starts with a photo of the keepthing, followed by a title page, then the story itself, laid out so that the paragraphs follow one after another on successive screens; swiping through them is like paging through a little book.

Earlier, I referred to The Keepthings as a literary magazine. I also often call it a memoir project. But increasingly I realize that in its heart of hearts, it’s a community. Every writer of every Keepthings story has experienced death and grief and loss, and readers come to the stories having experienced those things too. Readers comment on the stories, and the writers respond. The whole endeavor has taken on a life of its own as a place of recognition and kinship where people can feel feelings—the most basic, the most profound—together. 

And of course readers and writers aren’t the only people animating this virtual community. Above all, there are the dead, who, through the things they leave behind, continue not just to live among us but to reveal things to us. A special power they have.

Rebecca Gummere knows this power. Near the end of “Cooper’s Heart,” she asks, “What is God, anyway?”

And she responds, “Here is what I can attest to: I went into a hospital basement broken in certain places and returned mended, restored. I went there thinking I knew what I knew, autopsy report in hand, and discovered I knew next to nothing at all, for here my son had been all along, teaching. And here was my answer: There is no answer. But there is love, the kind that binds us to each other in ways beyond our knowing, ways that span distance, melt time, rupture the membrane between the living and the dead.”

I can’t say it any better.  

 *Katie Arnold-Ratliff, who wrote this poignant story about a horse and a saddle for The Keepthings.