The Story of the Stuff, a web documentary by Ashley R. Maynor, went live on April 16 at www.thestoryofthestuff.com. Consisting of brief videos and essays reflecting on tragedies such as the shootings at Virginia Tech and the bonfire disaster at Texas A&M, it primarily follows four Newtown residents who took on the task of dealing with the enormous physical outpourings of sympathy that came to Newtown following 12/14. Her interviews with former town assessor Chris Kelsey, former C.H. Booth librarian Andrea Zimmermann, local artist Ross MacDonald, and Newtown resident Yolie Moreno track the processing of “the stuff,” three, six, nine, and twelve months after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The Story of the Stuff is the filmmaker’s search for the answer to a question any community that has suffered an unimaginable tragedy faces: What do those who send teddy bears, toys, flowers, artwork, quilts, banners, letters — and more — hope to do through their actions?

The release date of The Story of the Stuff was significant to the filmmaker, marking the eighth anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., when 32 students and teachers were gunned down. On April 16, 2007, Ms Maynor and her husband were living in Blacksburg. She was the general manager for a small theater adjacent to the Virginia Tech campus. Her husband, a film making instructor at the college, was teaching in a classroom there. Although she was able to find out relatively quickly that he was safe, the sounds and scents of that day have lingered with Ms Maynor.

“I could hear the police on their megaphones telling people to lock their doors,” she said. She recalls the smell of popcorn more than anything else about the moment when she realized what was happening on the campus.

It may be subconscious, Ms Maynor told The Newtown Bee in a phone interview on April 16, but she cannot remember the last time since that day that she has ever had movie theater popcorn. What she does know is that movie theaters or enclosed spaces are not comfortable places for her, anymore.

It was years, she said, before she could bring herself to visit the memorial on the quad of Virginia Tech, even though she spent the following four years as a visiting assistant teacher and adjunct professor.

Ms Maynor is currently assistant professor and digital humanities librarian at the University of Tennessee Libraries in Knoxville, Tenn.

Originally intended as a means of exploring the archives of Virginia Tech from April 16, 2007, she felt compelled to change the focus after Newtown’s own tragedy unfolded.

The Story of the Stuff depicts the challenges, emotionally and logistically, that Newtown encountered post 12/14, when faced with tractor trailers filled with paper snowflakes, tens of thousands of stuffed animals, toys, school and art supplies, artwork, trees, plants, flowers, and half a million pieces of mail from around the world.

Her conversations with archivists at Virginia Tech and at Texas A&M had given her insight into two strategies used to process huge amounts of items left at memorials following those tragedies.

“The archivist at Virginia Tech estimated that Newtown received at least nine times as many items after Sandy Hook as Virginia Tech had received,” Ms Maynor said. She became curious as to how Newtown would deal with this unimaginable torrent of items of every ilk.

The project was also a way for her to work through her own grief and memories of the incident at Virginia Tech, she admitted.

“I’m still not through it. Like Newtown, Blacksburg is very small. All of us knew someone,” she said.

An Ancient Practice

In approaching her project, Ms Maynor made two decisions about the documentary immediately. One was that she would not use photographs of any of the 12/14 victims in the documentary, knowing how painful it is for her to see the faces of those who died at Virginia Tech. The other was that she would wait 100 days before she visited Newtown. She understood, she said, “the bizarre presence of the stream of media” that would be haunting the town.

One of the biggest differences she saw in the stuff sent to Newtown was the quantity of plush animals.

“Virginia Tech did not get even hundreds of teddy bears. We did not get bikes, brand new toys, or school supplies,” she said. But there were similarities. “We got a lot of mails and books, and a lot of music. We got the quilts, banners, and paper cranes that seem to be ubiquitous to this kind of tragedy,” she said.

As she witnessed Newtown’s “stuff” and spoke with her four main subjects, Ms Maynor was impressed with the determination and sensitivity of each one’s approach to preserving, archiving, and even letting go.

In one video clip, Ms Zimmermann confronts the question of how much to save as she sorts through boxes of artwork and letters at the library.

“You think of the person who put the thought behind it,” she says, later emphasizing, as did Ms Moreno, that everything had been read by at least one volunteer “and appreciated.”

“Every piece is somebody’s love and care,” says Ms Moreno, pondering who these senders were, and why they did it. She agonizes, in a later video, about artwork still in a box in the 80,000 square-foot warehouse commandeered by Mr Kelsey to store the overflow. Should she take it home and photograph it, or is it time to let it go?

“The stuff became sacred by the very fact that it had been sent here,” Ms Maynor comments in the video. Unclaimed items and things broken down by exposure to weather would actually be incinerated and declared “sacred soil,” as 2013 came to a close.

The four Newtown residents who accepted the responsibility of collecting, documenting, and disseminating Newtown’s gifts often found themselves, as have others charged with that responsibility elsewhere, locked in an internal struggle to do the right thing, respectfully.

“As an archivist,” Ms Maynor said, “I know you can’t save everything forever. We have to be a little Zen about it. There is no permanence.”

Memorials have been a human reaction to tragedy for millennia, Ms Maynor learned, and people tend to ascribe value and meaning to the objects left behind.

It is difficult to say if the gifts are intended to offer solace to the recipients or to the senders, Ms Maynor said.

“They’re both, and sometimes they are neither. I think the more bizarre [the item sent], the more it is meant to comfort the sender. But on another level, those are so personal and beautiful, and are, I think, a representation of the desire to offer comfort.

“But the truth is, no matter how many teddy bears are sent, it does not undo the violence,” she said.

The negative impact of thousands upon thousands of comfort gifts is clear to Ms Maynor.

“It creates so much work. I don’t think senders intend that, but it is the baggage that comes with it,” she said.

“The kinds of films I make are essay films, and often end up asking more questions than they answer,” she later said, and The Story of the Stuff is no different. Why people feel compelled to create memorials in response to tragedy, write letters, send cards and artwork remains mostly a mystery to the filmmaker.

“It’s kind of an impossible question, why we grieve the way we do,” she mused, reiterating that marking the place of a significant event is an ancient practice.

“The documentary is my way of trying to make sense of why these things happen and continue to happen. I do want to find out if these senders are people who do this regularly,” she said, and may consider a follow up documentary to explore that aspect of her question. Following the story of how Newtown chose to handle the influx of love and compassion was more important for this documentary, she said.

The documentary, as it probes Newtown’s processing of the “stuff” is of interest anthropologically, and reveals the commonalities and disparities of the phenomena of tragedy-induced paraphernalia, as well as the “stuff” in people’s hearts and minds.

“I would love for this documentary to have an impact on mainstream and 24/7 news outlets, for them to think of their responsibility and the role they may play in helping people send stuff that could become a burden,” said Ms Maynor. “And I hope it helps folks that have been through this, to explore the tragedy they’ve experienced, without reawakening grief, in a way that is healing.”

The Story of the Stuff can be viewed at www.thestoryofthestuff.com. Links to Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as a link to the mailing list, can be found at the end of the production.