A number of years ago a friend introduced me to a British documentary series directed by Michael Apted called “The Up Series,” which began in 1964. The premise was that the filmmakers would find a group of children from different family backgrounds and interview and observe them every seven years throughout their lives. The series is ongoing, and the participants are now 65 years old. I was transfixed by this ordinary kind of drama – just regular people growing up and growing older and growing different.

Writing the self is so tricky, so elusive, in part because we are so many selves over our lives. Writing a younger self is almost like writing someone else, only stranger. So this provocation is to gather materials that show you to yourself once every seven years. Build yourself what Virginia Woolf called “a platform of time” – a place where you can see and feel what it was like to be you at different moments in your past. She meant it as a metaphor, but let’s use it both literally and figuratively.

Claire Battershill is a writer and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Wendy M. Cecil Professorship at Victoria College. She teaches and researches in the areas of book history and print culture; Modernist and 20th-Century Literature;and interdisciplinary creative practice. She is the author of Circus (McClelland & Stewart 2014); Modernist Lives (Bloomsbury 2018); and, most recently, Women and Letterpress Printing 1920-2020: Gendered Impressions (Cambridge University Press 2022).