Working at MDAH’s Local Government as a notetaker and student of records has performed a 180 on my own caretaking behaviors, especially those towards county histories. The half-lives of our big, old books are wristwatches stuck at synchronous detail, trustful, like small animals, to the outsider, not only too old-leathery miscellaneous to positively notice, but also, their greatest of casual talents—portability, storage-happy— often abused or forgotten. Records maintenance is an office’s medicine. Unpredictability, the amounts of time we stick them in metal filings and boxes can set fire to a decade, or more; they’re named and boxed comfortingly after ‘bank’ and working with office filings is an elbow of government nursery that I have become blindingly in love with and feel terribly protective of. I work for good, brilliant, people and find a new lenience in my everyday towards community and papers, packets, and planes. I used to work in education. I finished my MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University, then, spent 1 year instructing high school students preparing for college admissions at a small, private specialized school in behavioral. I tutored students globally from a laptop and Zoom, they were prepping for hurdling admissions at Ivy Leagues and there was a pandemic demanding terrible closure, eroding great pauses in these young people’s lives. With 9 years of general teaching experience, I volunteered at Big House Books, a nonprofit organization that provides books to incarcerated people in Mississippi. I write sometimes and it’s usually about mental health, reviews, or indie literature author interviews about what they do to maintain their energy and genius. I have written two failed books and have screwed a cap over that part of my heart that bled so alarmingly for it in my 20’s. I received my BA in English from The University of Mississippi Honors College and found a Religious studies minor to be the perfect heartbeat of history and philosophy. Over the years, I’ve served as juror for a variety of scholastic writing awards. I am editor of the mental health based literature & arts magazine, Libre/H.A. We like to be friendly, write lonely yawps on the internet, cry about the state institutions, art-making that illness may, to the individual, inspire, and doctor abuse—our contributors are brave; we pay for stories that announce disability genres as rightful heirs to canon. Here’s to our books. @mrybsell / @librewrites