A conversation between the current Picador Guest Professor Annie Wenstrup (Fairbanks Alaska) and Senthuran Varatharajah.
What happens when we refuse to treat the archive as neutral or complete? Who gets remembered, who gets recorded, and who is left outside the frame? What can be found in the relationship between official documents, family stories, objects, and embodied memory?
Rooted in Dena’ina stories and shaped by questions of inheritance, memory, and belonging, Wenstrup’s work approaches research as both a creative and critical practice.
Her poetry collection The Museum of Unnatural Histories takes these questions into an imagined museum, where objects, records, voices, and acts of interpretation become part of an ongoing struggle over how history is made.