The Bryn Mawr College Backsmoker Diaries at first glance are unassuming, unlined composition notebooks with the dates of its use inscribed on the cover, alongside the dorm it was located within for students to write in it. These diaries sit in archival boxes, mostly undisturbed in the back rooms of the Bryn Mawr Special Collections offices. It is rare that a researcher wants to look at these materials over the collections from famous alumni and papers from the most pivotal college administrations—the diaries are unassuming at first glance, unprofessional, angsty, and full of crass sketches when compared to the pristine letters in neat, 19th-century handwriting that makes up other swaths of the collection. In some ways, these researchers are right in their assessments: the journals are indeed filled with students using this communal space to remark to their peers on their daily endeavors on campus, to vent their frustrations, or to make each other laugh with games and caricatures. The journals can be at times petty and juvenile as students express their emotions in one of the few spaces they are allowed outside of public purview. This initial assessment and writing-off of the material, however, is reductive of the complicated systems of communication that these students have created. Each student signs their entry with a pseudonym, and often revels in the ways in which they make their entries unique, using distinctive pens or markers to make their marks fluorescent against the page or employing elaborate and flowy handwriting to distinguish themselves. Students respond to each other’s entries and take care to dutifully note the date and/or time of their entries for the benefit of future readers, whether those be the individual responding to their entry an hour later, or a student reading through these diaries almost four decades in the future. Students participating in these diaries often look at themselves as members of an outsider culture on campus, and often revel in the joy that the subcultures on campus bring them—whether it be the queer community on campus, groups of punks, or those that practice wiccan rituals. At the very heart of the diaries are the ways in which they capture a thin cross section of the bright individuality of students’ day-to-day lives; in opening up a diary and reading the first page, one is thrown immediately into the midst of arguments started in an earlier volume and are suddenly privy to a flurry of inside jokes and secrets held among the student body. The reader witnesses a ghostly record of collaborative student activities, as games of hangman, quote-guessing games, and “exquisite corpse”-style drawings are displayed between entries detailing love, loss, and academic stress.

 The Backsmoker Diaries detail the ways in which student life on Bryn Mawr’s campus is at the same time ephemeral and eternal, as otherwise uncapturable emotions, thoughts, and events are recorded. History books don’t detail the personal highs and lows of student life— instead delegating this material as background noise to the larger socio-political landscape—but the accounts in these diaries show a cross-section of student life that still rings true to not only contemporary student experiences, but also universal human experiences of anxiety, loneliness, and community. One can’t help but feel part of a larger lineage when reading these diaries, watching the ways in which one’s own experiences have been pressed between the pages, but also the ways in which these experiences have shifted and changed over time. One is suddenly aware of the ways in which they are themselves forging new paths, away from the history recorded before them, just as the students of the 80s and 90s were doing in their historical moments as well. The Backsmoker Diaries are sites of discontent, of students lashing out against the system and the state of the world, even if it never left the space between the front and back covers of a marble notebook. Students rage against the patriarchy, against the administration, against each other, and against the world at large, pushing for change if only to see it reflected in their fellow readers if no one else. There is a sense of the avant-garde that rings pervasively through these diaries as students grapple with their lineage as members of the college community, trying to harness the essence of their community by celebrating its virtues while still working tirelessly to upend the systems that might keep them confined from goals and ideals. The art that these students created is intensely reactionary to their surroundings, pushing boundaries from their seats in the common rooms across both campus and across time itself.