When my uncle Bruce died in March 2020, my family elected me to be the steward of his unpublished writing. The decision was not a haphazard one; during the last several years of his life I had bonded with my uncle through our respective literary endeavors. Indeed, the first piece I ever published was written as a direct response to my uncle’s work. I believe my literary relationship with my uncle helped me to better understand him as an intellectual and as an author. It thus came as no surprise to me that I had been given the role of stewarding his work in the wake of his passing.
Still, inheriting my uncle’s work felt somewhat bewildering and daunting. From a technical perspective the prospect seems simple: I have the rights, so I can now go and publish his work, right? But hidden within this premise is the ethical conundrum that my uncle’s death has permanently severed him from the ongoing existence of his work. If I revise, submit, publish, or otherwise use Bruce’s writing, I do so without his direct consent. As such, I have found the role of stewarding Bruce’s work to be fraught with many ethical considerations as I strive to honor Bruce’s original wishes, intentions, and values.
In many ways this is a sticky wicket I am still learning to navigate. I have my uncle’s writings stored in a Google Drive folder that I’ve left largely untouched for the past two years or so. I’m nervous to look at the contents of that folder because I know, whatever actions I take, stewarding these words will not be simple. That Google Drive folder intimidates me like a Jenga tower: even if I touch only one small piece, I’m worried the whole thing will fall on me.
Nonetheless, I am slowly making progress. I have designed and published a chapbook of my uncle’s poems called The Chandler Letters, an undertaking made possible because of my closeness to that particular piece of writing. The process required almost no editing on my part since my uncle had slowly revised those poems to perfection over the course of a decade or more. I am glad for that. The thought of intentionally changing my uncle’s words still makes me uneasy. As for the design process, I found it to have a therapeutic quality, a sort of quiet catharsis, the dormant aftershock of grief. With every design decision—from typeface to cover design and paper selection to binding methods—I found the opportunity to be a part of my uncle’s vision for his work. At every step I would ask myself: Would Bruce be proud of this? Is this what he would have wanted?
As I’ve started down this path of posthumous stewardship, I am starting to see key principles emerging that will help guide my path going forward. I may not know what the future holds, but I am comforted to know that future decisions will be guided by the following principles:
- Go slow. A rushed decision is unlikely to be the best one.
- Do not profit. The goal of posthumous publication should be to honor the author, not to seek financial gain, however small.
- Do not add. These are the words of the original author, not the words of the steward.
- Avoid alterations. Make small changes with extreme care, and only in ways that preserve and respect the spirit of the author’s work.
The bottom line is this: although I own the rights to my uncle’s work, his work is not my own. Any and all decisions about which pieces to publish, where to publish them, and how to edit them, ought to be made with my uncle’s wishes in mind. They are his words, his spirit, his memory—not mine. I am, after all, only a steward.
I hope this short blog has been helpful. I know that when I first inherited my uncle’s work, I had a difficult time finding anyone else dealing with the same challenge. There are a few articles that address this topic from a legal perspective and a publisher’s perspective (you can find those articles at Sidebar Saturdays, Writers Weekly, Chautauqua Journal, and The Carolinian), but my hope in this blog has been to address the emotional labor and ethical responsibilities of posthumous publication. If you are in the position of stewarding the works of a loved one, I hope this has given you a place to start.
The LEAP Lab 