Needing a break from the onslaught of traumatic headlines, today I read an essay titled, “Why do we collect things?” It came from Substack in the weekly Cazadora newsletter by Elsie Morales, this one from August 27, 2025, and it resonated on myriad levels.
This piece about “things we keep” sprang from a writer who describes her newsletter as “mining creative wisdom from the lives of artists and writers we love,” including “the ways their history, habits, and processes shapes their works.”
As my Other Worldly novels protagonist Rowan Layne would say, boy howdy, because that last bit jumped off the page when I read it. Have I collected many and sundried items since childhood? You bet. Everything from antique marbles, foreign postage stamps, potted cactus, candles, slogan buttons, and yikes—books on UFOs—as a kid, to rubber stamps for paper crafting (many alien-themed), coffee mugs with fun messages and/or images, refrigerator magnets, moon-themed post cards, wine corks, and a multitude of antiques beyond marbles as an adult—to name just a few.
Have I shared some of those collections in my novels, giving Rowan various hobbies that are my hobbies? I sure have. Specifically marbles named for planets, various mugs, and numerous rubber stamp sayings. But what I perhaps didn’t realize until I read this essay was precisely how my varied collectibles have shaped my otherworldly storyline, especially my latest novel in progress, Alien Origins. Here’s why.
In this Elsie Morales essay, she states how “we know that collecting goes at least as far back as 105,000 years ago, with people in the Kalahari region of Africa collecting crystals, likely for spiritual reasons.” My OW novels suggest that extraterrestrial aliens have a different take on crystals and their various uses, including red diamonds on Mars with their laser capabilities as described in Alien Sensation. But that’s another story.
In the mid-16th century, Morales noted that “cabinets of curiosities” served as the precursor to museums, and also marked the beginning of collections as personal hobbies. These collected “curiosities,” Morales explained, contained a mix of items produced by humans such as jewelry, ancient weapons, and carvings, as well as scientific instruments like sundials and globes.
As Morales said, “These collections were early experiments in how to display your identity through stuff.”
The hobby of collecting stuff grew during the manufactured goods boom of the 19th century to include stamps, coins, seashells and books. “Such that today,” said Morales, “collecting belongs to everyone. Some collections are rare and valuable, but most are intensely personal. The things we keep and arrange become a part of our environment, identity, and how we communicate with the world, both as individuals and as societies. Collecting is a deeply meaning-making activity: it weaves memoirs and longing into the everyday spaces we inhabit.”
Could it be those antique marbles named for planets in my childhood ultimately manifested as a desire to visit other planets in our solar system, or at least to learn more about them in order to have Rowan Layne voyage into space? Yet the most intriguing message coming from this essay on things we collect was, “Objects connect us to the past. Even the most mundane object (an old concert ticket, a pencil eraser) matters if it tells a story or sparks a memory.”
Which brings me to Alien Origins, where Rowan is busy discovering how very much she is connected to the past, and perhaps why she can relate to it on a level that far surpasses any antiques I might have collected as both a child and an adult. Will Rowan Layne’s true identity be revealed through the “stuff” that she’s surrounded herself with since childhood? Only a bit of time travel into her past will tell.