Life Story Links: July 11, 2023

“Words can resonate though generations for all of us. That's one reason why it’s important that we embrace them.”
—Anna Quindlen

Poster showing children creating sand sculpture — Vintage poster produced by the Work Projects Administration; image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Digital Collection. The posters were designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia between 1936 to 1943.

First person reads worth your time

‘MEMORY IS SLIPPERY’
“I am almost always the main character in my stories of my parents’ music,” Keziah Weir writes in this piece about why we become who we are, and how artistic callings shift across generations.

SLICE OF LIFE
If you’re looking for inspiration for well-crafted, compelling first person storytelling, the Modern Love column in the NYT delivers regularly. “How My Father and I Drew a New Life” is a personal essay in this vein.

MINI MONOLOGUE ON MOTHERHOOD
“The story and memory scattered down the hall, again. You lost it. Your urgent need to document paralyzes you, shames you. You want it so bad, you don’t do it.”

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE WORDS
“I was agonizing over the deep feeling that I had tried to write a very honest novel. Bracingly so…. All that honest work and I was about to be dishonest about what I looked like?”

Current books of interest

MEMOIR WITH A TWIST
Tom Brokaw’s new book, Never Give Up: A Prairie Family’s Story, “is a hybrid of memoir and history, a kind of love letter to his parents and to the hardworking people of the Plains who shared a ‘never give up’ outlook.”

TRUTH IN FICTION
Have you ever thought about using your life experiences to inform a novel rather than a memoir? Here’s a new book that can help you discover effective ways to craft fiction through personal memories.

Documenting our histories

STUNNING STITCHED MEMORIES
“Some people enjoy…[using] photography or a sketchbook to capture their travel memories. But embroidery artist Maria Zamyatina uses a needle and thread to make beautiful embroidered keepsakes of her trips.”

A FAMILY HISTORY IN LETTERS
“This is my proudest creation. An archived collection of my father’s letters to his mother during his time in the Marines. Over 100 pages of his words and his handwriting and I could not love it more.”

A STEP-BY-STEP PLAN
As a professional personal historian, I help a lot of people create tribute books to surprise loved ones. Recently I shared a primer on how people who want to go the DIY route can make their own milestone birthday tribute books.

JOURNEY THROUGH THEIR JOURNALS
“Alongside their duties as presidents, these forward-thinking leaders turned to their personal journals, recording their ideas, theories, and reflections.”

CARETAKER, VOLUNTEER ARCHIVIST
“They are our fragile, flammable legacy, and we can lay our hands on them only because of the work of people like Paul Fasana,” the librarian who was instrumental in preserving hundreds of thousands of artifacts of queer history.

IN CONVERSATION WITH A GENEALOGIST
“I have two children that we adopted at birth, and if their descendants ever put together their family trees, are they going to bypass me because I’m not a DNA relative? Or are they going to be more inclusive and do family history, not just DNA genealogy?” Listen in to this interesting conversation on LGBTQ family history:

Things we leave behind

A WAY THROUGH GRIEF
“The gift of these pictures and letters allows me to explore the memories she had but didn't think to share, and gives me the opportunity to keep learning more about her, even without her voice telling the tales.”

ROYAL DIARIES
“Tall Paul is the legacy man—the keeper of the Queen's secrets.” Could Queen Elizabeth II’s diaries ever be published?—and why her Page of the Backstairs gets to make that call.