“I will always believe that storytelling matters, that glimpses of lives different than ours—whether they come through images or stories—have the potential to change us by opening the world to us and fostering compassion. We are so much better when we listen to each other.”
—Vikki Reich
With professional baseball’s opening day pushed back from March 26 to July 23, our national pastime is getting a late start this year due to Covid-19. This vintage photo celebrates the Negro National League Champions of 1935, the Pittsburgh Crawfords. Photograph courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
On Craft
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF MEMOIR
“It was really rewarding when my 60-year-old Italian mother-in-law, who I adore, said she saw herself in parts of the book. We’re completely different, and yet, my narrative joined us.” Davon Loeb, author of the lyrical memoir The In-Betweens, addresses the idea of finding universality in individual stories and filling in the gaps of his memories without fictionalizing.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
It's important to focus your life story writing on themes that both hold real meaning for you and that you feel will resonate with your family. Last week I wrote about how to identify impactful themes for your memoir.
“THINK SPECIFIC, THINK SMALL”
“One of the most common concerns we hear from prospective clients is that first-person writing seems intimidating, maybe even overwhelming. And one of our most common responses is to break a project down into bite-size pieces,” Samantha Shubert of NYC–based Remarkable Life Memoirs advises.
Time-Sensitive Offerings
GRIEF IN THE SEASON OF COVID
The workshop series “Remembering Our Loved Ones During an Unprecedented Time” from author and grief expert Allison Gilbert continues tonight at 8pm ET with a session discussing ways to meaningfully organize your family photos; and on August 4 with a topic of clearing clutter while staying connected to heirlooms that hold stories.
LIKE HIDDEN CAPTIONS
Learn best practices for adding metadata to photos so your pictures are tagged with names, dates, and other identifying info that make it easier for you to find them when you need them (and so future generations will know who's in the pictures, too). This one-hour class is free for now ($49 value).
LIMITED FREE SHOWING
The Public Theater’s The Line, a documentary-style play, is available to watch free until August 4, 2020: Crafted from firsthand interviews with medical first responders during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Line stars Lorraine Toussaint, Alison Pill, John Ortiz and other actors who bring their stories to life. I highly recommend finding the time to view this original work by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen which has been called “immediate and urgent” and “stinging with truth.”
Lorraine Toussaint in The Line, available to view free on The Public Theater’s YouTube channel through August 4. Actors speak directly to the camera using words captured from interviews with real-life first responders to powerful effect.
Family History Finds
A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE DURING COVID
The ranks of amateur genealogists have grown during the coronavirus pandemic, and they’re boring their sheltered relatives, reports the Wall Street Journal. “Genealogy is boring. But everyone loves a good story and family history is filled with very good stories.” Personal historians suggest focusing on the scandals you unearth to drum up interest.
WRITE IT OUT
You never know how recording your own story will impact others, but you can always know that your story is important—it matters!” This short blog from RootsTech offers up ideas for journaling during hard times.
PHOTO MEMORIES
Seeing her precious family photo, damaged in Hurricane Harvey, now fully restored and framed, one woman declared that maybe “I can be restored back to new,” too. Watch students working with Adobe’s “The Future Is Yours” program return lost memories to their owners in the moving video below. (While this recording is two years old now, I am sharing (a) because it’s refreshingly inspiring to see pre-pandemic hugs and (b) because you can volunteer for the ongoing program to help others.)
First Person Stories that Resonate
BLACK AND WHITE
“When I told my father I was going to marry Jake he said, ‘If you marry that man you will never set foot in this house again.’” Mixed-race couples from four generations in Britain tell their stories.
HISTORY REMEMBERED
Only about two percent of the men and women who served in the American armed forces from 1941 to 1945 are still alive. This piece gathers stories from participants in some of World War II’s most iconic moments, including from the only surviving witness of the German surrender signing.
In the Telling
WHOSE AUTHENTICITY?
“What I know for sure is that in order to create new ways of being, Native peoples must reclaim and revalidate the truth in our stories,” Taylor Hensel writes in this piece on indigenous ways of being and the idea of narrative as power.
THE IMMEDIACY OF THE MOMENT
“The velocity of my mother’s death and my distance from it all feel like a death in brackets. There is no touch, no contact, no final conversations, no holding the hand of the dying.” Jennifer Spitzer on losing her mother to Covid-19 and reading Virginia Woolf.
UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER
“I was in Italy, having lunch with friends, and one of them brought out a volume of Borges stories—he happened to be reading them. I said, ‘Let me tell you about my travels with Borges through the highlands of Scotland,’” Jay Parini writes. His friend told him to write a book; Borges and Me: An Encounter comes out in August.
A POET TURNS HER HAND TO MEMOIR
“I took with me what I had cultivated all those years: mute avoidance of my past, silence and willed amnesia buried deep in me like a root.” Natasha Trethewey on the seven-year process of writing her mother's story in Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir.
...and a Few More Links
How to curate your family photo slideshows like a professional photo editor
Alex Trebek “has written a memoir of consummate caginess.”
Creative tributes in place of a traditional memorial service
Autobiographical writing prompt: the story of everyday things
We’re all field workers in the effort to document the (many) happenings of this year.
Local newspaper turns the spotlight on Massachusetts–based family history film company Second Avenue Video.
Maryland–based personal historian Pat McNees offers up an anti-racism reading list.
On learning to decipher her father’s past in Nazi Germany, and the nuances of family history
Short Takes
Dawn Roode’s curated roundup for the week of November 3, 2026, includes reads on visual narratives, preserving our parents’ life stories, and more in memoir.