Life Story Links: June 16, 2026
“It is not the job of future generations to make sense of our lives from the remnants of the marketplace, scrap snapshots, refurbished heirlooms, electronic bits of bits. Only we can make of it all a song of self, a story with the power of myth, to leave somewhere the best of what we were and what we learned.”
—Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir
Vintage photograph by Walter Lubken of the Hancock homestead, July 23, 1910: settler from Benson, Minnesota, Sun River project, Montana; 1999 print from the original glass negative. Records of the Bureau of Reclamation (115-JAD-224). Courtesy Picturing the Century Exhibition, National Archives.
Finding our stories
INVITATIONS TO MEMORY
“Writing prompts are really just ways of listening—to memory, to emotion, to curiosity. They remind us that there’s no single path to finding your story; there are hundreds of small openings that lead to it.”
NO TRANSLATION NEEDED
“My grandfather only spoke Lao, and I had lost the language—but with one dish, we shared so much.” Manichanh Naonady on how eating snails with her grandfather bridged their language barrier.
MOBILE RECORDING BOOTH
Inside a circa 1978 camper trailer, The Chatterbox Project founder David Balzer collects and shares joyful audio stories in Canada:
Writing our lives
MEMOIR IN THE AGE OF OVERSHARING
“From sad-fishing on Facebook to sensational Substack revelations, today’s readers don’t have to look far for confessional writing. Is this the end of autobiography?”
WRITING THE TRUTH
“Memoir required a confident retelling of experience, a way for a reader to exist inside someone else’s life for a moment. The problem, I was coming to understand, was that even though I wanted to write my life story, I had disappeared inside the stories of everyone else.”
WRITING MEMOIR IS HARD
“For any memoirist who’s struggling to write, you’re not alone, and there’s nothing wrong with you or your process if it’s taking longer than you want.”
Short takes
