Memories Matter
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Life Story Links: November 24, 2020
Conversations on memoir, memories of Thanksgiving, new courses of note, plus a diverse array of stories about memory-keeping and life story preservation.
“We all want to get to the masterpieces of our writing lives by the shortest route possible. Trouble is, the shortest route possible is always the road ahead.”
—Bill Roorbach
On this vintage postcard, a parrot says to the turkey: “I would rather spend my life behind the bars than lose my head upon the block.” Courtesy New-York Historical Society, 1907.
Courses of Note
WRITE YOUR LIFE
Last week I began rolling out short memory and writing prompt courses geared at anyone who wants to preserve their family stories, even if they don’t consider themselves a writer.
OBITUARY HELP
In a free lunch-and-learn from Keeper on Tuesday, December 1, grief expert Allison Gilbert interviews professional biographers Kate Buford and Abby Santamaria about “how to expertly craft the kinds of obituaries that truly honor and celebrate your loved ones.”
The Memoir Files
TIM & MARY TALK
In this wide-ranging conversation Tim Ferriss speaks to Mary Karr about why she staged fights in her university memoir classes, how she found poetry in the idioms of her Texas upbringing, and why every writer should keep a commonplace book. Listen in here, or read the full transcript on Tim’s site:
PLAYING WITH FORM
“I think memoir is so much more than a single person’s memories, or the story of one life. That’s a power of the form for me—that it is so poetic, and it is so flexible, you can play with it.” Kao Kalia Yang, a self-described “prose writer with a poet’s sensibility,” on pushing the boundaries of the memoir genre.
IN HIS WORDS, IN HIS VOICE
In these five audio excerpts from Barack Obama’s new memoir, A Promised Land, the former president tells stories about spending time with some of the women in his life as well as his decision to approve the raid that led to the killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
DIVERSE, PERSONAL WAR STORIES
“After poring over people's correspondence and journal entries, it can be emotional seeing a young soldier's attitude…change from excited about going abroad to huddling in the trenches fearing for their lives,” historian Jacqueline Larson Carmichael said. Her new book, Heard Amid the Guns: True Stories from the Western Front, 1914-1918, is out this month.
Times, They Are A-Changin’
A VASTLY DIFFERENT FRESHMAN BREAK
Massachusetts–based personal historian Nancy West shares a first person piece about welcoming her daughter home from college for Thanksgiving, a ritual made quite different due to Covid-19.
TURKEY TALES
“These 29 Thanksgiving vignettes…exuberantly celebrate many cultures, stories, and people that loved us through their cooking,” Becky Hadeed writes. She curated a variety of holiday stories—sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, altogether relatable—for this episode of The Storied Recipe, which you can (and should!) listen to in full here:
MORE PANDEMIC JOURNALING
For the first 25 years after the pandemic, materials from University of Connecticut’s Pandemic Journaling Project will be available only to academic researchers; after that, the entire collection will become a publicly accessible archive. Each week a few entries are featured anonymously, with permission.
Potpourri
A “GREAT AND GEEKY” LEGACY
”I know people get upset when celebrities die,” former Jeopardy! contestant Burt Thakur said. “To me, he wasn’t a celebrity. To me, Alex Trebek was just another uncle.” Read tributes from fans of the American icon, as well as obituaries at Legacy.com and USA Today.
BEYOND A FINANCIAL LEGACY
“The question of how to pass personal values to future generations—and to continue to have some influence long after death—is expanding the traditional parameters of estate planning.” A look at family legacy trusts from Barron’s.
PILOT PROGRAM FOR MEMORY-CARE PATIENTS
Telememory, a telehealth startup that uses AI to power its digital technology, is helping families collect, curate, and reminisce together even as it tracks memory-care patients’ emotional responses to help improve their health and happiness.
MUSEUM OF SMELLS
I inhaled the tiny pot of Play-Doh my son got in his Halloween bag this year then stashed it in my room for when I need another sniff of nostalgia—for me, it truly is a singular childhood scent. Which of “your own personal smell memories” have become part of you? The New York Times asked readers, and their answers are unsurprisingly evocative.
NOW CASTING
How I Got Here, a new television series, is looking for second-generation individuals aged 14–30 to be cast on the program; subjects will travel (with their parent or grandparent) to their country of origin. Deadline for applications is December 1, 2020.
Our Stories, Our Selves
REASONS FOR DOCUMENTING PERSONAL HISTORY
“Sharing one’s personal history can benefit the individual recounting it as well as family members. One study found that reminiscing and storytelling reduce older people’s loneliness and increase feelings of social connectedness and overall well-being,” reports the Catholic Sentinel.
PERSONAL HISTORY RESOURCE
StoryCorps has released this seven-minute masterclass with Daniel Horowitz Garcia on how to conduct a great interview:
A GIFT FOR THE FUTURE
Pam Pacelli Cooper of Verissima Productions in Massachusetts coins a new verb, ‘ancestoring,’ and offers a few ideas for how to get good at it.
...and a Few More Links
“Memory Walking” exhibit in Poughkeepsie, NY, celebrates ordinary objects, family history.
Fair use: a statement on best practices for biographers drafted jointly by legal scholars, book publishers, and writers
Hippocampus magazine announces winners of “Remember in November” creative nonfiction writing contest.
Conversation with an ancestor surrounding the verity of Alexander Hamilton as a slave owner
Browse videos (mostly of biographers speaking about their subjects) from the archives of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
The prospect of a memoir by President Trump is proving divisive in the publishing industry.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: September 29, 2020
This week's roundup, heavy on video content, features stories on the nature of memoir, moving tributes for deceased, and an array of family history finds.
“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
—Oscar Wilde
Vintage postcard of “A Northern Autumn, Birch Drive” (originally issued by Detroit Publishing Company, 1898 - 1931), courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
On Memoir
A MEMOIR ROOTED IN PLACE
“Life moves in strange and marvelous patterns,” Rebecca McClanahan says in this interview for Brevity magazine. “The memoir runs panting behind the life but can never catch up.” Her new book, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, was released this month.
A LIFE BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
“Twenty-one years later I am close to finishing the memoir,” George Clever tells personal historian Patricia Pihl. “I owed my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren information about my Lenape life, information I could not receive from my parents, grandparents, or great parents.”
Stories Untold, Discovered Anew
SACRED STORIES
“All anyone really wants is to be seen and heard, and yet we avoid seeing and hearing others every day. Even among families, there are limits to what we can expect to receive from others. Sometimes we’re left carrying our own stories, like oceans inside of us.” Sarah Kasbeer on sacred stories.
ARTIFACTS OF A LIFE
William Lamb’s mother, who died in 1992, still finds ways to speak to him through the objects she left behind. Read how a lamp unraveled the story of a life Lamb never knew his mother had.
Family History Finds
FEAST OF MEMORIES
For anyone who’s ready to begin capturing the stories that make up your food heritage, I created a list of food-themed questions that you can use for either family history interviews or writing prompts.
LOOKING TO THE PAST
This pandemic year will be remembered for sure, but it’s also important to keep in mind that, “like our ancestors, we can come together and overcome the difficulties ahead. These U.S. census records offer signs of hope of what is to come.”
LIVING THROUGH THIS HISTORIC TIME
Lock down these days with a family memoir, suggests Joss Carpreau of Elephant Memoirs in Manchester, England: “You may not want to write about it yet [if] it’s all too raw, and maybe you think the worst is yet to come. These, however, are the thoughts and feelings that will most be interesting in years to come.”
SUMMONING COMPASSION
“After writing this piece, I received my great-grandfather's death certificate and discovered he…died in the State Hospital for the Insane from Dementia Paralytica, which may well have been a factor in the sad choice of allowing his son to perish.” California–based personal historian Lisa O'Reilly on an ancestor’s heartbreaking decision.
Personal Notes from Personal Historians
CLASSICS FOR THE SEASON
The partners behind NYC–based Remarkable Life Memoirs share a few of their favorite fall recipes, including a sweet kugel “best [eaten] when you’re standing in front of the fridge with your coat still on.”
(COUGH, COUGH)
“N95 masks are de rigeur, not the pretty cloth masks that are my everyday pandemic wear. (I can’t believe I miss them!).” Personal historian Trena Cleland provides a fire update from the West Coast.
“THE STRANGEST START TO COLLEGE”
Nancy West, a memoir coach in Western Massachusetts, says she was well-prepared to help her daughter through the challenge of going off to college—but she wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
Bearing Witness to the Holocaust
LESSONS OF THE PAST
“The results are both shocking and saddening, and they underscore why we must act now while Holocaust survivors are still with us to voice their stories,” an expert says in this piece revealing the dreadful results of a survey about Holocaust awareness among U.S. adults.
THE LAST GENERATION
Witness Theater: The Film takes viewers behind the scenes of an intergenerational program which brings together Holocaust survivors and high school students to elicit and memorialize stories of the Holocaust. “These [survivor] communities are dwindling,” film director Oren Rudavsky told The Times of Israel. “It’s an action to create another generation of people who can tell their stories.” Watch a trailer below, and check local PBS listings for an upcoming air date.
Notable Losses
REMEMBERING HIS FATHER
“People used to ask my dad if he was the real Bill Gates. The truth is, he was everything I try to be,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates writes in this tribute to his father, William Gates, Sr., who died on September 14. He honors him as well in this brief video posted on his blog:
JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG REMEMBERED
“Born in Depression-era Brooklyn, Justice Ginsburg excelled academically and went to the top of her law school class at a time when women were still called upon to justify taking a man’s place. She earned a reputation as the legal embodiment of the women’s liberation movement and as a widely admired role model for generations of female lawyers,” reads the obituary in The Washington Post. The New York Times also ran a lengthy tribute that details her early family life in New York City as well as her history-making career; watch a video remembrance below.
MORE PERSONAL TRIBUTES FOR RBG
Nina Totenberg, friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg for 50 years, shares stories of “her extraordinary character, decency and commitment to friends, colleagues, law clerks—just about everyone whose lives she touched. I was lucky enough to be one of those people.” And her fellow Supreme Court Justices also wrote moving tributes honoring their “dear friend.”
...and a Few More Links
The latest issue of Brevity magazine, with a focus on experiences of disability
A look at the history of personal food writing
New books in October include biographies of Sylvia Plath and Malcolm X plus Lenny Kravitz’s ghostwritten memoir.
Podcast episode: “Lisa Lisson on How Knowing Your Family’s History will Benefit Your Family”
This Modern Love column by Heather von Rohr is a fine example of writing about your relationship origin story.
Reminder: If you missed any of the short video classes from Save Your Photos Month, they will be available to watch through November 1.
The World Mother Storytelling Project, to be livestreamed on October 25, teaches us to listen to and tell our mothers’ stories.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: April 30, 2019
Ways in which the past is ever-present, artifacts made accessible, writing from our lives, the power of personal narrative in medicine, and new memoirs of note.
“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”
—William Shakespeare
Ruth Reichl as a young girl with her mother in the photograph that graced the cover of her 2009 memoir, Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way; Reichl has a new memoir, Save Me the Plums, out this month.
The Ever-Present Past
FACEBOOK’S DIGITAL MEMORIALS
Facebook is no longer just a social network; it’s also a scrapbook. “When users die, they may leave behind accounts containing over a decade of memories, and they might not have specified how they want that archive to be maintained,” Wired reports on the platform’s latest rollout of features for legacy contacts.
A WITCHY LEGACY
“I would never truly know my father or my Polish family, but I could know our homeland, its history.” How Michelle Tea found a spiritual home in her Polish heritage.
ON GRIEF, MEMORY, AND TIME
“When your beloved dies, your memory is at risk. Your past no longer fits your story of who you are,” Matthew Salesses writes. “To remember is not to time-travel; it is to alter how time feels.”
A STORYKEEPING MILESTONE
“Clinton Haby, founder of San Antonio–based StoryKeeping, celebrated a decade in business with a party filled with appreciative clients and likeminded family storytellers. “When you say ‘it’s been ten years’ I don’t believe it, but when I look at the [video] equipment I’m using and the productions I’m working on today I recognize it took a decade to get here,” Haby says. Congratulations, and cheers to the next 10 years!
Memoirs of Note
SAVE ME THE PLUMS
I was as eager to read the new memoir of everyone’s favorite foodie, Ruth Reichl, as much for the inside dish on Condé Nast (where I worked in the late nineties at the same time as Reichl) as for again encountering the author’s poignant and deliciously charming voice. (I brought Save Me the Plums along on vacation and devoured it on one trans-Atlantic flight.)
HER VERSION OF EVENTS
How do you write a memoir when you can’t remember? This conversation between ghostwriter Anna Wharton and Wendy Mitchell, subject of their jointly written memoir Somebody I Used to Know, ranges from using WhatsApp to communicate about the book to waiting for the fog of dementia to clear so their process could proceed.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ENSLAVED MUSLIM
Omar Ibn Said was 37 years old when he was taken from his West African home and transported to Charleston, South Carolina, as a slave in the 1800s. His one-of-a-kind autobiographical manuscript has been translated from its original Arabic and housed at the Library of Congress, where it is challenging the American narrative:
Writing from Our Lives
PHOTOS AS WRITING PROMPTS
Family photos can be useful tools to jog memories and call forth stories. In a recent post I share six tips for determining which images will elicit the best family stories.
LOVED IN THE TRANSLATION
In just 15 lines Marie A. Mennuto-Rovello shows us how love and memories and setting can come alive through poetry (not all life story writing need be narrative!).
A LIFE MOSAIC
How the best life story vignettes are powerful ways to capture your past, and why writing short narrative pieces from your memories is an effective way to begin your memoir.
PROJECT PACE
When Massachusetts–based Nancy West isn't writing memoirs she is a journalist for a daily paper: “Tight deadlines and fast turnarounds are in my professional DNA,” she says. But sometimes her personal history clients need more time—so she is “learning to be patient with the process.”
BEHIND-THE-SCENES PEEK
Lisa O’Reilly says that finishing a book about her dad was her greatest accomplishment. “My whole life, he’s been the king of my world and now I can let everyone know why,” the California–based personal historian writes.“That makes it a precious gift to myself, as well as to him.”
Artifacts Made Accessible
FROM A VINTAGE VARSITY JACKET TO AN 1876 DIARY
Unless you live in Plano, Texas, knowing that the Genealogy Center at Haggard Library houses, behind lock and key, thousands of newspaper clippings, pieces of ephemera, and amazing historical and personal artifacts likely wouldn’t interest you. But I, an East Coast girl, was fascinated by the breadth of their collection, and find inspiration in the fact that this local team has, over the last 18 years, digitally preserved more than 30 thousand archives for the public to access!
DIGITAL AGE DIARY
“Being present in the moment doesn't mean I can't ever capture the moment,” Daryl Austin writes in this defense of using Instagram for “photo-journaling” his family’s daily lives. “Captions turn pictures into stories” and, he says, help you remember why a memory was worth safeguarding in the first place.
From Left Field, Perhaps?
A DOCTOR’S EDUCATION
I have written before about narrative medicine, and in this brief piece I was newly reminded of the power of personal story—of listening, of being attuned to someone—in a caregiving setting.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
When Maria Popova discovers books that her great-grandfather had annotated, “it was this sort of intellectual dance with another mind that you could see in the margins of his books,” she tells Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast. Popova’s Brain Pickings website is a treasure trove of interconnected themes and literary gems; she calls it “a record of my becoming who I am.”
...and a Few More Links
Rachel Howard names five great writer biographies.
Connecticut author publishes personal story of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
Is your smartphone already organizing your unwieldy digital photo collection?
An “intensely charming, a tinge eerie, and deliciously nostalgic” repurposing of old family photos
Prince’s memoir, due in August, will include handwritten song lyrics and portions of his own scrapbook.
Spotlight on Naperville, IL, digital preservation business Memory Keepers
Four hassle-free ways to get your Google Photos memories in order
“Surfing My DNA,” a live one-woman show in New Jersey, explores a unique family history.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: October 17, 2018
Stories on staying curious including a conversation starter card deck & ideas for family interviews, plus digging into family history via photos and stories.
PHOTO: Wallenda Family Album Picture, 1962. Photographed by Robert W. Kelley for LIFE magazine. ©Time Inc.
“Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is.”
—Parker J. Palmer
Stay Curious
AGING IN NYC
A longtime social worker and photographer turns his lens on seniors out and about in the Big Apple, and his interest invites stories from all walks of life.
STORY CATCHER CONVERSATION STARTERS
A holiday gift idea, perhaps? Tree of Life Legacies’ April Bell has introduced the Life Legacy Card Deck with 52 prompts for values-based storytelling.
LET’S TALK
Conducting family interviews is a great way to gather the stories of family elders and preserve family history for the next generation—here, four ideas to get you going.
Digging in to Family History
THE ONLY TRUE STORY
“Humans love stories, and genealogy is essentially a gradual reading of the grandest, most compelling story of all time,” Roman Kraft writes in his ode to discovering family history.
ONE BOX AT A TIME
Denise Levenick, aka The Family Curator, describes how to use “the parking lot system” to organize old photos in your family collection.
BBC’S “FAMILY FOOTSTEPS”
An Ulster-Scots family goes on a journey back in time to discover what life was like for their ancestors at the turn of the 19th century.
YOUR HISTORY…OR YOU’RE HISTORY?
“With both of my parents gone it is getting much harder to collect the stories from their lives,” writes Jay Lenkersdorfer in a local newspaper column. “Each memory is perishable and should be treated as though it will soon expire...”
...and a Few More Links
A new website aims to build a database of music that's effective at triggering memories for dementia patients.
Storytelling as a form of healing
An in-depth review of Kiese Laymon’s “startlingly open” and “raw” new memoir, Heavy
Short Takes