Memories Matter
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Life Story Links: August 21, 2018
The importance of oral traditions, why interviewing subjects in a familiar environment elicits the best stories, family history resources & more memoirish links.
“In books lies the soul of the whole past time: the articulate audible voice of the past.”
—Thomas Carlyle
During a weekend trip to our nation’s capital, I escaped the oppressive heat in the Library of Congress and found inspiration at every turn. The next line of this quote from Thomas Carlyle reads: “the articulate audible voice of the past.” Indeed.
Places in the Heart
READING TILL THE END
“Papa left the summer I turned eight.” Cinella Barnes, who tells the story of her tragic childhood in her memoir Monsoon Mansion, reads excerpts from her book to her hospitalized father in this moving essay on the power of memory and questions left unanswered.
HIBAKUSHA EXPERIENCE
As the only country that has ever suffered nuclear attacks in war, Japan has a responsibility to ensure that memories of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki went through will be passed on to future generations.
ON LOCATION
Clinton Haby of San Antonio–based StoryKeeping prefers to conduct interviews in subjects’ homes when possible, setting the interviewee at ease and capturing a familiar environment for loved ones.
Family History Takes
ODE TO ORAL TRADITIONS
“Those stories, even if they are embellished in the retelling, make a statement: This is who we are. And we remember.”
AN APPALACHIAN ODYSSEY
A genealogist and a neurologist hunt for ALS genes along a sprawling family tree. “What makes [their] work pleasurable is also what makes it hard: Tracking familial disease meant tracking families, and every branch is complicated in its own way.”
BOOKMARK THIS
Last week I offered up a curated list of resources for the genealogist who cares about story.
Paper Trails
BOOKISH NOTES
“All we talk about...is books—your book, my book, this book, that book,” writes Sarah White of First Person Productions in Madison, WI, who shares takeaways from her creative nonfiction residency in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
INSIDE AN INHERITED DIARY
Carol McLaren of Arizona–based Unique Life Stories ruminates on inherited diaries & letters as windows to the past.
...and a Few More Links
Understanding vernacular photography: collecting found photos
Reuniting stumped readers with the books from the edges of their memories—a delightful read for library lovers everywhere
A bundle of old negatives provides a connection to immigrant ancestors and a vision of what Buffalo, NY, looked like generations ago.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: August 7, 2018
Grandmothers, mothers, Vietnam veterans, and more tell their stories for the next generation; thoughts on the craft of life story preservation, memoir & memory.
“I think of a good conversation as an adventure. You create a generous and trustworthy space for it...so the other person will feel so welcome and understood that they will put words around something they have never put words around quite that way before.”
—Krista Tippett
In Their Own Words
TESTING THE WATERS
A grandmother discovers grace and self-forgiveness while offering a safe place for a child to explore: Massachusetts–based personal historian Marjorie Turner Hollman tells one of her own stories and, I hope, inspires others to allow themselves to be vulnerable enough to tell their own.
ON MEMORY & INHERITED TRAUMA
“I imagine the weight of her trauma in my palm, opaque and heavy,” Crystal Hana Kim writes of her grandmother in “Like You Know Your Own Bones.”
WAR STORIES
"I never talk about the war." Until now. Raul Roman undertook a three-year effort to document the lives and memories of North Vietnamese veterans and their families; hear some of their voices in Roman's recent NYT piece.
BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE
“Eight years ago, I decided I was going to interview my mother and last year, I finally did it. I’m not 100-percent clear on what took me so long,” writes Cari Shane. “Perhaps the reality of what and why I was recording my mother’s stories; it was an acknowledgment of her mortality.”
THE PRESCIENCE OF A NAZI-ERA DIARIST
“The past informs the present; human memory is frail and fallible; and the only way to mitigate the discord between these truisms is to chronicle current events in granular detail,” Daniel Crown writes of Victor Klemperer’s legacy.
Craft & Conscience
THE FUTURE OF BIOGRAPHY?
Historian Charlotte Gray wonders what tomorrow’s biographers will do to engage readers and bring “them as close as possible to a credible version of a life.”
VALUING VALUES
Bethesda–based writer and editor Pat McNees explores two topics of utmost interest (and importance) to the life story community:
a meandering conversation about “the rocky shoals of truth-telling” that happened six years ago but was worth her time to revisit anew;
and why a code of ethics is crucial for those of us helping others tell their personal stories.
PICTURE PRIMER
“You know how disappointing it is to come across an orphaned photo. You are the ancestor of future generations who will want to know who you were. Don't let them down!” writes Alison Taylor of Pictures & Stories in Utah. Learn how to—easily—add metadata to your photos.
MY OWN NEXT CHAPTER
On the heels of relaunching my own company’s website, I wrote about the journey from magazine editor to entrepreneur and announce a new signature line of bespoke books.
VANITY PROJECT?
“It’s anything but vanity to know yourself and to want to share your story with the generations still to come,” writes Samantha Shubert of NYC’s Remarkable Life Memoirs.
MORE MEMOIRS, MORE MEMORIES
A client attended her 60th school reunion and learned that the whole gang was working on memoirs. “I was pleasantly surprised to hear this and thought: Will family memoirs be as standard to future generations as wedding portraits are today?” says Massachusetts–based personal historian Nancy West.
THROUGH THE LENS OF OUR FAMILY ALBUMS
Thomas Allen Harris, who has gathered people for photo sharing events across 50 different cities for years, says it is the stories that emerge from the images that bring people together, connect generations, and “open up the communication of the heart”—for “the heart,“ he says, “has its own song.” He is working on a pilot for a new TV show, Family Pictures USA.
...and a Few More Links
Adam O’Fallon Price waxes poetic on the virtues of the semicolon
Memory study casts doubt on the first thing you remember from your childhood.
Ethical wills can be a critical part of one's legacy.
Seven reasons to honor your engaged daughter with an heirloom book
New survey shows that storytelling moves us far more than literary quality.
Short Takes