Memories Matter
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Life Story Links: September 18, 2018
Tangible memories, truth's elusivity in memoir, an autobiographical essay collection, a free chapter of "Your Meaning Legacy,” & a chance at a free writing book.
“All she ever wanted was to be remembered. And she understood that memories happened in the mind but also in the heart.”
—Michelle Gable, I’ll See You in Paris
“Kim Sisters” photographed by Robert W. Kelley for Life magazine. ©Time Inc. Many of the millions of photographs from the LIFE Photo Archive, from the 1750s to today, are available for non-commercial use.
Tangible Memories
TRANSPORTED BY MEMORABILIA
Massachusetts–based personal historian Nancy West writes about how something as prosaic as a paper placemat can bring back evocative and powerful memories of time spent at her grandparents’ Colorado cabin.
BLESSING OR BURDEN?
“Keeping everything honors nothing!” Don’t let your most precious photos and memorabilia become a burden to the next generation. The team at the Family Narrative Project has valuable advice to help you sort your memory-laden stuff.
SUITCASE OF TALISMANS JOURNEYS TO ISRAEL
Stacy Derby of Bind These Words in Chicago went above and beyond to help a client gift an invaluable piece of her family's history to the National Library of Israel. (Use Google Translate in your browser to read in English.)
Writing, Remembering, Reading
MEMOIR: THE ART OF THE SUPPOSE
“The truth is elusive, but don’t let that defeat you. Let truth’s elusivity galvanize you toward the deep dive for the facts, the shimmery details, the startle of a color red or a wind storm or a mother’s muffins,” said writer Beth Kephart in her opening address at HippoCamp 2018.
BOOK REVIEW
“We all have different versions of ourselves, depending on the story,” Mimi Schwartz writes in her autobiographical essay collection, When History Is Personal. Read a review here.
IT COMES DOWN TO STORY
Last week I attended Narrative Medicine Rounds in NYC to hear physician and writer Haider Warraich, MD, talk about “The Search for Beauty at the End of Life.”
YOUR MEANING LEGACY
Legacy planning expert Laura A. Roser offers a step-by-step guide to cultivating, capturing, and passing on non-financial assets such as values, wisdom, and beliefs in her new book. Download the first chapter here.
NYACK RECORD SHOP PROJECT
Listen to history: “Two chairs, a microphone, a few questions and a 30-minute hourglass-style timer. When the sands ran out, the interview was over. Some interviews began with the line: ‘Tell us your story.‘ And that was enough to get the ball rolling and the personal history flowing.”
...and a Few More Links
Lifetime of family memories commemorated through art
Five tips for historical research, from uncovering local history to plotting your family tree
Storytelling connects children with history, families and each other.
Actress Sally Field’s new memoir reveals a personal history that she has never shared before.
Enter by October 1st for a chance to win a free, signed copy of Helen Sword's The Writer's Diet.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: September 3, 2018
Opportunities for life story tellers including a memoir class, writing contest, & volunteering with seniors; plus, gratitude journals & digital photo archives.
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
—William Faulkner
Hal B. Fullerton. 1899. Cranberry bog and drain in Calverton, Suffolk County, NY. Gelatin silver print, part of the Empire State Digital Network accessed via the Digital Public Library of America. All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format.
Some Storytelling Inspiration
PUBLIC ARCHIVE
Graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to anyone with a computer. Check out the fruits of their labor, including photographs of the frontier and the paperwork of slavery.
ON GROWING OLD
“I just said goodbye to one of my clients,” Virginia–based personal historian Karen Bender writes. “Flo, 97 and on hospice, is going to live with her daughter in a different state for whatever time she has left.” Bender shares what “old age” means to Flo, from the book they worked on together.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GRATITUDE JOURNAL
Not all the life story projects Massachusetts–based Nancy West produces are traditional narrative memoirs: Here she shines a light on how to use photos to create a gratitude journal.
Opportunity Knocks
THE MAKING OF A FAMILY HISTORIAN
Wisconsin–based personal historian and educator Mary Patricia Voell offers a new online course designed to give participants of all ages the framework and tools to tackle their family history projects.
ARCHIVAL STORYTELLING
The New York Times is hiring a team “to exhume the photographs and stories that had been relegated to the dustbins of history and to explore anew the stories left untold.” Interested?
WRITING CONTEST
The Family Narrative Project is seeking entries for its 2018 writing contest: Submit essays that reflect the full range of family life by October 31 for a chance to win $500 plus a feature on their website.
VOLUNTEER WITH SENIORS
Check out the important work being done by Brittany Bare and her team at nonprofit My Life, My Stories, where marginalized seniors are paired with volunteers to help write their own memoirs. While in-person volunteering is currently only available in the San Francisco Bay area, there are other ways to help, too.
...and a Few More Links
Have you discovered the Digital Public Library of America yet?
My guest blog for Save Your Photos Month is about how to find what matters amidst all your digital clutter.
Foundation strives to put “a face” on history for younger generations
Podcast recommendations for life storytellers, creative entrepreneurs, oral historians, and anyone who loves a captivating first person story.
Short Takes
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
Life Story Links: Blog Roundup, July 10, 2018
Managing memories post-divorce, during a move & after war; sharing stories for the next generation—and your own reflective journey; plus more memoir-ish links.
“The entire story of mankind has come to us from individual voices from the past.”
—Janice T. Dixon
Students in Negaunee, MI, interviewed members of the community to preserve the history of a local mine for a documentary they produced called A Vanishing Breed: The Men and Memories of the Mather B.
Enterprising Storytellers
NEXT–GEN ORAL HISTORIANS
Kudos to these Michigan high schoolers for their 100 hours of work, their initiative, and their valuing of community story preservation!
OPEN TO POSSIBILITIES
Clinton Haby started his San Antonio–based StoryKeeping business in 2009 with the belief that he wasn’t the only grandchild who loved their grandparents and wanted to retain their stories. “I began with a single digital voice recorder,” he says—and look what he’s doing now!
Personal Histories, Shared & Sorted
BEING HEARD
Last week I wrote about Brandon Stanton’s insights on why people open up during personal interviews—and it’s not the questions.
YOUR NEXT READ?
“There is a deep relationship between finding meaning in one’s own life experiences at times of transition and wanting to share the stories that hold that meaning,” Sarah White, of First Person Productions in Madison, WI, writes in her thoughtful review of the book It’s Never Too Late to Begin Again, by Julia Cameron with Emma Lively.
MEMORIES & MOVING HOUSE
“Being the custodian of your family’s stuff can be a dusty, dispiriting and often overwhelming responsibility, but it is an act of love of sorts,” writes Emma Beddington. “We weigh it all up, make choices and hope we get it right.” Read her musings on sifting through masses of personal history and see how it compares to your own penchant for saving—or purging—mementos and family photos.
Banishing Bad Memories?
LOST IN WAR & SILENCE
“That generation...if they lost a boy in the war, they didn't talk about him,” says Paul Levy, author of the biography Finding Phil, which chronicles the life of his uncle, Phil Levy, who was killed in action in World War II. Too often families bury the past if it was hurtful, but preserving those stories for the next generation is so meaningful—as Levy’s search for history reveals.
THAT WAS ME, THEN
“The person I was then is important for my sons to know about,” actress Mayim Bialik says in this video about how she has dealt, post-divorce, with the physical mementos of her marriage. Bialik keeps her wedding album “lined up with all of the other photo albums and memories that I can’t run from”—and her sons relish seeing photos of their grandparents and family in younger days. There’s food for thought here for anyone wondering what to do with old photos of tougher times.
...and a Few More Links
11 White House memoirs by women that show a different side to the Oval Office
Preserving your digital memories: How smart phones have changed family photography
“Those books made me realize that though history is about big world events and politics, it’s also about the ordinary lives of ordinary people.”
Backpack-sized archiving kit empowers community historians to record local narratives
Short Takes
Life Story Links: Blog Roundup, June 26, 2018
Icons of interviewing Studs Terkel and Brandon Stanton, unconventional memoirs, Stonewall memorabilia, plus tips on telling the whole truth in your own memoir.
“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
A photo of the Christopher Street Liberation Day March from the Rudy Grillo Collection, as submitted to the Stonewall Forever Project. You can help preserve the untold stories of the Stonewall Riots by donating personal photos and letters, too.
Voices of Our Time
THE ART OF CONVERSATION
“I hope the voices in this wonderful archive will help us to better appreciate one another,” Lois Baum says of the Studs Terkel Archive, an audio treasure trove of the late broadcaster’s newly digitized 6,000+ tapes. In his 45 years on WFMT radio, Terkel talked to a wide array of the 20th century’s most interesting people—and now you can explore those interviews for free.
HOW TO LISTEN
Humans of New York’s Brandon Stanton opens up to Tim Ferriss about the power of biography, how being 100 percent present is more important than the questions in an interview, and hanging in there when things get tough.
NYC: SEEKING HISTORICAL MEMORABILIA
Stonewall Forever, a project launched last year after Google granted a Greenwich Village community center $1 million to preserve oral histories of those present during the Stonewall Riots, is collecting photographs, letters, diaries and protest material to be considered for an online collection.
Stories of Our Lives
BEYOND DESCENDANCY
“Birth dates, death dates, immigration records, legal proceedings—none of those capture the measure of a person’s soul,” writes Massachusetts-based Nancy West, who chronicles why genealogy is only the beginning of one’s personal history, and how memoir uncovers heartfelt nuance.
BEHIND THE BOOK
“They have the most incredible story and it has been weighing on my for years that we need to get it written down,” Olive Lowe’s aunt told her. And so it was that Lowe, of Life Stories by Liv in Mesa, Arizona, went on to capture how her aunt helped a family from South Korea immigrate to the United States after their son was born with a severe form of spina bifida.
THE GIFT OF BRAG
Karen Bender, a certified guided autobiography instructor in Virginia, has some advice for budding memoirists: “Tell the truth. Not a watered-down truth or a polite truth, but the full ‘hey Ma, look at me!’ truth.” Worried about seeming less than modest? Let your friends and family do the bragging via quotes from interviews.
DADDY’S DUTCH
“So, the morning passed with a daughter peeking into the academic world of a father who had spent a lifetime learning and now was sharing his special knowledge,” reflects Carol McLaren of Unique Life Stories in Pinon, Arizona. How poring over a rare book in seventeenth century Dutch made a cross-generational connection.
NOTHING IS LOST, INDEED
Clinton Haby of San Antonio–based StoryKeeping says he is enriched by his work through the bonds he forms with those he has the privilege of interviewing—and the resulting production ensures the storyteller’s spark is just a “press play” away.
...and a Few More Links
- Five unconventional memoirs recommended by writer Glen David Gold
- “We Survive by Telling Stories,” by Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros
- Paul Sullivan died in Vietnam 50 years ago, and his family has kept his memory alive ever since
- Sarah White on handling the income insecurity of the personal historian lifestyle
Short Takes
Life Story Links: Blog Roundup, May 15, 2018
Mining letters, journals, and homes for life story material; the latest personal history-themed podcasts; plus family history help & a memoir writing contest.
“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” —Kazuo Ishiguro
On Process and Progress
JUST DO IT
Ignoring an instinct to preserve family stories can be an expensive trade-off. And most of us know this—so we do we wait? Last week on the blog I explored the perils of procrastination.
FROM JOURNAL TO MEMOIR
Patricia Charpentier of Florida-based Writing Your Life discusses the benefits of keeping a Five-Year Journal and how to mine your entries for your memoir.
FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH
Ever wonder if you could benefit from a professional genealogy consultation? The New York Genealogical & Biographical Society tackles the issue in helpful detail.
THE BLUE BACKPACK
Object writing is a technique of constraining your writing to the concrete and specific, letting a “thing you could drop on your foot” be a firm central point around which the story unfolds, says Sarah White of First Person Productions in Madison, Wisconsin, who offers up this essay as inspiration.
TAKE NOTE
In honor of Mother’s Day, Lisa Lombardi O’Reilly, founder of Your Stories Written in California, dives into some family letters to get to know the women in her family a little better.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
Try creating a place-line, instead of a timeline, to aid with organizing your memoir, suggests Massachusetts–based editor Nancy West: a list of places you’ve called home throughout your life—each “a tangible repository of memories.”
New & Noteworthy
LEGACY MOMENTS
Legacy Republic is among the first developers to be a part of the Google Photos partner program, and will be one of the first to launch the integration with Google Photos to their customers.
THE WALLS BETWEEN US
“Every division—metaphorical or real—is a story,” observes award-winning writer Beth Kephart, who invites writers to submit true, previously unpublished memoiristic stories of between 300 and 3,000 words that speak to or illuminate the place of walls in our personal lives or world.
FUTURE OF HISTORY?
On May 5, The Phi Centre and the MIT Open Documentary Lab presented Update or Die: Future Proofing Emerging Digital Documentary Forms.
Listen Up!
Grab a pair of headphones or plug in during your morning commute for these recent podcast offerings from our colleagues:
- Kansas City–based Amy Woods Butler speaks to Denis Ledoux of the Memoir Network on how to grow business as a memoir professional in episode 15 of The Life Story Coach podcast.
- California–based Peta Roberts’s podcast Storyical, which offers encouragement from ordinary people about how they started recording their life histories, features memoirist Libby Atwater in the latest episode.
WHAT PODCASTS DO YOU LOVE???? I am looking for recommendations for storytelling, family history, documentary, and memoir themed podcasts for an upcoming post—please share in the comments below!
Short Takes
Life Story Links: Blog Roundup, May 1, 2018
You want help writing your memoir—who do you search for? Plus, history brought to life through oral testimony, and time travel through old photos & beloved stuff.
“When nothing else subsists from the past...the smell and taste of things remain poised, a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.” —Marcel Proust
Buried Treasure
TIME TRAVEL
Plenty of historians have studied the booming time period when New York City’s population fast approached five million, but other than one or two super-centenarians, nobody actually remembers New York in 1911. This immaculately restored film lets us all take a virtual trip there.
REST IN PIECES
Giving up things we've grown attached to can be tough, writes designer Susan Hood of NY–based Remarkable Life Memoirs. How she continues to value those significant possessions after they’re past their prime.
SUMMER OF ’78
Six months ago, a New York parks official came across 2 cardboard boxes that had been sitting around for decades. Inside were 2,924 color slides, pictures made in parks across NYC in the summer of 1978. No one had looked at them for 40 years.
Photo by Paul Hosefros | More photos from the collection will be on view from May 3 through June 14 at the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, 830 Fifth Avenue, near 64th Street in Manhattan.
Telling Tales
YOUR SINGULAR STORY?
Why write your life story when telling your life stories is likely to be more compelling? Thoughts on memoir, biography, and the power of first-person narrative.
HEALTH BENEFITS, TOO
“Engaging your brain to write your memoirs can leave a recorded history for your descendants as it helps improve your cognitive fitness,” reports Harvard Health Publishing.
THE WORDS WE USE
Personal history, life stories, memoirs—what words are people using when they search online for our services? Kansas City–based Amy Woods Butler thoughtfully explores this important topic.
ECHOES THROUGH GENERATIONS
Family traits, mannerisms, preferences—how often do we say, “You’re just like...”? We take for granted that these connections exist, writes Marjorie Turner Hollman, but keeping the stories going just may ensure those connections remain intact.
AFRICAN AMERICAN LEGACIES
The opening of a lynching memorial in Alabama inspires Clinton Haby of Storykeeping in San Antonio to reflect on the personal biography industry’s role in capturing African-American legacies.
WITNESS TO HISTORY
Patricia Pihl of Real Life Legacies in Mayville, NY, looks back at the 50th anniversary of the Martin Luther King assassination and the benefits of reminiscence through the lens of a very public event.