Memories Matter
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Life Story Links: May 29, 2019
Hospice biographers, illustrated journals, personal letters, and more reveal stories & cement legacies for the next generation. Plus, things that hold memories.
“The wondrous thing about being human—the beauty and banality of it—is that we all tend to dwell in the same handful of elemental struggles, joys and sorrows, which is why a book one person writes may help another process her own life a century later...”
—Maria Popova
A mother reading to her son in Marshall, Texas, 1939. Photograph by Russell Lee, courtesy Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
A Legacy of Stories
ALL IN A LETTER
“There it was. My grandmother’s story, crystalizing out of the ether after 66 years.” An adopted man discovers more than he expected when searching for his birth mother’s country of origin.
HOSPICE BIOGRAPHERS
A charity in England that records people’s life stories in hospices is now set to expand its work to homeless people and prisoners.
CATCH-22
Their grandfather, Papa Julie, “could barely talk about the war at all”—so when his family discovered a journal that charts each mission’s bomb targets and casualties, “the war journal is so jarring to read.” Moreover, said grandfather just may have been the inspiration for one of literature’s most famous characters.
AN IMPRESSIONISTIC RETROSPECTIVE
What a treasure this grandfather left for his family! His hundreds of journals were “filled to the brim with thousands of illustrations, anecdotes, inventions, thoughts, dreams, adventures, misadventures, and historical events filtered through the lens of one family.” Take a peek:
RECKONING
Eve Ensler shares the story of her father’s abuse in a most original—and courageous, intimate—way in The Apology, in which she imagines an apology from her long dead father. Read an excerpt here.
Things We Hold Dear
THE ART OF CURATION
Whether you call it “culling,” as photographers do, or “curating,” as photo organizers do, it is an integral step in preparing your family photos for preservation in a book or video, or for preserving your family archive. Learn how to cull your photos for optimal storytelling and engagement.
PROTECTING FAMILY ARCHIVES
Jim Michael of the Personal History Center in Georgia shares an excerpt from his book Tell Your Story and Save the World. Find tips on preserving family archives including photographs, papers, digital media, and analog audio and video tape.
HOUSE OF MEMORIES
The Minnesota Historical Society launched a statewide dementia-awareness program that uses museum resources to teach professionals and family caregivers how to use everyday objects to draw stories out of people with memory loss.
...and a Few More Links
New biography of Susan Sontag based on hundreds of interviews with people who knew her well
Ten individuals win colorized photographs from their own family history collection.
A look back at a decade of The New York Times Lens column
Illinois man preserves the story of his family’s migration through art exhibit
Memories from a World War II scrapbook
“Lessons on Living from my 106-Year-Old Aunt Doris”
The Bob Dylan Archive finds a permanent, public home in Tulsa.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: May 14, 2019
A wealth of reading on the enduring power of family stories and the elusiveness of memories, plus recommended first-person reads and memoir writing prompts.
“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.”
—Michele Filgate
In Honor of Mother’s Day
REMEMBRANCE OF SOUPS PAST
“Maybe, decades from now, my own kids will uncover a cookbook from long ago, turn to a yellowed page and a recipe for soup that they’ll remember from childhood,” John McMurtrie writes upon finding his mother in the pages of her favorite cookbook.
THIS BOY’S LIFE
“Even allowing for the vagaries of memory, for the various ways different people may interpret the same event, it doesn’t follow that the stories we tell from our experience are not to be trusted simply because they are personal.” Tobias Wolff on the iconic memoir he never intended to write.
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
In this excerpt from What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, writer Lynn Steger Strong revisits, with a fair amount of distance and a little bit of compassion, scenes (and recurring themes) from her relationship with her mom. In the eagerly anticipated new book, 14 other writers also “take the sacred mother-child ideal down from its pedestal and inspect it, dissect it, run tests on it, muck it up a bit.”
WISH YOU WERE HERE, MOM
Mother’s Day can be challenging for those of us who have lost our moms. I find that lingering in our memories can help (and, yes, also hurt). Here, a very personal tribute I wrote in grief, and love.
Then and Now
“AND NOW, I’LL NEVER KNOW”
“[My grandfather] always had the perfect anecdote for any situation at his fingertips,” Samantha Shubert, a NYC–based personal historian writes. And yet, she never asked him about certain aspects of his past, even as he entertained the family with stories well into his eighties.
SENSE MEMORIES
In Part One of an ongoing series on Life Story Vignettes Writing Prompts, I offer five specific exercises for writing about your memories by engaging all your senses.
WHAT WE KEEP
“Knowing that their mother and grandmother had held this very same object, had felt those same edges and that same weight, was part of the experience, enhancing the memory and also adding another layer to the emotional connection,” subjects told author Bill Shapiro of their most meaningful objects.
MEMORY LANE
Accenture is using Artificial Intelligence to combat elder loneliness and preserve generations of memories in Stockholm. Listen to a few conversations captured through the project, dubbed Memory Lane, and explore why the company took on such an important challenge.
Picture This
SECOND TIME’S THE CHARM
About 10 years ago video biographer Stefani Elkort Twyford, owner of Legacy Multimedia in Houston, scanned her parents’ large photo collection. Now she is taking on a re-do of the project, using her accumulated knowledge about genealogy and digital preservation to get it right—and is discovering some nice surprises along the way.
A PAST NOT OUR OWN
In “How Eudora Welty’s Photography Captured My Grandmother’s History,” Natasha Trethewey finds context and inspiration. “Welty’s photographs were, for me, a resource, a way to see a time and place I’d only encountered in history books and my grandmother’s stories.”
ONE PHOTOGRAPH
History of Memory, a brand collaboration with HP and a winner at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival’s X Awards, is a series of short episodes that hone in on the power of photographs to move people—and even change lives. See a preview here:
Holocaust Remembrance
SURVIVOR STORIES EVER-RELEVANT
“As survivors become endangered, and their flames extinguish, they rely on the next generation to not only light new candles, but to bear witness—both for the dead and the living.”
“GATHERING THE FRAGMENTS”
"It's a small testimony to what happened, another drop in this sea of testimony. It doesn't uncover anything new. The facts are known. What happened happened, and this is another small proof of it." As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, Israel preserves their memories.
Recommended First-Person Reads
SELECTIVE MEMORY
“How can I blame them for choosing to forget in order to survive? And how can I not think about what may happen as a result—future generations, grasping in the dark for their own histories?” Victoria Huynh seeks the stories of her refugee family.
A MOST PERSONAL PERSONAL HISTORY
“Helping my aunt write her memoir, I realized that her story was my story, also,” Massachusetts–based personal historian Nancy West writes. “We are related by blood and DNA and history, and as she told me about her forebears, I saw my own backstory filling in with details I’d never known.”
BRIEF YET MIGHTY
Two distinctly divine pieces from the latest issue of Brevity that illustrate the power of concise, vivid writing from life: “A Legacy of Falling,” by Jenny Apostol, and “My One, My Only,” by Michaella A. Thornton.
...and a Few More Links
All the Way: Joe Namath memoir “as exciting as it is personal”
The StoryCorps podcast is back next week with a new season of stories.
Adam Gopnik on the new biography of Theodor Geisel, Becoming Dr. Seuss
In China, a podcast inspired by ‘This American Life’ showcases stories of everyday life.
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: April 8, 2019
Preserving traumatic histories from Holocaust and American slavery, memories both remembered and forgotten by individuals with dementia, and more memoir reads.
“There is a real power in crafting a truthful narrative—or at least as truthful as you can make it, your emotional truth.”
—Steve Lickteig
Wkkeken, Southern Weekend, August 1951. Photograph by Lisa Larson for LIFE magazine. ©Time Inc.
The Power of the Past
A TRAUMATIC LEGACY
"Because our home lives are so influential on who we become...the question isn’t whether children of [Holocaust] survivors are psychologically affected by their family’s Holocaust experiences—it’s who will be and when,” Adam Kovac writes in this perceptive piece exploring how grandchildren of survivors grapple with their own psychological wounds.
FAMILY HISTORY HIGHLIGHTS
Last week I offered up the most memorable quotes and takeaways from family history experts at RootsTech 2019, including why and how to put yourself into your family history and curating (or tossing?) family heirlooms and documents.
STUFF, AND MORE STUFF
“We used to hold on to letters, tickets and playbills to remind us of the past,” writes Peter Funt in a short NYT opinion piece entitled “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?” It's worth a read, certainly, but it's the 407 reader comments that reveal the most insight and range of opinions on the perceived value of all that ephemera.
THE RACE TO ARCHIVE SLAVERY RECORDS
For the true history of slavery to survive and be told, the original evidence must be preserved, and protected. The Enslaved project aims to gather research about historic slavery in one searchable digital hub, due to go online in 2020; currently, "much of that information has only been in books or museums, or scattered in corners of the Internet in different languages, hidden behind broken links."
Amidst the Forgetting
GRANDMA’S DEMENTIA
"While Grandma’s brain let go of many of her memories, her heart held on to some of the dearest ones," such as the birthdays of all 20 of her grandchildren and dates with her not-yet husband. She seemed to forget, however, her disapproval of same-sex marriages (and resulting estrangement from her gay daughter).
ONE LAST TIME
“What could have been a desperately sad visit that December—one filled with the painful realization that his time was coming to an end—instead became a precious opportunity to allow my father-in-law just a few minutes to soak in the life he had when life was good,” Karen Bender of Virginia–based Leaves of Your Life writes.
MOTHER AND SON, TIME AND MEMORY
Artist, son, caregiver Tony Luciani went on a voyage of discovery with his nonagenarian mother: The photographic project that changed both of their lives, MAMMA In the Meantime, “looks at her frailty, delves into her dementia and the angst she feels about being old now. But it also speaks about life, love, endurance, and will power. It talks about the love a mother and child have in sharing moments too quickly vanishing,” Luciani says in the book, which is available for purchase.
Remembering, Writing & Recording
CRAFT AND QUESTIONS
Nicole Breit calls writers questers. "Setting out to draft a new tale, we begin an archetypal hero’s journey. What initiates the quest are questions—about the memories that haunt us, no matter how many years have passed," she writes.
A PLACE TO SHARE
A podcasting studio in Hobart, Indiana is inviting people to come record their family histories and life stories using the professional audio equipment for a nominal fee; they also have a team who can visit people off-site who might be in assisted living or unable to drive. "You can sit and listen to family stories when growing up, but this a permanent record and memento," says a founder of The River Project, as it is called.
FORGET-ME-NOT
On the latest episode of The Life Story Coach podcast, Amy Butler interviews New Zealand life story writer Christine Norton on how she expanded her company by taking on business licensees.
First Person Reads
AIR: A RADIO ANTHOLOGY
Hippocampus has released the first of its The Way Things Were series, a line of anthologies that celebrate the things we miss, the things we long for—this one all about radio. ”From first jobs in small town stations to listening to baseball games with grandpa, the 20+ essays take place across the decades in studios of all sizes, in homes, in cars, and, really, wherever the airwaves take us.” Forthcoming titles will celebrate diners, small town newspapers, and mom and pop stores.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
“Now I love it when people ask me how to say my name right, because, hearing it said out of someone else’s mouth makes me feel real,” Rebecca Tamás writes for Granta. “Like a TV being tuned through static that finally lands on a crisp, clear image. Ah, there I am.”
...and a Few More Links
Is the Writing from the Heart memoir workshop (starting tomorrow!) right for you?
How the “genealogies in Genesis show us the impact one life can have on that of another”
A columnist on “the good ole days” and how we never know they are that when they’re happening
Nine facts about your memory you’ll want to know
Best memory journal apps for Android
Read an excerpt from Valerie Jarrett’s new memoir, Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward.
On the real-time thrill of reading a writer’s diary
Just released: Questions I Am Asked about the Holocaust by Auschwitz survivor Hedi Fried
Short Takes
Life Story Links: March 26, 2019
The symbiotic relationship between photography and memory; veteran voices and immigrant storytellers; plus lots of life story & family history audio treasures.
“Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by the necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section: but to the whole picture not one is initiated.”
—Vita Sackville-West
Writer Vita Sackville-West, a prolific diarist and letter writer, circa 1940
Past and Present
AMERICAN STORIES
In Search of Our Roots by Henry Louis Gates Jr. traces how 19 African Americans reclaimed their past. “All of us have ancestries defined at turns by people on the move—people with far more complicated arcs than might first appear in straight lines of descent,” he writes.
ACCESSING PAINFUL MEMORIES
“Once writing the book became the most important and life-affirming thing I could do, my nightly dreams provided me with the vivid memories that propelled me forward,” writes Holocaust survivor Max Eisen. “I was not aware of how cathartic an experience it would be.”
VETERAN VOICES
A debate about the utility and appropriateness of sharing the experiences of war has been waging over at The Havok Journal. In this three-part series writers contemplate what happens if silence becomes the story of your life; the reality of healing through sharing; and the possibility that you don’t get the chance to “work through” traumatic experiences.
THE AUDACITY OF STORYTELLERS
“If I believe that my own existence matters, I am even more confident that each of us has stories that matter,” Mary Ann Thomas writes in a piece exploring how as a nurse and writer, she works toward a culture of care.
Hear, Hear
FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE
Last week I recommended three recent must-listen podcasts about memoir, narrative structure, family secrets, writing prompts, and more—and with each weighing in at under an hour, they’re easy to fit into your schedule.
AUDIO TREASURES
The Library of Congress has added 25 “audio treasures” to its National Recording Registry, including music from Jay-Z and Neil Diamond as well as a 1968 speech by Robert F. Kennedy. The oldest recordings on the list are the earliest-known recordings of Yiddish songs, made between 1901 and 1905. All of the audio treasures in the collection are available to listen to for free at the National Jukebox.
MEMORIES ON CASSETTE
Leora Troper of Portland-based Artisan Memoirs shares a brief post about why and how to digitize family stories that are currently stored on cassette tapes.
VOICES & GESTURES
In the video below, Steve Trainor of Remember Your Life Video in Hampton, Illinois, shares his enthusiasm for personal history with a local television reporter and gets to the heart of why capturing family stories now is of utmost importance. Kudos, Steve!
Photography & Memory
CAPTURING ‘OLD NEW YORK’
“My work is fueled by a sense of loss and nostalgia foretold,” Dimitri Mellos says of his photography project Chinatown. "The act of photographing affords me the illusory comfort that I am preserving a few bits and pieces of what life in this vibrant immigrant community has been like, in a form impervious to the passage of time.”
PHOTO CHAOS
Stumped for what to get someone you love this Mother’s Day or Father’s Day? “One of the greatest gifts that you can give to a parent is to help them to update and organize their treasure trove of photos," suggests Amy Blankson, who offers five steps to guide you through the process.
PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY INTO PAST
“The sheer abundance of mementos, spilling from mobile photo galleries, bestows significance upon ordinary moments,” Veeksha Vagmita writes in this short meditation upon the nature of how memory is impacted by our photographic history, from tattered old albums to present-day phone scrolls.
TOUCH POINTS FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH MENTAL LOSS
“Touch the screen and a memory appears”: The free My House of Memories app has been designed for, and with, people living with dementia and their caregivers. It features historical photographs intended to spark meaningful conversation (personal photographs can be uploaded, as well).
Memoir Love
INSTRUCTIONAL MEMOIR, ANYONE?
”Are you a skilled cook or teacher or technician with a personal story underlying your expertise?" asks Massachusetts-based personal historian Nancy West. Consider combining a retelling of your life with information about how to do something, offering useful instructions that the reader might be able to apply directly to his or her own life.
BOOKTUBE WITH OBAMA
“It’s harder to hate up close. So let’s let each other in a bit more,” Michelle Obama says in this 10-minute interview about her bestselling memoir.
...and a Few More Links
A list to bookmark: The top 25 films that explore memory
Read the March/April issue of Hippocampus Magazine.
Sandra Day O’Connor and Alzheimer’s: a personal story
Social media sites are designed for sharing, not archiving.
Psychological counselor in India develops seven-step storytelling therapy.
An ode to (Australian) family history indexes
What will happen to our cloud-based keepsakes? A millennial’s take
Short Takes
Life Story Links: March 11, 2019
An array of topics, from how to curate family heirlooms and photos to group biography recommendations and a son's loving personal history interview with his mom.
“I wish I had realized that family history is a perishable commodity. It disappears with time, as memories fade, and as loved ones pass on. I wish I had known that the most important aspect of family history is preserving a record of the present for the future.”
—Gordon B. Hinckley
Out of the Boxes
AMONG THE RESIDUE
This book was discovered among the papers not sent to the author’s literary archive in Oxford. "Its yellow and curling title page announced Really and Truly: A Book of Literary Confessions." And inside…the handwritten opinions of the owner’s grandmother, as well as those of Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West.
PRESS PRINT
In last week’s post “Sharing Is Good” I implore everyone to print—and share—family photos. Why? Because besides generating conversation, you will spark joy, find genealogy clues, and discover even more treasures.
CURATE KEEPSAKES LIKE A PRO
“Family curators have been organizing and saving family history for a lot longer than Marie Kondo has been teaching people how to discover joy in decluttering,” observes The Family Curator. "Trends. They come. They go. I’m happy to report that family heirlooms aren’t dead yet."
Storytelling, Your Way
GROUP BIOGRAPHIES
Carolyn Burke’s Foursome is a group biography that interweaves the lives of Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, and Rebecca Salsbury. Here she shares five books that inspired, spurred, or otherwise helped her to think of writing group biography.
GREAT GRANDMOTHER’S GENEROSITY
Personal history varies from family history in myriad ways, though they often do (and should!) complement one another. Here is an example of piecing together a family narrative from documents, a worthwhile step in sharing genealogical research. Just imagine, though, if the people had recorded their own stories—how much richer the narrative would be!
“HAPPY VERY EASY”
“My parents are getting older and even though I have a good relationship with my mom…I’ve never had a super-deep conversation with her,” Kane says. Here he asks her 11 intimate questions “before it’s too late,” and the resulting video, full of playful banter and deeply moving moments, is a wonderful example of how effective—and relatively easy—at-home video interviews can be.
Opportunities Knock
THE LONGEVITY ECONOMY
“According to AARP, the economic activity of Americans 50+ is the equivalent of the third largest economy in the world.” Personal history is one of four career opportunities in the field of aging explored in a recent Forbes article.
SEEKING SUBMISSIONS
Madison, Wisconsin–based personal historian and educator Sarah White publishes first person stories on her blog True Stories Well Told. “Short, true, and diverse in genre—a reminiscence, a reflection on your writing process, a book review, a question—it's all welcome for consideration,” she says.
Voices Carry
“MAMA’S LAST PICNIC”
Margaret-Ann Allison, who would have been 83 years old today, shared a remembrance of “Mama’s Last Picnic” with NPR, where broadcasters were “so charmed by her soft southern accent that they asked her to read it aloud on the air.” While we can’t hear her honeyed voice, we can read it here, as shared by her daughter.
“WHERE THE TROUBLE STARTED”
A traumatic experience changes the course of a girl’s life, and eventually resides deep in a box in her mind. But, she writes from a distance of decades, “it does not belong in a tucked away box like a dark and dirty secret I can’t touch.” Saidee Sonnenberg tries to make sense of experience through writing.
VALUE OF LIFE REVIEW
”What it does when you go back and review your life”—by really digging in, getting to know your parents and their motivations and their parents’ motivations—is it leads you to empathy, Jane Fonda says during this brief interview where she revisits the writing of her memoir and memories of her mother.
...and a Few More Links
Untold story of the Warsaw ghetto: Who Will Write Our History
Help students become oral historians with these complete lesson plans from The Tenement Museum.
Taylor Swift says nostalgia inspires songs: “I love preserving memories”
“Oldtimers, tell your stories. Youngins, start asking.”
Fun tool: What book was the bestseller the year you were born?
See if the StoryCorps Mobile Tour is coming near you.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: February 26, 2019
Writing the suffering, memoir as therapy, family history come to life in a surprising film from Ancestry, plus a few life story reads worth your time.
“Some writers have a more defined sense of cause and effect. Plot. My sense of life is more moment, moment, and moment. Looking back, they accrue and occur to you at a certain time and maybe you don’t know why, but you trust that they are coming back to you now for a reason. And you make a leap of faith. You trust you can put these moments together and create story.”
—Amy Hempel
Toom Sisters, July 1957. Photograph by Al Fenn for LIFE magazine. ©Time Inc.
Writing the Suffering
“ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE ABOUT THAT?”
The complicated choices of memoir writing: Judy Goldman on finally being able to write about her husband.
ADOPTION JOURNEYS
“Preserving the full story of your adoption journey may mean sharing some of the pain, too—but how much you include is a personal decision.“ Last week I delved into this topic in the hopes of helping adoptive parents consider how to best shape their personal narrative.
Understanding Blossoms
MEMOIR = POWERFUL THERAPY
“You validated my life.” Such is the nature of the feedback memoir coach Bob Becker receives from senior citizens and other participants in his Connecticut memoir workshops. “Sharing your story is for you first,” he says.
RAILROAD TIES
In this powerful short film (below) created by Ancestry and Sundance, six strangers meet in Brooklyn—and at the historic Plymouth Church, an integral station along the Underground Railroad, learn how they are bound together by the deeply webbed histories of their ancestors.
See also a panel that was recorded live after a screening of the film, including Harvard historian and Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ancestry historian Lisa Elzey, featured historian Melissa Collom, and featured descendant Gayle George.
First Person Pieces
ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK, WHERE ARE YOU?
Of attending a concert of her childhood musical crush Kavita Das writes that “memories [came] flooding back to me of how it felt to be so small my feet didn’t touch the car’s floor but also to have felt so big that my voice drowned out all the clamor of New York City on those song-filled drives with Mommy.”
STORIES, LONG BURIED
“That grandma told me the story at all was unusual. She lived in the present. Didn’t reminisce.” How one family story leads this writer down a genealogical rabbit hole.
“ME, BY ME”
NYC-based journalist Cynthia Ramnarace learns that, while she is the writer in her family, she was not necessarily the right person to write her own relative’s stories. She explores why, and delves into her inspiration to start Memoiria Pubishing—in the end revealing why she is the perfect catalyst to bring other “people’s stories from minds to lips to paper.”
On Craft
WRITING RETREAT: TWO OPENINGS REMAIN
In honor of her imminent MFA graduation (congrats!), Wisconsin–based personal historian Sarah White is hosting a small-group Nova Scotia writing retreat. Participants will spend three days at Windhorse, a rural farm/eco-retreat, followed by two days in bustling Halifax on the campus of University of King's College.
BUTTERFLY TOWN, USA
On the latest episode of The Life Story Coach podcast, Amy Woods Butler speaks with publisher Patricia Hamilton about a curated community history project for which she received more than 400 submissions—and how she sold out of a 500-print run on launch day.
...and a Few More Links
Chinese immigrants etched their anguish into walls.
Stop sharenting?
View the top 12 finalists in the 2019 RootsTech FilmFest.
A look at how “artful historians” are preserving the past in engaging new ways
On The Life Story Coach podcast: Mike Oke and his unorthodox approach to life story writing
Short Takes
Life Story Links: February 12, 2019
Ruminations on the nature of memories, inspiration for using letters to inform memoir, a pining for handwritten recipes, plus a few family history reads.
“Certain moments are vividly conceived during adrenaline rushes—falling in love, thinking you’re about to get hit by a bus. But the brain isn’t a file cabinet…and what you forget says as much psychologically as what you remember.”
—Mary Karr
Retired man with family, 1959. Photograph by Stan Wayman for LIFE magazine. ©Time Inc.
On Memories and Memoir
DIARIST AS MEMOIR WRITER
An aspiring memoirist seeking famous writers’ letters and essays for motivation receives an inspired list of book recommendations. I can almost guarantee you’ll find something new to you and revelatory on the list.
“THIS IS MY LIFE”
“The past is a giant ball of tangled yarn that I simply do not know how to untangle,” writes N. West Moss in this keen meditation on the nature of memories. Later: “The thread of my own story spools from me like an endless ribbon. It says to me, ‘This is my life. This is my life.’”
CHOOSING YOUR STORIES
“If you answer a few interesting questions while you still draw breath, you will leave a gift of inestimable value to those who come after you,” writes Alison Taylor of Utah-based Pictures and Stories.
Pieces of the Past
FOOD OF LIFE
A reissue of Ntozake Shange’s If I Can Cook/You Know God Can (Beacon Press, 2019) prompts LitHub to share this deliciously personal excerpt. The book’s subtitle, “African American Food Memories, Meditations, and Recipes” merely hints at the rich and eclectic content within, a tribute to food as a people’s living legacy.
RECIPE FOR NOSTALGIA
“The internet is making paper recipes obsolete, but many modern cooks see the cards as tangible mementos of favorite foods and the beloved cooks who made them over and over again.” Frayed edges and oil stains? All the better.
VOICES FROM LONG AGO
Susan Hood of Remarkable Life Memoirs in New York shares a handful of handwritten letters she revisited among her parents’ things, feeling reconnected to them and gleaning a bit of family history along the way.
OBJECT LESSONS
We all know how photos and family heirlooms tell stories, but what about objects as mundane as bakeware? Are there simple objects that reflect significant truths about who you are?, asks Massachusetts–based personal historian Nancy West.
Family History Reads
DIGGING STUFF UP
“They’re the myths that are a part of the story of yourself, whether you like them or not,” Jaya Saxena writes of uncovering genealogical facts. “Learning your history is forced reckoning, asking you to consider whose stories you carry with you and which ones you want to carry forward.”
#NOTATROOTSTECH2019
You needn’t travel to Utah to benefit from the family history event of the year, RootsTech. Discover how you can learn about storytelling, interviewing, and genealogy from the comfort of your own home.
...and a Few More Links
Urban Archive invites New Yorkers to submit photos for their new crowdsourced history project.
Familygenealogy.online launched tools and resources for exploring family trees.
HippoCamp, a conference in PA for creative nonfiction writers, has opened early-bird registration.
“How to Turn Your Parents’ Stuff into Something Cool”
Short Takes