Memories Matter
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Life Story Links: February 16, 2021
When memories are left unrecorded, legacies fade; but when stories are preserved, the rewards are myriad. The value of personal history, memoir, and more.
“Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.”
—Marcel Proust
Vintage Valentine’s Day postcard with early 20th-century illustration
In Pictures
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
The experience of abundant togetherness during this pandemic for Mandy Patinkin and his wife, Kathryn Grody, “is a matter of public record, because scenes from their marriage—in all its talky, squabbly, emotional, affectionate glory—are all over social media, courtesy of their son Gideon, 34, who started recording them for fun.” What a delight!
SCENES FROM A BYGONE ERA
When boxes of photos of everyday life in the Shetland Islands were salvaged from the recycling heap and shared online, residents’ memories went into high gear. “Overnight, dozens of people were leaving messages and helping to identify the people featured, chiming in with notes on family homes and sharing memories of places they spent time as children.”
Lives Recorded, Lives Unrecorded
AND NOW, BLANK PAGES
“I often wish I could ask my father who he was at 23. I wish I could ask what his bad habits were, or how he treated his mother, or what he did on Saturdays. But his ability to recall his past has disappeared…” A daughter unearths her father’s journals from a time before Alzheimer’s stole his memories.
A GIFT FOR ALL
“At the time I thought I was doing this for my kids, and my grandkids… It would be ancient history on a personal, family level,” Randy McDaniel says of recording his father’s stories while he was in a nursing home. When his dad died years later, Randy realized, “Nope. I recorded it for myself.”
BROOKLYN SERVICEPEOPLE
World War II veterans buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY, will soon be honored by a team of dedicated archivists to offer “a better story than what’s on the gravestone about who these people were and what they did.”
“MY FAMILY AND THE MOB”
“As the hurts are revealed, they offer unexpected insights that traverse generations. The life of the grandfather explains the life of the father, which explains the life of the son.” He knew his grandfather was a mob boss., but was that the whole story? A review of Russell Shorto’s Smalltime.
Pen to Paper
A CONUNDRUM, INDEED
“Not the first modern trans memoir, but perhaps the first with literary ambitions, Conundrum helped establish one way of thinking about what it means to be trans.” A thought-provoking piece about how one person’s story can become less relatable, even “obsolescent,” over time.
A FOOLPROOF WRITING PROMPT
Last week I wrote about the two-word writing prompt guaranteed to keep even the most blocked writer’s memories—and pen—flowing, which was introduced to me by one of my favorite memoirists.
Kinship and Connection
FIRESIDE CHAT
This conversation between Dave Isay, founder and president of StoryCorps, and Dr. Ira Byock, founder of Providence’s Institute for Human Caring, is now seven months old, but its message—how stories build human connections—is as relevant as ever.
UNLOCKING MEMORIES & EMOTIONS
“While we could have looked at photos together before the pandemic, we rarely did. Now, using ‘share screen,’ we gaze at the snapshots Dad took while he was working as a fishing guide on Yellowstone Lake, and as a relief doctor for the Havasupai people who live near the Grand Canyon. The photos release memories.” How Zoom has enabled one family to become closer during the pandemic.
LONG-DISTANCE EXCHANGE
“I get to have a 45-minute to an hour conversation with one of my oldest, closest friends every single week. Not just, ‘How’s life?’ or, ‘How’s your job?’ but real, actual subjects that mean something. Not many people can say that.” Behind the scenes at “The Bittersweet Life” podcast.
AN ARTFUL MEMORIAL
A quilt stands as a monument to a mother who looms large in the memory of her family: “It’s a way to preserve history and...to keep our mom’s memory alive and remember her after all these years.”
...and a Few More Links
“Secrets & Memory: A Workshop for Writers with Dani Shapiro & Albert Flynn DeSilver” on March 6
Smithsonian presents the Mother Tongue Film Festival, “The Healing Power of Storytelling”
Mike Nichols, intuitive storyteller
Read an excerpt from Gabriel Byrne’s new memoir, Walking with Ghosts.
Considering creating a commonplace book?
For one woman, prayer cards provide treasured connections.
Memory and technology: on how we retrieve images from the past
Short Takes
Life Story Links: February 2, 2021
Lots of memoir excerpts to inspire your own life story writing, plus more recent articles with tips and ideas for memory-keeping of all kinds.
“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
—Oscar Wilde
Children on sleds in Central Park in New York City, circa 1915, photograph by Bain News Service, courtesy Library of Congress Digital Collection.
The Craft of Ghostwriting (or Whatever You’d Like to Call It)
CHANNELING THEIR VOICES
“Readers just want the truth, particularly in a memoir. And they can really sense when they’re getting it. So I’m mostly hanging out, waiting for the truth to come out and reveal itself.” Michelle Burford on why she prefers to be called a “story architect” rather than a ghostwriter.
THEN AND NOW
Even before co-founding NYC–based Remarkable Life Memoirs, Samantha Shubert was in the business of helping tell empowering life stories. Here she shares a story about how a plum copyediting job inspired her, plus details on her company’s new hybrid memoir/cookbook offering.
Family History, Personal History
FINDING THE JOY
There are plenty of lists of generic family history interview questions around, but this one offers up an array of topics both silly and fun to add some levity to any probing personal history conversation.
STORIES OF BLACK EXPERIENCE
A Connecticut author describes her profound feelings upon reading an ancestor’s obituary—“I cried when I found out what his life was like, being enslaved, wanting to escape, wondering who he left behind”—and encourages Black families to study their genealogy to find personal stories of tragedy and triumph.
THE SHAPE OF US
“What is it that makes us, us?” Kat Nicholls asks in this piece that explores the role our memories play on our identity, and what happens when they’re taken from us.
END-OF-LIFE THOUGHTS
Most of the academic studies social psychologist Michael Ent was able to find were focused on practical aspects of support for the dying rather than on trying to harvest their wisdom—so he undertook a study to see what was on their minds.
PANDEMIC PIX
In an effort to preserve imagery from the Covid-19 pandemic, the Library of Congress’s ‘rapid response’ collecting has already secured special projects from nationally recognized artists and photographers. Now they have extended an offer to citizens across the country to submit their own pictures of pandemic experiences.
Lots of Great Memoir Reads
THE PRICE OF INNOCENCE
“I am a first-generation immigrant…but my real identity, the one that follows me around like a migraine, is that I am the daughter of immigrants,” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes in this evocative piece about waking up from the American dream.
A FITTING LEGACY
Deborah Orr never got to see her memoir, Motherwell, become a bestseller, as she died before its publication. In a recent podcast Damian Barr reads an excerpt from this “book about how a deeper understanding of the place and people you have come from can bring you toward redemption.”
IN THE WAKE OF DEVASTATING LOSS
“I feel it in me, that uncomplicated, devastating happiness; it is as true and tactile as anything I’ve ever felt. But behind that feeling lurks the panic that the world can drop out from beneath your feet at any time, because that’s true, too.” Read an excerpt from Emily Rapp Black’s memoir Sanctuary.
LEAVING HOME
“The way my father tells it, my mother was wrong and the police were wrong and my memories were wrong.” Memoirist Danielle Geller tells the story of a life by what was left behind in this excerpt from her new book, Dog Flowers.
BEYOND THE GREAT SILENCE
“Over many years I came to understand that I had been infused part of my father’s traumatic history. Why this happened I do not know. All I do know is that it became the dark ghost inside me, the lining of my heart, the stones of my kidneys.” Jonathan Lichtenstein on writing through the silences of a lost family history.
IMPORTED FROM DENMARK
“I bring news of Tove Ditlevsen’s suite of memoirs with the kind of thrill and reluctance that tells me this must be a masterpiece,” Parul Sehgal writes of The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency, translated from the Danish.
Personal History Through Obits
AN ALL-STAR HUMAN
"It was supposed to be the greatest triumph of my life, but I was never allowed to enjoy it,” Hank Aaron said of his storied baseball career. "The only reason that some people didn't want me to succeed was because I was a Black man." Sports Illustrated and The New York Times laud a legend and a gentleman.
AKA LAWRENCE ZEIGER
An intent listener during his CNN interviews, Larry King was fond of saying, "I've never learned anything while I was talking." King, who conducted 50,000 interviews according to the BBC, is quoted by the LA Times as saying, “For this to all happen to a Jewish kid from Brooklyn is a damn impressive thing.”
...and a Few More Links
New “memory safe” product safeguards your digital and physical memories.
John Waters learns that his ancestor owned slaves.
A counselor speaks to the importance of memories and offers tips on how to preserve them.
Presidential biographies, and presidential mythologies
Preserving memories one flower at a time
Early Snapchat employee debuts Yoni Circle, a social storytelling app for womxn.
Project Memory Co. creates photo books with journaling elements.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: January 19, 2021
Timely reads on new memoirs and biographies, tips for fine-tuning your life story writing & curating your family photo archive, plus more links to bookmark now.
“I could tell this story with myself as the villain or the hero, innocent bystander or agent provocateur, and each time I’d be telling a form of the ‘truth.’ What is the value of a truth that has an infinite number of forms?”
—Marc Hammer
On this day in history: Snow fell for the first time in Miami on January 19, 1977 (though for the most part the flakes melted when they hit the ground).
Recent Memoir & Biography
“SUFFERING WITHOUT SENTIMENTALITY”
“I wanted to abandon all this personal history, its darkness and secrecy, its private grievances, its well-licked sorrows and prides—to thrust it from me like a manhole cover,” Bette Howland wrote in her 1974 memoir W-3, which has been recently reissued.
ON WRITING AND LIFE
Gabriel Byrne’s new memoir, Walking with Ghosts, has been hailed as a “masterpiece” by Colum McCann and as “dreamy, lyrical, and utterly unvarnished” by Colm Toibin. Listen in as Byrne talks about memory, loneliness, and more.
ANOTHER SIDE OF SYLVIA
“There’s this sense in other biographies that she was only writing to please other people—to get love from her mother, her professors, her teachers—and I thought that short-changed her own sense of ambition and determination and the pleasure that she got out of writing.” Heather Clark on not falling into the Sylvia Plath trap.
Timely Tips
TREASURE, NOT TRASH
Last week I wrote about what everyone can do to ensure their own family photo collections are inviting to the next generation—for, whether we want to believe it or not, many kids simply throw away those once cherished pictures.
LISTEN UP
“What might happen if you read your memoir aloud as if talking to a therapist…?” David Perez ponders in this piece on the power of speaking your writing to life (spoiler alert: there is substantial power in the exercise).
FREE SELF-PUBLISHING WEBINAR JAN. 25
During “Everything You Want to Know About Self-Publishing but Are Afraid to Ask” you’ll “leave with a roadmap to the self-publishing journey so you can start taking action now.” Register for the free January 25 Zoom class here.
...and a Few More Links
The Statue of Liberty—Ellis Island Foundation has opened a new online shop.
“You can’t tell a life story or family history with 60,000 photos.”
Learn all about the Army Navy “E” Award, a.k.a. the Excellence in War Production Award (WWII).
Study sheds light on how the timing of memory is encoded in the hippocampus.
Singer Billie Eilish set to release photo book filled with personal memories.
Read the current issue of Brevity.
California–based personal historian Perry Hamilton reflects on a wedding.
Preserving memories one image at a time
Short Takes
Life Story Links: January 5, 2020
Ways of remembering, first-person essays worth your time, and efforts to tell stories of real peoples from all walks of life: new reads for the new year.
“The years on someone’s gravestone are when they lived. The dash represents how they lived.”
—David Allen Lambert
![On this day in 1920, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 in what would come to be known as the Curse of the Bambino. Pictured above: Lou Gehrig, George Herman [Babe] Ruth and Tony Lazzeri in a 1927 photograph by Un…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55d35604e4b08af97dadd334/1608672183720-I6KA9WATTCEDFFYYW7K5/lou-gehrig-babe-ruth-tony-lazzaeri-yankees.jpg)
On this day in 1920, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 in what would come to be known as the Curse of the Bambino. Pictured above: Lou Gehrig, George Herman [Babe] Ruth and Tony Lazzeri in a 1927 photograph by Underwood & Underwood, courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.
All Peoples
SHOULD OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT?
“From the pews of a church where white deacons once refused to seat African Americans, a group of Black singers in Alabama reminds us why preserving our memories of this historic year is vital—even if we'd rather just leave 2020 behind.” Take three minutes and forty-five seconds to relish the sounds and watch here:
MAKING HISTORY RELATABLE
The Canadian War Museum made a conscious effort to include a diversity of voices in its latest exhibit, “Forever Changed: Stories from the Second World War,” which turns to individual stories to make an impact. “You learn something about the person—maybe it’s hopeful, maybe it’s sad, maybe it’s scary—but each one stands on its own as something that you can feel a connection to.”
SHARE YOUR PERSONAL HISTORY
Are you an immigrant of color in America? NPR invites you to share a short audio clip telling about your family’s history involving “themes of identity and assimilation in America” for a new project looking at our country’s melting pot.
Flickers from the Past
AH, MEMORIES!
Dan Rodrick writes that memories “are like old toys that need to be taken from storage and wound up to make sure they still work. If you don’t do that, they stop speaking to you, and one day you’ve forgotten the sound of your father’s voice.”
“THE GHOST ON THE ZOOM CALL”
Judy Bolton-Fasman reflects on the weekly group video calls she has with her mom, who is in a nursing home, and “the times she sees her mother, my abuela, inhabiting a Zoom cubicle…. Abuela has been dead for over forty years.”
IN LETTERS
“There will be no (or vanishingly few) books of collected emails, and who would want them?” Dwight Garner wonders in this piece mourning the letters that will no longer be written, and remembering the great ones that were.
First Person Reads Worth Your Time
SELF-DISCOVERY THROUGH READING
For Jenny Offill, “Mrs. Dalloway is…[a book] to which I have mapped the twists and turns of my own autobiography over the years. Each time [I reread it], I have found shocks of recognition on the page, but they are always new ones, never the ones I was remembering.”
A VIRTUAL BEST-OF
The editors at Narratively (“human stories, boldy told”) have picked their favorite stories from the past year, and I recommend perusing their list. A few of my favorites:
“I Quit My Job at 50 to Reinvent Myself. Pro Tip: Don’t Do This.” by Ivy Eisenberg, laced with a wonderfully acerbic self-deprecating wit and canny cultural touchstones
“Snowed in with a Ghost” by Krista Diamond: “‘Building’s haunted,’ the landlord said, with more boredom in his voice than the statement merited. ‘Ramona. That’s the ghost’s name. She was here when this was a brothel.“”
“My Secret Life as a Coronavirus Nomad” by JB Nicholas: “As a freelance journalist, I’ve struggled financially for years. Then the pandemic hit and I got thrown on the street. But I will go on — I always do.”
...and a Few More Links
A beloved WWII photo comes to life in a virtual reunion.
A year-by-year glance over the first ten years of The Public Domain Review
Tips for anyone considering creating a family website
A look back at “the lives they lived”: remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year
Short Takes
Life Story Links: December 22, 2020
Last-minute reads while we await Santa's arrival: first-person tales to inspire & foment, diaries expected and not, plus some family history for good measure.
“Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos and become story.”
—Sven Birkerts
A whimsical vintage Christmas card, created between 1950–1963, by Oscar Fabres, a Chilean illustrator who studied art in Paris and settled in New York in 1940, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.
Accounting for Life
HONORING THE YEAR GONE BY
Austin–based video biographer Whitney Myers shares some thoughts on the sacred work of reflection including helpful pages you can print to guide you in New Year’s reflections and a bunch of fun conversation starters.
NOW IS THE TIME TO START (OR RESTART)
“About 10 years ago, I started adding a diary calendar feature to record at least one thing that happened every day—the profound and the mundane—so that I captured both the forest and the trees that make up the map of my life.” David G. Allan, who has kept a diary consistently since 1986, makes a compelling case for journaling about your life, now.
ACCIDENTAL DIARIES
A writer peruses his recent history through 14 years’ (and $12,017 worth) of Amazon purchases: “Looking through it all was unexpectedly cathartic; almost like a shorthand, accidental diary that I never got around to keeping.”
What’s Missing
AURAS OF POSSIBILITY
“Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.” This exploration of our unlived lives—and what it’s like to explore them—is an intriguing and worthwhile read from Joshua Rothman.
THAT EMPTY FEELING
Last week I shared what I hope will amount to a dose of comfort for anyone grieving a loved one during this holiday season—a post that is all the more relevant as, right now, it seems as if we’re all grieving something.
First Person Tales
“SITTING ON MY MOTHER”
An encounter with his high school sweetheart (and her White Shoulders perfume) lead this writer on a path of rediscovery, reorientation, and re-disorientation that ends at his mother’s grave—and “an urge to reckon with the stories that make up [his] life.”
ARCHIVE OF AMERICAN VOICES
The latest season of the StoryCorps podcast explores how people deal with one of the only constants in life: that things change. Listen in to stories of how people cope while their lives are in flux, highlighting the lessons they’ve learned along the way. On the following episode, hear how Alice Mitchell and her younger brother Ibukun Owolabi found a way to move forward—from baby steps to teenagehood—after losing their mom:
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
“According to my parents, the only real Santa was in Kirven’s Department Store. The other Santas around town, including the one at the new Kirven’s in Columbus Square, were ‘Santas helpers,’” Perry Hamilton, a personal historian in Laguna Hills, California, writes. Read about his childhood Santa realization here.
AN UNEXPECTED RESET
“I was tremblingly weak, and yet my COVID lifestyle was strangely enjoyable. My spirit floated somewhere above my suffering body, experiencing the days like shards of light piercing the dark.” Memoir coach Sarah White, a self-described “freelancer who rarely takes vacations,” on the surprising gifts of a relatively mild bout of COVID-19.
A Little Family History
HOLIDAY TRADITIONS OF YORE
After spending most of the last year writing about (and getting to better know!) her great-grandparents, Lisa O'Reilly wondered what Christmas traditions they brought with them when they came to America. Here the California–based personal historian dives into “Christmas Traditions from the Old Countries.”
HERITAGE DISCOVERY VIDEOS
The folks at RootsTech invite you to submit a personal video from 90 seconds to five minutes showcasing your heritage. Topics include food, culture, travel, and, as exemplified in the video below, traditions. They’re also seeking videos that highlight genealogy tips and tricks. Learn more here.
...and a Few More Links
New personal history business launches in the UK.
The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction now available in paperback
One mom learns that “my props were my memorabilia and my kids were my memories.”
The joy of reliving her childhood bookshelf
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of “This American Life,” Ira Glass, a pioneer of the genre of audio narrative journalism, picks a few of his favorite episodes.
Examining the archives of writer Julian Barnes
Short Takes
Life Story Links: December 8, 2020
An array of recent stories on the how sharing our life stories can be transformative (for both the teller and the listener), plus memoir resources & news.
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
—Anaïs Nin
Bubble gum kids series of photographs by Cornell Capa for LIFE magazine, January 1947.
The Stories of Our Lives
LETTERS TO THE KIDS
"Somehow we had never really found time to tell stories. Everybody was just busy doing stuff, living our lives." After Bob Brody, a writer in NY, came to this realization, he spent a year writing letters to his grown children “as an act of love and memory…but also as a legacy—a repository of knowledge about the relatives who came before them.”
JUST SAY YES
What are the chances that we’ll all hear—and preserve—our parents’ stories if we don’t ask for them? Yeah, not great. Here are three easy ways to get the family storytelling ball rolling.
“NARRATIVE THERAPY”
Longtime South Carolina–based personal historian Mary Johnston shares how she helps Lowcountry writers transform memories into memoirs during the pandemic.
“TRUTHS THAT MATTER”
“I am haunted by what I don’t know about my father, and long to know, no matter how many pages of declassified documents pertaining to his old night fighter squadron that I’ve been able to obtain,” Paul Hendrickson writes in this meandering but worthwhile piece that’s, ultimately, about two writers and their complicated relationships with their fathers’ pasts.
Write On!
FIND SERENITY THROUGH WRITING
For the past several years Massachusetts–based personal historian Nancy West has led writing groups at which she promotes the value of establishing a daily writing practice. During the pandemic, she compiled her favorite "three-minute journaling" prompts into a book.
DEMENTIA LETTERS PROJECT
Kathryne Fassbender, CDCS, founder of Dementia Letters Project, invites you to write a letter—addressed to “yourself, your family, dementia, to a loved one with dementia, the community, God, anyone, everyone”—sharing your dementia-related story.
The Power of Our Voices
LETTERS TO HER SON
The New York Times calls Homeira Qaderi’s memoir, Dancing in the Mosque, “a stunning reminder that stories and words are what sustain us, even—and perhaps especially—under the most frightening circumstances.”
WOMEN’S VOICES
“This documentary [The Girl Inside] will make you think about the power of your own voice, the healing gift of story-telling, and what message you want your life to speak into the world.”
Miscellany: Food, Photos & Grief
FOLLOWING THE BREADCRUMB TRAIL
“Each bowl of okra soup or snippet of kitchen-table conversation is an ark from the past…” How to apply insights from chefs and culinary historians to cook family recipes that hold special meaning to you, even if the elders who originally made them are gone.
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG
A baby's first sip of stout, picnics beside cars, and braving cold seas: Nostalgic photos showing family life in Britain between the ’40s and ’70s collected in new book.
AMIDST HER GRIEF
“There was no gathering or reception after, no hugs and fellowship with our family and friends, no stories exchanged in anyone’s yard,” memoirist Nicole Chung writes in this poignant piece about the signposts of mourning and honoring our grief.
...and a Few More Links
Older adults remember past events with remarkable accuracy, new study finds.
Forever ambassador Ellen Thompson-Jennings details layouts and resources for making your own family stories book.
One family’s Milanese Jewish recipes that survived generations of secrecy
Winter online writing classes from Creative Nonfiction (including historical narratives and the thirty-minute memoir)
Thoughts from writer Sarah Cannon on writing a hybrid memoir
Interesting thoughts on the idea that memory lies at the heart of various academic disciplines
Short Takes
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: November 13, 2020
From deep thoughts on biography & finding your identity through writing to lighter fare on music & family photography, a roundup for memory-keepers everywhere.
“A qualification for writing good memoir is being courageous about looking at the truth of your life.”
—Joyce Maynard
On this day in 1940, Disney’s animated classic Fantasia was released. This lobby card features a scene from the “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” segment in the film (and, of course, features one of my very favorite things—a book). © The Walt Disney Company
Memorializing Our Lives
IN CONVERSATION WITH A BIOGRAPHER
“At the beginning, you don’t know what you’re looking for. The shape comes at you as you get deeper into the archive, and a strange force field starts to grow…” Hermione Lee, writing her first biography of a living subject in Tom Stoppard, on how to write a life.
“HERE I AM”
Poet Javier Zamora says that his poems are like a first draft of him understanding his own life. Here he is in conversation about using writing as a vehicle to make sense of his lived experience, and how his memoir must differ from his autobiographical poetry.
PITCH IN
A surprising number of my recent projects have been tribute books overflowing with letters honoring someone special, whether for a milestone birthday or a celebration of life. Now, a group gifting option makes such projects accessible to even more people.
Artifacts of Times Gone By
SLIDE INTO THE PAST
"I realized that by placing the slides in my current landscape, I created not only a connection between his life and mine, but a trail of memories, each that had its own association for both of us." Photographer Catherine Panebianco honors her parents using her father’s old slides.
UPON MY DEATH…
“A series of meticulously curated Spotify playlists is just as valuable as a beloved record collection; seeing the last Google search someone made is every bit as intimate as the unwashed mug left on the table, the last thing to have touched their lips.” A host of companies have arisen to help preserve our digital legacies.
A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
“The first time I put the records on to see if they worked, it was like grandpa wasn’t gone and he was playing a private concert for me in my home,” historian Jason Burt says. He rediscovered, remastered and released the music of his grandfather’s WWII Air Force band.
...and a Few More Links
Bruce Springsteen’s autobiographical new album
Riveting TV interviews with Titanic survivors
Soldier’s note is echo of World War I era.
Maureen Taylor, aka The Photo Detective, puts the spotlight on Collectionaire as a digital hub for curating family history materials.
Dinty W. Moore suggests five books that have helped define flash nonfiction.
Driven to document the moment, more and more people are journaling since the pandemic began.
Short Takes