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Life Story Links: October 5, 2021
This week’s roundup includes the best in first-person storytelling, the scoop on new memoirs, explorations of how memory works, & plenty of family history fun.
“Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.”
—Joseph Pulitzer
Vintage photo of kids playing football, October 1947, by Wallace Kirkland for LIFE magazine; © Time.
Celebrating Hispanic Heritage
VIVAN LOS VOCES
in collaboration with StoryCorps, AARP has launched “Vivan Las Voces” (Long Live the Voices), a national audio story collection project dedicated to capturing the diverse stories and experiences of the U.S. Latino community. Head to StoryCorps Connect to record your conversation, and tag it #VivanLosVoces to become part of the permanent collection.
KICKOFF STORYTELLING EVENT OCT. 25
The Power of YOUR Stories—Hispanic Heritage Celebration is a free online event on Monday, October 25, 2021 at 12pm ET. Panelists will weave stories connected to caregiving, food, family, and more, and hope to inspire folks at home to record their own stories.
TAKING IT TO SOCIAL MEDIA
Latino individuals “from San Francisco to Seattle to Miami are reflecting on their family’s history and contributions in celebratory social media posts highlighting their relatives' and ancestors' work and journeys.”
Meet the Storytellers
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN STORYTELLERS
“I’m always surprised. I still can’t believe that I gave birth to you. And I feel the same way about the stories.” Writer Meg Wolitzer interviews her mother, Hilma, also a writer, for the first time.
“TAKING BACK MY OWN HISTORY”
“Betty has an amazing ability to share her own story in a really personal and vulnerable way—not so people know more about her, but so they understand that they too have a story. We all have a history—and it’s just as important as the history we learn in school.” Meet the fabulous, 100-year-old park ranger Betty Reid Soskin.
GRATITUDE, ALWAYS
For years I’ve shied away from sharing praise about the books I create (and the experiences clients have partnering with me to make them). Thanks to a few fellow creative entrepreneurs for the push to not only share some testimonials, but to celebrate them!
Memoir & First-Person Storytelling
MEMORY, IDENTITY, AND STORY
“Rather than prioritizing confession and catharsis, today’s authors are focusing on the question of who gets to share their version of things and interrogating the form, along with themselves.” Megan O’Grady on how recent literary memoirs take a different tack.
WALDORF STORIES
In honor of its 90th anniversary, NYC’s Waldorf Astoria hotel has created a website to share stories through videos, memorabilia, and essays. The oral history hub kicks off with curated selections from workers and guests (including a couple who hid a time capsule in their wedding suite).
THE TALENTED MS. HIGHSMITH
“The eight thousand pages of diaries and notebooks [novelist Patricia Highsmith] left behind—an edited version of which will be published this November—depict an engaged, social, and optimistic youth.”
NAMING THAT EXPERIENCE
“Eldest daughter of an immigrant household. For a phrase I’d never heard before, it immediately summoned an avalanche of memories.” Ruth Madievsky with an interesting take on learning lessons on diasporic identity from meme culture.
“THE STORYTELLER”
W.G. Sebald’s books suggest that we are powerless to remember adequately and powerless to forget, according to a review of new biography Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald by Carole Angier.
Family History Fun
ROAD TRIP TO THE PAST
After being a stranger to family reunions for 64 years, Zoe Morrison, a personal historian in Florida, drove more than 3,000 miles in search of bits of her own family history.
GAMIFYING HISTORY?
Svoboda 1945: Liberation, a new video game from an independent Prague-based studio (preview below), includes interviews with real actors and historically accurate memories of people who lived through WW2. “We believe that games are a great medium for telling stories and have the power to tackle serious issues,” the lead designer said.
Memory Bank
THE LONG GAME
“Memory is an unruly machine, embedded in a Russian nesting doll of systems and circuits that is the brain,” Hannah Seo writes in this thoughtful look at how making predictions may impede memories from encoding.
POSSIBLE BOOST TO MEMORY RETENTION
A new discovery about the effects of magnetic brain stimulation could provide a way to improve episodic memory in people with conditions such as dementia.
...and a Few More Links
Would it surprise you to learn that the original paper ship manifests from Ellis Island no longer exist?
How making Nuclear Family helped documentarian Ry Russo-Young come to terms with her past
Are video games “crucial to the ‘creation of public knowledge of the past’”?
Jim Sheeler, who turned the simple obituary into a high and reverent art, has died.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: September 21, 2021
From memories out of the box (the boxes in your attic, that is) to the craft of writing memoir, this week's curated roundup has plenty to inspire and instruct.
“When you write your family history, be a recording angel and record everything your descendants might want to know.”
—William Zinsser
Vintage photo of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Garrity and family at home in Yonkers, New York, circa 1942, photographed by Arthur Rothstein.
Stories from Life
HISTORY THROUGH A PERSONAL LENS
“I don’t know if the horse had died or simply fainted with heat exhaustion. The peddler was slapping the horse in the face, yelling and cursing at the stricken animal in a futile attempt to force it to stand up.” Scenes from the Great Depression in NYC through the eyes of a boy.
DELVING INTO THE PAST
“The people from my past became like characters…. I found a lot of information that shows how people in my family tree thought alike. We would have been like best friends had we grown up at the same time.” On building a family legacy.
FINDGING HEMINGWAY
“Interweaving his eventful biography—a life lived at the ultimately treacherous nexus of art, fame, and celebrity—with carefully selected excerpts from his iconic short stories, novels, and non-fiction, the [now-streaming] series reveals the brilliant, ambitious, charismatic, and complicated man behind the myth, and the art he created.”
“In order to have something new to write, he had to have something new to live.” This panel discussion, “Hemingway and Biography,” happened back in May but I only just discovered it and thought others might be interested, as well.
The Craft of Memoir
OUT OF THE DARK
“So when you write about your life, don’t skip over the hard parts. What would be the point? Who would you be fooling? Yourself? Oh please.” Abigail Thomas asserts that vulnerability is a memoirist’s strength.
TALKING ABOUT TOURETTE’S
Salt Lake City–based personal historian Elizabeth Thomas offers up a few tips for memoirists who want to address a physical disability in their writing, using recent book The World's Strongest Librarian by Josh Hanagarne as a model.
Memories Out of the Box
THE VOICE OF THINGS
“I found that going through my accumulations became an ongoing encounter with everyone I’ve been on the way to whoever I am now,” Sven Birkirts writes in this meditation on why we keep what we keep.
PHOTO LEGACY
“Long after I’m gone, and my son becomes the steward of our family stories, these photos will remain. They will live on. They will speak across generations, saying, ‘I was here. I mattered to someone. I left a legacy of love. I helped start your story.’” Rachel LaCour Niesen on leaving a legacy of love.
YOUR LIFE IN 30 THINGS
Listen in as Martie McNabb discusses a community challenge she recently launched around choosing 30 objects that can tell your life story—and why so many people have trouble discerning which sentimental items to keep and which to get rid of:
In the Books
DRAW YOUR LIFE
Last week I shared some artful memory-keeping ideas from the world of sketch journaling plus the books to help you begin to draw your life, no pressure.
ONE-HOUR INTERVIEW = 5,000-WORD CHAPTER
“I realized that if writing was not my strong point, it didn’t make much sense to start with it, over-invest, and become frustrated with a behavior I personally found hard to do.” Barry O’Reilly on working with a writing partner.
...and a Few More Links
Journalist Ron Steinman shares memories of helping his Vietnamese family resettle in Maryland after the Vietnam War, and makes parallels to the plight of Afghan refugees today.
Ancestry corrals three leaders from tech world to help grow business.
On getting past writer’s block (and the kitchen table as hub for story sharing)
Short Takes
Life Story Links: September 7, 2021
A thoughtfully curated list of recent stories on how to write memoir, preserve memories, organize photos, and leave a legacy for the next generation.
“History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.”
—Jodi Picoult
Vintage photograph of women picking carrots in Camden County, New Jersey, October 1938, by Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, courtesy Library of Congress Photo Archive.
Safeguarding Photo Memories
EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
September is Save Your Photos Month and there are a wealth of free video sessions geared to DIY memory-keepers. You can register once to gain access to all the workshops throughout the month. A few to have on your radar:
Three simple ways to create a photo legacy
Five tips for downsizing prints and memorabilia
Treasure hunt: finding the gems
Capturing family stories
Manageable memory keeping
Create a family archive
Tell your story: family history
SAME AS IT EVER WAS
“I remember the bonding and the togetherness of those times maybe even more than the actual photographs,” Kenneth Dickerman writes about huddling around a slideshow of family photos when he was a child in this review of Snapshots 1971-77.
Fragments of Recent Memoir Writing
THE PROMISE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
“Most of all, I liked that I could help Ba Ba believe that one day, no one would think we were immigrants, that we really and truly belonged here.” Read an excerpt from Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang.
DIVERGING PATHS
Dawn Turner, author of Three Girls From Bronzeville, visits the neighborhood where she grew up in Chicago—where she saw “drug dealers beside surgeons, prostitutes beside university scholars”—and reflects on different paths taken from the same place.
Memory-Keeping Miscellany
CARETAKERS OF AN INVALUABLE ARTIFACT
A family hid their Bible in an attic as Nazis invaded. Almost 80 years later, it was reunited with the family’s heirs; a small postcard tucked inside the Bible confirmed its original owner.
WISDOM FROM ADVERSITY
Last week I wrote about three professional lessons I learned during the pandemic, including that human connection transcends technology.
ROSH HASHANAH FOOD HERITAGE
The recipe for chef Michael Solomonov’s coffee-braised brisket, a signature family recipe that began with his grandmother Betty, has evolved with each generation.
Write Your Life
FREE 5-DAY WRITING CHALLENGE NEXT WEEK
“We specifically look at key firsts throughout each decade of your life and demystify how to write these defining stories,” Patricia Charpentier says of her new FREE weeklong course. Registration closes at 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday, September 13, 2021. Click here to see a video invitation from Patricia with more details about the challenge.
...and a Few More Links
Matthew Nickerson, founder of the Private Historian, is profiled in Classic Chicago Magazine.
Book Riot’s list of 12 great indigenous memoirs
Creative activities to plot your life and revisit your memories
The story of J.P. Morgan’s ‘personal librarian’—and why she chose to pass as white
Raphael Simon on whose material is whose when everyone in the family is a writer
Some fun back-to-school memories
Check out the latest issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: August 24, 2021
A curated collection of recent stories about writing—and reading—memoir, creating lasting legacies, and telling family stories in engaging, truthful ways.
“A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
Vintage postcard of Trinity Church in Boston, 1899. Photograph courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1898-1931.
Conversations Worth Having
JOURNEY TOGETHER
A memoir should be a conversation, not a monologue, Beth Kephart opines in this excerpt from her latest craft book, We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. “Find a place for a ‘we’ inside your pages. Step down from the stage. Lower the lights. Mingle with the audience.”
INTERVIEW SUBJECTS, GET READY!
Know someone who is about to be interviewed about their life? Share these six tips for getting comfortable with the idea of stepping up to the mic and telling great stories.
Behind the Memoirs
WHEN GUILT, GRIEF, AND SHAME COLLIDE
“I’m revealing major flaws about myself that I’m going to get judged for, but that’s what makes a story interesting,” memoirist Rachel Michelberg tells Marion Roach Smith on the QWERTY podcast. “I wrote it because it was my truth, and there was shame at the time, but there isn’t shame anymore.”
“WE SHARE THE SAME SKY”
“‘I had so much of my grandmother’s stuff that I probably could have written a biography of her life without ever leaving my bedroom,’ said [Rachael] Cerrotti, while sitting in her apartment in Portland. ‘But I wanted to hear the language, see the landscape, and explore what it all meant in my life.’” (I am completely engrossed in this the memoir right now, fyi!)
GUIDE TO GRIEVING
“It wasn’t even a year since my father had died, I hadn’t completed my Jewish mourning cycles and rituals, I was still a raw and cracked egg, and this book was born amidst my half-cooked grief.” Merissa Nathan Gerson on writing her grief in Forget Prayers, Bring Cake.
‘REMEMBERINGS’ OF A SINGER-SONGWRITER
“Early on, [Sinéad O’Connor] realizes, ‘In real life you aren’t allowed to say you’re angry but in music you can say anything.’ It turns out that she thought real life and music were the same thing.”
THE MORRIS SISTERS
“It didn’t take me long to realize that for women who were so famous within my family, there didn’t seem to be much written about them in the world.” Julie Klam on tracking down the truth and telling the story of her notable relatives.
Creating Legacies
PRESERVING HER FATHER’S PHOTO LEGACY
“I am so proud of my father’s body of work and the fact that his legacy will now live on in perpetuity…. Also, this legacy will no longer be my responsibility. For that, I am greatly relieved.” Houston–based video biographer Stefani Elkort Twyford prepares and ships off her father’s photo archive, with pride and a twinge of sadness.
HONORING A QUIETLY JOYFUL SOUL
While most people visit StoryCorps to interview a loved one, Libby Stroik recorded memories of her grandfather on her own, as his memories were fading. “If I could ask him something now I think I would probably ask him what his secret was,” she said, “cause he always seemed so grateful for living.”
HIDDEN HISTORY
How Vancouver–based personal historian Mali Bain went from a box of photos and ephemera to a richly researched book about the uncle her client never met.
Video Inspiration
LIFE INSPIRES ART
“Dear son, Charles wrote on the last page of the journal, ‘I hope this book is somewhat helpful to you. Please forgive me for the poor handwriting and grammar. I tried to finish this book before I was deployed to Iraq. It has to be something special to you.’” The upcoming movie A Journal for Jordan, due out in December and based on a true story, was inspired by this original New York Times article by Dana Canedy and the 200-page father’s journal her partner wrote for their son. Here’s a preview of the film:
A NEW CHANNEL FOR FAMILY STORYTELLING
Jamie Yuenger, who has long produced legacy videos for families as founder of StoryKeep, is now offering private podcasting as another medium for story sharing and preservation. Here she gives a brief intro to the concept:
...and a Few More Links
North Carolina documentarian aims to preserve family histories with video heirlooms.
How blockchain could have saved the Library of Alexandria (and what it can do for future historical preservation)
Netflix’s Misha and the Wolves is “as much about storytelling as it is about the Holocaust.”
Why Billie Jean King finally took control of her own story
Short Takes
Life Story Links: August 9, 2021
A bi-weekly roundup focused on ideas and practical tips for preserving your legacy, writing about your life, and reading memoir and biography as inspiration.
“I had already planned the journey back. During quiet afternoons I spread maps onto the floor and searched out possible routes to Ceylon. But it was only in the midst of this party, among my closest friends, that I realized I would be traveling back to the family I had grown from—those relations from my parents’ generation who stood in my memory like frozen opera. I wanted to touch them into words.”
—Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
A little “on this day in history” trivia: On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World. It is commonly believed that his contemporaries feared he would sail off the edge of the Earth, but the fact is that 15-century Europeans did not believe the Earth to be flat. This reproduction of a 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemuller (image courtesy of Library of Congress) is the first to label America and show it as a separate land mass.
What’s New in Memoir & Biography
FORWARD GLANCE TO POSTERITY
American writer Shirley Jackson “fully expected her correspondence to be published one day. (She implored her parents to save everything she wrote to them.)” This newly collected collection of her letters covers a range of quotidian concerns as well as her experience making a living as a writer while raising four children.
BY QIAN JULIE WANG
“Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.”
AN EXPANSIVE BIOGRAPHY
“Even at the end of this extraordinarily intimate book, Mildred remains somewhat of an enigma. ‘Despite her wish to remain invisible,’ Donner writes, ‘she left a trail for us to follow.’” Why All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is “a remarkable work of family history.”
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
“‘Who are you?’ I want to ask the gentle gnome in front of me. ‘And what have you done with Lou Sedaris?’” A new personal essay by David Sedaris charms and intrigues.
Storytelling Miscellany
OPENING QUESTIONS
Last week I wrote about my three favorite questions to start a personal history interview with, and when to use each to initiate free-flowing and interesting family stories.
VISUALIZING FORGOTTEN STORIES
“Are women real keepers of our past? … How important in the context of collective memory is personal history, and should it be part of the school textbook? Is it possible that the carefully listened story will teach us sensitivity and openness to other people?” Questions raised by the Art & Memory exhibit based on oral histories of Polish women’s wartime memories.
FROM SUITCASE TO THE CLOUD
A new advertising campaign for cloud storage provider Dropbox portrays the company as a trusted partner for storing—and sharing—our most cherished digital mementos. Here’s a clip:
Learning from Memoir Masters
ANNE LAMOTT, UNCENSORED
“Now, we all love stories about ourselves, right? That’s what the tribal storyteller tells. And that’s what people like about my stories, because they’re the stuff in me that I know is universal and holds up a mirror to them.” Anne Lamott in conversation with Tim Ferriss about “the really real,” the writing life, and so much more.
BETH KEPHART, REFLECTIVE
Through teaching memoir, Beth Kephart has explored “how it feels to go unseen, how the fear creeps in when our stories keep their distance, how it is essential, always, to live with purpose so that we might write with meaning.”
Leaving a Legacy
ETHICAL WILLS
“You might make the mistake of believing you are in control of your legacy, when it is largely determined by the people who have been influenced by you in some way.” Massachusetts–based personal historian Susan Turnbull offers two-hour ethical will workshops.
INHERITING STORIES—AND RESPONSIBILITY
As the generation that experienced the world’s first atomic attack fades away, Hiroshima is training younger volunteers to share the experiences of nuclear survivors. The memory keepers, called denshosha, spend three years learning to tell a survivor’s story as the survivor wants it told.
LIFE WRITING AS RESPONSIBILITY
“Without stories imparted from grandmother to mother, to son to daughter, our DNA is as sterile as computer code, a raw set commands with no context.” A co-founder of Biograph on preserving generational wealth through intergenerational storytelling.
...and a Few More Links
Book publishing cost calculator: What to expect to pay for everything from manuscript editing to promotion
“Don’t be afraid to tell your stories. The world will be better because you tell them.”
Google Photos releases a memories widget for Android.
Show-and-tell for grownups in Toronto
Tips for how to make photography help, not harm, your memories
A list of things millenial kids might actually want to inherit from their parents (hint: they all involve family memories!)
Short Takes
Life Story Links: July 27, 2021
An array of reads for memory-keepers of all kinds including great autobiographical writing, thoughts on what we remember, and the stories within our heirlooms.
“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more sneakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are to be sure a miracle every way—but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.”
—Jane Austen’s Fanny Price, Mansfield Park
Vintage postcard, “Two of a Kind” (1898 - 1931), courtesy The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collection.
Recent Autobiographical Writing Worth Your Time
“A VERY GOOD LIAR”
“My mother is home from the hospital after being sick, and I want to stay close to her. It is a beautiful day outside, but I would rather be here, inside with her, than outside playing. I am seven, in the second grade.”
RECOLLECTIONS OF HER MOTHER
“Years later, while staring out my Brooklyn apartment window, [my mother] said with genuine bafflement, ‘I assumed you kids would be exactly like me. It horrified me that you weren’t. You were a separate narrative.’” Bex O’Brian on her wildly permissive mother.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AN APOLLO MISSION WALK
“Pulling a two-wheeled, rickshaw-like contraption for their tools and rock samples, they set out confident that they knew just where the crater was—‘right over that way,’ as Mitchell put it.” A captivating third-person look at what it was like to walk on the moon in the summer of 1971.
On Film
A RECORD OF PIONEER LIFE
Lora Webb Nichols created an intimate record of Wyoming in the early twentieth century including what “might be the largest photographic record of this era and region in existence.” Browse not only her photographs but also transcripts of her diaries (1897-1907) and an unfinished manuscript for her memoir, I Remember, via the American Heritage Center.
ONE MAN’S QUEST FOR HAPPINESS
Filmmaker Morgan Neville, who “specializes in unknotting the real story from the public narrative,” says it was helpful that he never met the subject of his most recent documentary, Anthony Bourdain.
What Gets Remembered
LET THE MEMORIES BEGIN
After months in lockdown, we all seem keen to “make memories”—memories that “will become, we hope, stories we will tell and retell, cherished flashbacks that will become part of our personal history.” But can we really ‘make’ them?
TELL YOUR STORIES, IN SPITE OF IT ALL
Two things no one tells you about writing your own story: that it can be really hard (but it’s still worth the effort), and that your family members might not care (but they will, one day)
Heartfelt Possessions Hold Memories
A PRICELESS MEMORY BANK
“While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a captioned photograph is worth at least double that.” Ally Bunbury on the comfort to be found in memories and remembering.
THE BOOK OF OUIDA
“I felt a bit of her soul attached to those objects, talismans that would make me feel like I was closer to her,” HGTV star Erin Napier says of her grandmother’s things. But it was finding her Mammaw’s handwritten recipes that was the real family treasure.
ARTIFACT, RESTORED
“An amateur genealogist, he cared less about preserving the Book of Psalms…than the family history—the first of it penned by his great-great-great-great-grandmother.” A man’s 250-year-old family Bible is brought back to life—and good for another century.
USED WITH LOVE
“Not only do heirlooms matter more when they have a story, but they are treasured when we associate them with love,” writes Elizabeth Thomas, a personal historian based in Salt Lake City. How to continue infusing those objects with love? Use them, of course!
...and a Few More Links
Prince Harry to publish memoir next year that he calls “wholly truthful.”
Family History Library reopens after long pandemic closure.
Library's vintage postcard collection is a timeline of Phoenix history.
Archivists at the University of Michigan-Flint campus hope to write history books from the perspective of “real” people.
Memoir review: Crossing the River: Seven Stories that Saved My Life by Carol Smith
Personal history gift ideas for celebrating the trailblazing women in your life
Short Takes
Life Story Links: July 6, 2021
During this Fourth of July week our roundup includes thoughtful pieces on the nature of memory, how vulnerable to get in autobiographical writing, and more.
“There were so many stories in just her life alone. And what about all the lives before and after her? The mothers and daughters that had bred her, that had bred me, that I myself would breed? I sat there fingering the crinkling, yellowed diary with new energy now and lost in thought.”
—Carmit Delman, Burnt Bread and Chutney
Foster’s Freeze ice cream stand in Cloverdale, California, photographed by John Margolies, 1991, part of his Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
From the Research Files
GRIEF, A TIMELESS EMOTION
Holding onto everyday items as keepsakes when a loved one dies was as commonplace in prehistory as it is today, a new study suggests. “Even the most mundane objects can take on special significance if they become tangible reminders of loved ones no longer physically with us,” archaeologist and author Lindsey Büster says.
MEMORY WORKS
After reading Lisa Genova’s new book Remember, I wrote about why understanding the basics of how our brains encode memory can help us both remember the things we want in the future and retrieve precious memories from our past.
Our Lives in Stories
A BLACK FAMILY KEEPSAKE
“All That She Carried focuses on a worn, cotton bag given to a girl by her enslaved mother before the child’s imminent sale. The sack would re-emerge decades later, adorned with [an] embroidered family history.”
VULNERABILITY AS A TOOL
“The thing that’s so difficult about personal essays is that they’re awfully personal. There’s an answer to this conundrum, and it has to do with cows.” Jess Zimmerman on being vulnerable in first-person writing.
THE THERAPEUTIC EFFECTS OF STORY SHARING
“I had all the material for my book, and I needed to guard my time to write it. But she was reluctant to give up my undivided attention.” Debra Dean on the complex relationship between subject and biographer.
“A RIP VAN WINKLE HOLIDAY”
Pam Pacelli Cooper reflects on how different this Fourth of July is from last—what was lost, what’s still here—and why it’s important to preserve our memories “before they are papered over and lost forever.”
...and a Few More Links
Are self-hosted photo management apps strong alternatives to Google Photos?
“You will very normally forget most of your life.” A Q&A with Remember author Lisa Genova
Three personal historians highlight their pandemic quest for home in varied media.
Short Takes
Life Story Links: June 22, 2021
This week's curated list for family historians, memory-keepers, and memoirists includes new book reviews, great first-person reads & thoughts on story sharing.
“For many who reminisce, the story—the end product—is the most important outcome; but for others it is the therapeutic process of revisiting and reconsidering memories which is more important.”
—Barbara Haight
Vintage photo for LIFE magazine; uncredited. © Time.
Objects of Affection
BETWEEN THE PAGES
A visit to novelist Philip Roth’s personal collection at the Newark Public Library in New Jersey (just opened on June 8) promises to delight with books crammed with Roth’s handwritten marginalia, personal letters tucked between pages, and one of seven scrapbooks his mother kept about his life.
“MY FATHER’S SHOES”
“His dress shoes, wingtips and oxfords told a straightforward story.... But the beat-up shoes he wore at home and in the yard were mysteries, and their images lingered with me,” Clorisa Phillips writes in this short personal essay.
Memoirs & Personal Essays of Note
TRAVEL GUIDE TO THE HEART
“Even though [Bad Tourist] is full of exciting, accidental, ill-advised experiences while on the road, [Suzanne] Roberts just as deftly moves into writing about those moments when “the world itself shifted” and finds the deeper revelations in her discomfort.”
CHILDHOOD, CATHOLICISM, AND CONFESSION
“We were a baptized bunch, but regular church attendance was never on the menu…. If Sunday was the Lord’s day, we were only taught to pray to the gods of the split-finger fastball and John Wayne.” A delightful excerpt from Danielle Henderson’s new memoir The Ugly Cry.
“THE MIGRANT RAIN”
“All this lives on in me, in the tense and aching body I’ve inherited. They are the things that make these words possible. This is how the story, with its many gaps, continues.” Vinh Nguyen is haunted by the ghosts of migration.
PROOF OF LIFE
A theorem has a teleological cast; one idea follows another, in a steady march toward a concise conclusion. A life isn’t necessarily like that. My dad still marvels at a career and a life that he never could have anticipated.
A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A 16-YEAR-OLD ACTIVIST
From the diaries of teenage naturalist Dara McAnulty: “Mum thinks I invented this memory from a photograph, because I wasn’t even two years old. But I’m convinced it’s real. Maybe I processed more of it when I was older, attached new memories, but that moment left such a deep, warm feeling.”
Stories Told, Stories Received
IT TAKES TWO
Did you ever notice how magical it can be when two people swap personal stories? Last week I wrote about the top three benefits of having an engaged listener to your stories.
WE BELONG TO EACH OTHER
StoryCorps has released a new season of animated shorts that bring poignant moments from participants’ interviews to life. I was moved by this one in which a grandson recounts his relationship with his grandmother, his “first roommate”:
CHAIN OF REMEMBRANCE
“What might I pass along that will be experienced—by those I will someday leave behind, and those to come—as something of value?” Andy Schmookler embarks of what he calls “the heirloom project.”
A SURVIVOR’S LEGACY
Chicagoan Fritzie Fritzshall, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, recently died at the age of 91; she dedicated her life to fighting against hatred. In the clip below, she remembers a family member who saved her life:
...and a Few More Links
Ever read a graphic memoir? Check out a brief excerpt by Rebecca Hall (I recommend viewing on a full screen).
Lisa Kagan of Family Heirloom Arts has released a new book, Coming Home to Myself.
Short Takes