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Writing prompts for life story vignettes: 300 words in 30 minutes
By limiting oneself in word count and time allotted for writing, undertaking any life story project becomes both more urgent and more relaxed. Ready, set, write!
Our first two parts of this series, Writing Prompts for Life Story Vignettes, offered up ideas for writing from the senses and a how-to for conducting a thoughtful self-interview. Here in Part Three, we provide a simple step-by-step plan for a timed writing exercise, along with three specific idea prompts to get you started.
300 Words in 30 Minutes, Step by Step
1 - set a timer for 30 minutes
2 - Begin writing on one of these topics:
Create a literary snapshot of someone close to you: a parent, friend, teacher, someone you love…
Think of a turning point in your life and imagine you had made a different choice (not going to college, telling your secret, becoming a parent)…
Write a vignette about an old family photograph in which you are pictured. What is the story of the moment in time captured in the photo—and what is just beyond the frame? What happened just after it was taken?
Whatever writing prompt you choose, try to include striking images that give readers a strong sense of what you see, hear, and feel about your subject.
3 - wait
Let your vignette sit for at least four days to give you some distance. Reread it.
4 - do a word count and edit
Too short? If your vignette is shorter than 300 words, add to your story (by fleshing out details or drawing emotional conclusions) until it reaches this goal.
Too long? If your vignette is longer than 300 words, edit the story down, aiming for a brevity that is crisply focused and conveys some essential truth.
The Value of a Timed Writing Exercise
“The hours we spend talking about writing is time we don’t spend actually doing it,” Stephen King asserts in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
By giving ourselves a time limit, we feel both the urgency to begin (before time runs out!) and a sense of relief that an end is indeed in sight (what’s a half hour, after all, in the scheme of things?).
That urgency in turn inspires us to write from the heart, in our own voice (forget about sounding polished or overthinking things)…to just write.
Find more of our life story vignette writing advice:
Download Free Writing Prompts Guide
Get all our life story vignette writing prompts in one easy-to-read printable guide!
Memory & writing prompts sent weekly to your phone
Short courses for anyone who wants to write about their life—just $15 for 8 weeks of guidance & inspiration!
Life Story Links: June 11, 2019
Storytelling in unexpected places, piecing together personal WWII histories, plus writing prompts, Scrivener notes, and curating our own legacies.
“I thought everything you wrote had to be about England; nobody ever told me you could write about growing up in Ireland.”
—Frank McCourt
Schenectady, New York, June 1943. Photograph by Philip Bonn, courtesy Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
What We Leave Behind
A MEANINGFUL LEGACY
“It’s easy to leave the house, the car, the money, the boxes of pictures,” Sarasota–based personal historian Curt Werner says. “But it’s much harder to leave pieces of yourself.”
MATTERS OF THE HEART
“I was looking for pictures that had the power to turn bitter memories into sweet. Images that said, ‘I love you more than anything.’ Images that whispered, ‘I can’t express how sorry I am to leave you.’” Mary Bergstrom curates her legacy while decorating a new home.
THE (DIGITAL) PIECES OF A LIFE
“If the only way to preserve her memories was to put together the pieces of her digital life, then we had to hack into her online accounts.” Historian Leslie Berlin recounts her desperation to break into her mother’s phone after she died.
Process of Discovery
A SCRIVENER WORKFLOW
Sarah White, whose First Person Productions is based in Madison, Wisconsin, describes her conversion from an occasional Scrivener user to a devotee who finds it “highly useful in finding the best structure for long-form writing projects.”
THE SELF-INTERVIEW
How interviewing yourself (follow-up questions and all!) can be a useful writing exercise for generating life story vignettes.
FILLING IN THE GAPS OF WWII VETERANS
“Those lauded as the Greatest Generation might just as easily be called the Quietest”—leaving family members to wish they had asked more, and to attempt to recreate their loved ones’ stories through a vast archive of war papers.
ONE FAMILY’S NUCLEAR HISTORY
“Never one to talk directly about his role as a pilot in the Second World War, my grandfather instead told my siblings and I scraps of his story that I would eventually stitch together into an incomplete whole,” Tyler Mills writes.
Storytelling in Unexpected Places
OFF THE CHARTS
“There is research that suggests when caregivers know their patients better, those patients have improved health outcomes.” See how personal storytelling is filling the gaps between patients and staff at VA hospitals.
DEPT. OF STORYTELLING
The city of Detroit has hired a Chief Storyteller. You heard that right—and with a team of storytellers on board, The Neighborhoods has become a platform that shares locals' stories and aims to change the traditional narrative surrounding the place they call home.
...and a Few More Links
Do you have (or need?) a writer’s will?
Some research suggests that events in our lives can affect the development of our children and perhaps even grandchildren.
Unique documentary series follows group of schoolchildren over six decades.
Have you listened to episodes from the new season of the StoryCorps podcast?
D-Day vet bonds with 9-year-old through the magic of music.
If you are interested in learning more about a family member who served in WWII, explore this Research a Veteran Guide.
New York State substitutes for the lost 1890 census
Short Takes
Writing prompts for life story vignettes: self interview
In Part Two of our Life Story Vignettes Writing Prompts series, guidance on conducting a probing self interview as an entry point to your stories and memories.
In Part One of our Life Story Vignettes Writing Prompts series, we offered five specific exercises for writing about your memories by using all of your senses. Today in Part Two we give you guidance on conducting a self interview as an entry point to your stories.
Getting to Know You
An oft-recommended exercise for first-time novelists is to “interview” their main characters: Imagine these fictional beings sitting before you, answering a list of questions of your making. By getting to know them, the thinking goes, the writer will be able to flesh out multi-dimensional characters with back-story, quirks and all.
Well, you are the main character of any memoir writing you take on. You know yourself, of course, but it’s a rare soul who sees himself objectively, or who looks upon herself with clear eyes.
So imagine you have been invited to sit across from Barbara Walters. You’re in a cushiony chair, glass of water within reach, ready to take on the tough questions. Ms. Walters, as you presumably know, is well known for making her guests cry, laugh, and gush as they open up about things they rarely if ever have discussed.
Preparing Your Questions
This is one occasion where I will not be offering up suggestions for questions! You must play the role of interviewer and interviewee here.
Be sure to ask the tough questions.
Ask follow-ups!
Probe beyond one-word answers.
Be thorough, asking questions about your past, present, and future.
Think about what you wish people knew about you—and consider answering those questions you wish people perhaps didn’t know, too. Open yourself up to the possibilities.
Generating your list of questions is as challenging a part of this writing assignment as answering those questions will be. Consider this: If you were a journalist about to conduct an interview with somebody famous, you would do your research first, and craft questions to shed light on some of the things you discovered.
Do the same for yourself. Record a list of milestones, big decisions from your life, and key relationships that might be worthwhile to explore. At least some of your questions should develop from here.
You might even consider including some questions that you truly don’t know the answer to yet—questions that will spur you to real introspection, and result in interesting answers that will no doubt prove fruitful for more in-depth exploration in writing.
Proceeding with Your “Interview”
Unless you are a Robin Williams wannabe, chances are you are not going to role-play both characters in this pseudo interview (if you do, please videotape and share—I’d love to see it!). Rather, you have two obvious choices:
Read your questions aloud to yourself, then answer aloud, recording your self-interview with a recording app on your smart phone or with a traditional mini-cassette recorder.
Benefit of this approach: It is often easier to talk at length than to write, and this method is more apt to retain your colloquialisms and the flavor of your voice.
Drawback: If you are going to use this as part of further writing, you will need to transcribe the recording to have it in print.Type, or write, your answers following each question.
Benefit of this approach: Writing something longhand is itself a contemplative act, and doing so here allows for periodic pauses for thinking and crafting your response. That thoughtfulness may result in answers that go deeper than if you were conversationally speaking them aloud.
Drawback: This approach can take longer, or may feel slightly intimidating to someone who does not consider him or herself a writer.
I don’t particularly recommend having a friend or loved one interview you for this exercise (though it is an approach I generally do suggest for family history preservation). Part of the value of this writing prompt is its privacy and striving for depth, and its aim to get you to share things you might not feel comfortable sharing under normal circumstances.
What Comes Next?
As with many generative writing exercises, I recommend setting aside your self-interview answers for a week or so before doing anything else with them. Once that emotional distance is achieved, then you might:
use your interview to write a longer vignette exploring one answer that was surprising to you (or revealing, or maddening, or…)
use the themes within to create a template for how to approach a larger life story project
discover questions that yielded only the beginning of an answer; if, upon rereading your answer, you feel the need to expound, then this may be a topic rife for your attention
determine which questions prompted you to share more than you expected, then (a) consider asking similar questions of a family member to capture their stories; or (b) think about going even further—what would chapter two of your answer be?
Find more tips for writing life story vignettes:
Download FREE Writing Prompts
Get all our valuable memoir-themed vignette writing prompts in one handy, printable guide!
Memory & writing prompts sent weekly to your phone
Short courses for anyone who wants to write about their life—just $15 for 8 weeks of guidance & inspiration!
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
Photographers call it culling
Culling your collection of family photos—whether a year's worth of images or just the shots from your latest vacation—helps retain their value—and stories.
Culling is the process of going through a large collection of images to select those that are the best, whether for delivering to a client (for a professional photographer) or for using in a family album of some kind (for a family photographer).
Culling is not always the most fun part of preserving our memories (it can be tedious, for one thing, and it is almost always time-consuming). It is, however, a critical step in preserving our memories beautifully.
Consider your friend who posts every photo from his recent weekend getaway to Facebook—including images so dark you can barely tell who is present, 10 shots of the same group pose (ugh!), and a few mystery shots that seem to make no sense (think: a corner of a menu or a pile of rocks).
There’s a reason you cringe, at worst, or pass right by that friend’s albums, at best: because the meaning of the group of photos has been diminished by not first culling them.
Why culling matters
Nobody wants to page—or scroll—through endless photos that seem like they were dumped right from your camera’s memory card. As I see it, if you, the photographer, do not respect the photos, why should I?
Culling matters because:
Weeding out poor images is respectful of the recipient’s time.
Including only the best photos helps tell a story and bestow meaning on your experiences.
Presenting a purposefully curated selection of photographs ensures that those you would like to see them—your family, your friends, your descendants—will indeed feel compelled to revisit them, hopefully often.
Culling regularly helps keep your photo collection organized and manageable, making it easier to access a particular photo when you want it, and enabling family genealogists to also find what they may need.
How to approach culling
What NOT to Include
Do not include overly dark images (if, of course, there is one meaningful shot that is too dark but can be salvaged by photo retouching, then by all means, edit it and include!).
Did you snap a series of the same shot in hopes of capturing the best light, or of having everyone smiling, eyes open? Then choose the best ONE. You don’t have to delete the rest, but at least put them in a separate folder called “Outtakes” that you archive in case needed later.
What about shots that mean something only to you (previously mentioned pile of rocks, for example)? Consider your audience, and either caption the photo to reveal its story (“the rocks that would soon become our new backyard fire pit”) or do not include it in your project.
Determining Your Best Images
How you define “best” is contingent upon what you are doing with your photos. If you are creating a vacation memory book, for instance, you will want a mix of pictures that show the places you visited (close-ups, panoramas, textures) and the joys you felt (facial expressions, action shots). If you are editing a wedding shoot, you will want to make sure everyone important is represented, and that key moments are all covered.
It helps to be deliberate: When I am feeling overwhelmed, I often review shots of a similar scene or person side by side, eliminating one at a time as if I were in an eye exam: THIS ONE or THIS ONE? THAT ONE or THIS ONE?
There are many methods for culling—using stars or other labels in Lightroom, say, or creating digital albums in Google Photos. Whatever your approach, be consistent. Not only will that make for an efficiently organized photo collection, but it will also enable you to perfect the craft of culling; you’ll get faster each time you give it a go, and know that types of shots that resonate for you.
The best bit of guidance I can give is to select images that, together, tell a story. Back to that family vacation album: You needn’t include a photo of every.single.place you went, but do select the places that meant something to you, that sparked joy, that you would like to return to some day—and include details that bring said place to life (zooming in on hands in action is always a favorite of mine—hands eating a favorite meal, hands waving a sparkler or steering a boat or resting on a child’s lap…you get the idea?).
Taking the next steps
CULL again?
Your first pass at culling a collection of images might have resulted, still, in a large group. That’s totally fine, but depending upon what you would like to do with your photo collection, you may want to do a second or third pass (selecting images for a family annual book, perhaps, and a smaller collection for a social media share).
CULL, THEN EDIT
Always do any image editing after your have finished culling, There is no sense spending time adjusting anything if you may toss the image later!
INPUT METADATA
Family historians in particular may want to consider adding detailed metadata to photos so names, places, and dates are embedded in the digital files for later reference.
SELECT IMAGES FOR WRITING PROMPTS
Family photos can be especially powerful tools for jogging our memories and recalling stories from our childhood. Select a few photos (read how to choose the best ones here) and, after digitizing and archiving them, schedule some time to reminisce and capture stories. Even if you don’t anticipate writing a full-fledged family history, preserving detailed captions that go beyond who, what, when, and where is a worthwhile endeavor, one that will be cherished long into the future.
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
Writing prompts for life story vignettes: Using the senses
In Part One of our Life Story Vignettes Writing Prompts series, we offer five specific exercises for writing about your memories by engaging all your senses.
When the daunting task of writing a major autobiographical work is broken into chunks, the writing becomes easier to manage. Guided prompts help rediscover lost memories.
In a previous post I introduced the concept of vignettes, and discussed why I think they are an ideal starting point for any life story writer. Today I would like to dive a little deeper and offer you specific writing exercises to help you get started.
Some general guidance for writing vignettes
I recommend keeping a list of ideas in a notebook: Jot down memories that come to you unbidden, people you would like to recall, moments from your life you would like to revisit. Write phrases and visuals that may jog your memory later—Poppy’s red Cadillac, fishing at Johnny’s lake, the first time I wore red lipstick.
Be specific. Be sensual (the smell of the fish, if that comes to you; the tacky feel of the lipstick, perhaps).
And when you need a little inspiration beyond your list of memories, try using one of the following prompts designed to get the memories—and your words—flowing.
sensory prompt 1: allure of a stranger
Go somewhere you can people watch: the mall, a park, the library. Sit in silence and watch. What do you see? Does someone catch your attention? Think: What is it about this person that ...
... seems familiar?
... scares you?
... moves you?
... feels trustworthy?
Imagine yourself sitting down comfortably with this individual over coffee. You can ask one question which leads them to share a story from their past—but you must answer the same question for them.
Write: Imagine yourself speaking directly to this individual, sharing your story and perhaps your reason for sharing and how it makes you feel (is it something you have never told anyone before? that scares you? that makes you proud? joyful?).
sensory prompt 2: power of music
Listen to your favorite album or song. Immerse yourself in it, avoiding other distracting activities while listening.
Write: Where does the music take you? Are you transported to a different time or place? Describe the scene, how you feel. How do different songs connect to different parts of your life?
sensory prompt 3: a room with you
Think of a room where you spent a lot of time as a child, a teenager, or even recently as an adult. Nothing monumental need have happened here; it is simply a place you have stayed, often. Think about the room: What do you see? Smell? Feel? Is there an object you touch? Is there someone with you—or in the next room?
Write: Describe this place in as much vivid detail as you can. Be specific, using all of your senses. Continue to explore who you were while in this place: Why were you there? Did you want to be there or someplace else? How did you feel? Would you return there if you could?
If you have chosen the right location, your writing will develop from external setting to a sense of internal place.
sensory prompt 4: show & tale
Choose an object from your life and write about it. Of course, what you choose will determine the course of your storytelling.
Think inside the box:
a piece of jewelry
something from your kitchen
a talisman/lucky charm
a trophy
your camera
a handwritten recipe
…and outside the box:
a tattoo
your curly hair
an old car
a tree from your childhood yard
Write: Imagine yourself touching the object, and describe that sensory experience. Tell the story of your object, weaving yourself into the story and finding the meaning and significance of the role this object has played in your life or a loved one’s life.
sensory prompt 5: taste of the past
Think of a time when someone you loved cooked for you. Perhaps it was a holiday gathering, or more likely it was an ordinary day—cookies during after-school homework, say, or breakfast before a family road trip. Close your eyes and try to conjure the smells and tastes of the food, and use them as a gateway into your memories.
Write: Start not with the food, but with your loved one, and describe the scene: the cooking, the discussion, the background noise and plans for the day. What was your loved one wearing? How did they make you feel? Were you aware that the act of cooking for you was an act of love? Have you made this food for someone?
Your FREE Writing Prompts Guide
Get all our life story vignette writing prompts in one handy, printable guide (and yes, it’s free!).
Read more vignette writing tips
This is the first in a four-part series on how to begin writing your life stories with short, evocative vignettes.
Explore the other posts in this series:
PART 2: Writing Prompts for Life Story Vignettes: Self Interview
PART 3: Writing Prompts for Life Story Vignettes: 300 Words in 30 Minutes
And if you}re interested in beginning a larger life story project to preserve your stories for the next generation, start here: How to Plan a Life Story Book in 3 Simple Steps.
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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