Life Story Links: April 23, 2024

“Words that come from the heart enter the heart.”
—the Torah

Vintage poster produced between 1936 and 1938 by the Work Projects Administration; image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Digital Collection. The posters were designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia between 1936 to 1943.

Memories, memoir, and more

LIFE AS STORY
“We live in the tribe, in story, in lyric and meter and song that does not end,” Dorothy Allison says. “In story—the ones we share and those we have not yet crafted—we live forever.”

WRITE ON, MY FRIENDS!
Good writing prompts will rid you of blank-page anxiety—and you can easily write your own! Last week I shared five easy steps to drafting a library of personalized memoir prompts.

FAMILY HISTORY PRESERVATION TIPS
In honor of preservation week, Permanent.org shared two posts on intentional, effective memory-keeping: “Gathering & Transferring Your Digital Materials in One Place” and “Tips for Preserving Your Physical Materials.”

LIFE WRITING WISDOM
“This is sacred work, so you should have a bit of fear; otherwise, what are you writing for?” Megan Febuary writes about memoir. Here, the memoir writing checklist she says she could have used years ago.

DRAWING HER WORLD
“The other day one of my boys said to me, after looking at my stack of sketchbooks, ‘Mom, this is a crazy amount of memories… whenever we decide to sit down and look through these, it will take weeks!’” Samantha Dion Baker shares some of her favorite sketchbook pages with thoughts on why they resonate.

CROSSROADS
“Some moments [in our lives] stand out as particularly poignant, ripe for reflection, celebration, and preservation,” legacy filmmaker Jamie Yuenger writes in this piece identifying seven of these times when beginning a legacy project may make great sense.

INVITING FAMILY STORIES
“A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.” Elizabeth Keating on the questions we don’t ask our families but should.

Stories, across generations

“FOR VANESSA TO WRITE A BOOK”
“Is that why you left me these stories? You couldn’t give me the love and nurturing I needed, but you could give me this, your version of your life in your hand. You could give me answers, so that with them I could do what I’ve been trying to do for more than fifteen years—‘Para que Vanessa escriba un libro.’”

INTERGENERATIONAL TALE OF A DIVIDED LAND
“While living in Vietnam, my father remained a constant presence in my thoughts, despite our minimal communication. I began to contemplate the concept of the motherland, the land of our ancestors, and think more about the hardships my father had endured to rebuild his life.”

ABUELAS’ INTANGIBLE HERITAGE
A new project from Latinos in Heritage Conservation is transforming research and geodata into rich and engaging StoryMaps to honor and preserve Latine histories, changing the way we remember the past.

On recent memoirs of note

‘PATRIOT’
Before he died in prison, Aleksei Navalny wrote a memoir. It’s coming this fall, and has already been translated into 11 languages, including Russian.

REMEMBERING A DISAPPEARING PAST
“I am looking for the past, I say.” Suzanne Scanlon on the act of ‘walking into the past’ to write her memoir, Committed, and of returning to fact-check her memories, pre-publication.

MATZO BALLS AND MEMORIES
“Joan Nathan has spent her life exploring Jewish culture through recipes. Now in her 80s, her new book is her most personal work yet—excavating her own culinary history.” Listen to the story: