“When interviewing your elders, you’re the anthropologist who wants to understand the world from someone else’s point of view, and the key is getting details about ordinary life.”
—Elizabeth Keating, Ph.D.

Lessons in craft

KEEN SENSES
Last week I wrote about how smells (such as of Mom’s perfume or Grandpa’s grease-stained clothes) and sounds—especially music—can trigger long-buried memories helpful for writing memoir.

CLASS IS IN SESSION
This lesson from Storytelling School with The Moth focuses on the importance of conflict in storytelling, with a video story from Tig Notaro, suggested activities for your own compelling storytelling, as well as creative prompts.

ALL THE INGREDIENTS YOU NEED
Before you begin editing and designing your family cookbook, here are a few specific things you can do to elevate it from run-of-the-mill recipe guide to an essential family tool and heirloom.

DESIGN FORWARD
This limited-edition printed showpiece is an example of a unique way to treat family history (in this case, the entire British royal family!) through a graphic approach.

MEMOIRIST ABIGAIL THOMAS IN CONVERSATION
Memoir doesn’t consist of stacks of neat unalterable facts. Writing memoir is a fluid, messy process—there are rough patches, maybe a tsunami or two, and what you are writing might take you somewhere you hadn’t imagined.”

Writing our lives

DIARY AS MAP OF CREATIVE WORK
John Steinbeck had two requests for his diary: “that it wouldn’t be made public in his lifetime, and that it should be made available to his two sons so they could ‘look behind the myth and hearsay and flattery and slander a disappeared man becomes and to know to some extent what manner of man their father was.’” 

THE SPIRIT OF AN ERA
“Unlike the inward-focused journal intime (a personal diary) the journal extime is outwardly focused, captures something of the times, of life as it is lived collectively, but of course, it also inevitably paints a portrait of the person who’s writing down the details of that outside world.” Annie Ernaux’s translator on the memoirist’s latest book.

LIVING & AGING JOYFULLY
“I could just hear his voice ringing through every page,” Rob Schwartz says of the manuscript he discovered years after his his father’s death, which he has now edited and released as The Wisdom of Morrie:

ONE FAMILY, THREE GENERATIONS
“Father and daughter never establish much of a connection, but the author begins to pull other threads of her family’s past and present. A lot of material comes loose” in the memoir Mott Street by Ava Chin.

The undeniable power of story

HIS HISTORY IN HIS WORDS
“Most of the time [my daughter] Debbie tells my story, because I have certain points where I start to cry, and I can’t go on,” Gerald Szames said. He finally told his own survival story 80 years after the Holocaust.

GENERATION STORYTELLING
In this recent podcast episode (listen below), StoryKeep’s Jamie Yuenger discusses the growing trend among multi-generational family offices and businesses to document their history professionally amidst a shifting media landscape:

PROBING KOREA’S HISTORY & ANCESTORS’ STORIES
“In memorializing, remembering, and holding onto pieces of stories which belong to parents and grandparents only a couple decades before, [Kyung-sook] Shin finds unity in the ‘things that went missing between her and her parents.’”

HEALING THROUGH NARRATIVE
“Storytelling can be a powerful skill to develop to help others understand their own narrative but also for you to better understand yourself.”

Always learning…

FREE PRESERVATION LECTURES
During Preservation Week, libraries across the U.S. hold events that highlight what we can do, individually and together, to care for our personal collections and to support broader public preservation efforts. This page from the Library of Congress compiles presentations from previous years in one place.

PASSWORDS, PHOTOS & MORE
From naming legacy contacts for online accounts (including those housing your precious photos) to safeguarding social media history, how to secure your digital life before you die.

...and a few more links

• Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson discuss film preservation as “the protection of memories.”

• Tools to format and publish e-books

• Holocaust Remembrance Day: Finding new ways to never forget

• The U.K.’s Police Gazette: What it is and how to search it online

• “The Making, Keeping, and Losing of Memory”: Ferrier Prize Lecture 2023 given by Professor Richard Morris

• Broadway legend Chita Rivera dances through her life in a new memoir

Short takes