Life Story Links: May 21, 2024

“Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives, and we will call it fate.”
—Carl Jung

Photograph of female workers gathered outside the Dix Building in New York City, by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collection.

Memory, memories, and memoir

THE SELF IN RELATIONSHIP
“My father wrote half of me into being, I suppose. My mother wrote the other half.” Jane Wong “on memoir, permission, and the thorny terrain of writing about family.”

TURNING PAGES OF OUR HISTORY
“Perhaps one of the most memorable treasures women of the Civil War passed onto future generations were letters they sent to their husbands. These chronicles of daily life embraced sorrow, joy, fear, and love.”

WHO ARE THEY?
“What if we began our own character development work with this mandate in mind: Tell the stories they told, the lessons they taught, and the mind that has become our own.” Beth Kephart on lessons from Amy Tan.

“THIS IS MY LIFE”
I’m not sure why LitHub is now presenting an excerpt from Working, Studs Terkel’s classic oral history of Americans’ working lives originally published in 2004, but I’m glad they did: Meet Babe, a checker at a supermarket somewhere in America.

WHY FORGETTING IS BENEFICIAL
“‘Memory,’ writes neuroscientist Charan Ranganath in his new book Why We Remember, ‘is much, much more than an archive of the past; it is the prism through which we see ourselves, others, and the world.’”

‘NAMING ONE’S OWN EXPERIENCE’
“Reconciling a writing life with the life of a mother has always felt like an impossible task,” memoirist Emily C. Bloom writes in this look at the legacy of Pearl S. Buck’s The Child Who Never Grew.

What a picture’s worth

THE HEIRLOOMIST
Last week I wrote about a new coffee table book from photographer Shana Novak, aka “The Heirloomist,” in which the stories of the unexpected family heirlooms within “will play your heartstrings like a symphony.”

PAIRING ANNIE ERNAUX WITH PHOTOS
“With photography...there’s this presumption of the ‘truth’ of the camera, which is also an expectation that a writer like Ernaux, who uses the first-person deliberately, comes up against. In her case, the presumption that the first-person is ‘true’ and not fictive.”

DYNAMIC, CROWD-SOURCED ARCHIVE
The nonprofit cultural heritage organization Permanent.org shares details about its public gallery, a “rich collection of public archives” that they say are a celebration of “the power of personal stories and the impact they can have on future generations.”

FINDING THE ‘SOUL THREAD’
Have you ever heard of a legacy doula? Meet Nancy Rose from the Compass Rose Legacy Foundation and hear her thoughts on how exploring one’s own legacy (through words and photos) helps bring wholeness to individual storytellers in this podcast:

Stories told through food

FROM MAMA’S KITCHEN
“Her food was there all my life, part of my most literal sustenance, and yet I took for granted that the meaning and memory baked into everything she produced would always be there.”

HER EXPERIENCE AS A GREEK JEW
Becky Hadeed talks with a Holocaust survivor about her complicated story “of sacrifice, love, and gratitude,” about the long legacy of a good deed, and the enduring comfort of a jar of cookies (in this case, Greek Koulourakia). Listen below: