Life Story Links: May 9, 2023
“It is a captivation like no other—to hear about the adventures of those that have come before, those whose legacies are entwined with ours.”
—Joy Callaway
Vintage poster produced 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.
Writing our lives
“A NORMAL, TERRIFYING CHILDHOOD”
“I spent many nights in Cuba sitting on the porch with my family, listening to their stories, and likely learning from the way they told them. This book feels very much like the storytelling I experienced as a child.”
WORDS AND PICTURES
I write a lot about the big-picture aspects of preserving our personal histories, but last week I offered up some nitty-gritty advice about how to write the best captions for your memoir or life story book.
MINING THE DETAILS OF OUR LIVES
“So, which elements are more true, the ones penciled on notebook pages as a teen, or the ones whose impact set a course for my life, even if recalled inaccurately?” Amy White writes in this thoughtful piece about ways of remembering.
WORK, DIVORCE, WOMANHOOD
“I was angry at myself, and more than a little ashamed, that I allowed this to happen, and that I had unwittingly modeled to my children what women’s work was…. Caregiving.” Read an excerpt from Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and read an interview with the author here.
FROM THE BACK CATALOG
Gregory Cowles is drawn to journals “for their conscious dance between private and public, for the freedom they grant writers to experiment with style and with self, and not least for their inherently fragmentary nature, each entry a new beginning.”
Honoring the past, one story at a time
HISTORIC SILHOUETTE PORTRAITS
“We just realized that [the digitized archive] will be of real interest to people who are descendants or who have relatives represented in this album, who have no other image of a great-great-grandfather, great-great-grandmother.”
FRAGILE YET ENDURING
“I really do believe that archives and collections are always telling us new stories,” a professor said of the exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, at Princeton University through June 4, 2023.
POIGNANT GLIMPSES INTO THEIR LIVES
In this affecting piece NYT readers share “the digital scraps they found after a loved one passed away,” from a to-do list note (“remind Linda that I love her”) to a photo of the back of one dad’s head…each moving in its own way.
Form and function
BEFITTING THE OCCASION
Six staff at Shepherds, Sangorski & Sutcliffe, one of the oldest bookbinders in England, spent over 300 hours binding and finishing four bibles for His Majesty King Charles III’s Coronation.
AN EXPLORATION OF FORM
“How, I ask myself, do writers generate ghost narratives—a turn we didn’t see coming, an unexpected destination?” Leslie Jill Patterson explores the flash nonfiction ending that appears from nowhere.
THOUGHTS ON GHOSTWRITING
“That’s the mystic paradox of ghostwriting: You’re inherent and nowhere; vital and invisible. To borrow an image from William Gass, you’re the air in someone else’s trumpet.” J. R. Moehringer on collaborating on Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare.
...and a few more links
Short takes