Life Story Links: September 7, 2021

“History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.”
—Jodi Picoult

Vintage photograph of women picking carrots in Camden County, New Jersey, October 1938, by Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, courtesy Library of Congress Photo Archive.

Safeguarding Photo Memories

EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
September is Save Your Photos Month and there are a wealth of free video sessions geared to DIY memory-keepers. You can register once to gain access to all the workshops throughout the month. A few to have on your radar:

Three simple ways to create a photo legacy
Five tips for downsizing prints and memorabilia
Treasure hunt: finding the gems
Capturing family stories
Manageable memory keeping
Create a family archive
Tell your story: family history

SAME AS IT EVER WAS
“I remember the bonding and the togetherness of those times maybe even more than the actual photographs,” Kenneth Dickerman writes about huddling around a slideshow of family photos when he was a child in this review of Snapshots 1971-77.

Fragments of Recent Memoir Writing

THE PROMISE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
“Most of all, I liked that I could help Ba Ba believe that one day, no one would think we were immigrants, that we really and truly belonged here.” Read an excerpt from Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang.

DIVERGING PATHS
Dawn Turner, author of Three Girls From Bronzeville, visits the neighborhood where she grew up in Chicago—where she saw “drug dealers beside surgeons, prostitutes beside university scholars”—and reflects on different paths taken from the same place.

Memory-Keeping Miscellany

CARETAKERS OF AN INVALUABLE ARTIFACT
A family hid their Bible in an attic as Nazis invaded. Almost 80 years later, it was reunited with the family’s heirs; a small postcard tucked inside the Bible confirmed its original owner.

WISDOM FROM ADVERSITY
Last week I wrote about three professional lessons I learned during the pandemic, including that human connection transcends technology.

ROSH HASHANAH FOOD HERITAGE
The recipe for chef Michael Solomonov’s coffee-braised brisket, a signature family recipe that began with his grandmother Betty, has evolved with each generation.

Write Your Life

FREE 5-DAY WRITING CHALLENGE NEXT WEEK
“We specifically look at key firsts throughout each decade of your life and demystify how to write these defining stories,” Patricia Charpentier says of her new FREE weeklong course. Registration closes at 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday, September 13, 2021. Click here to see a video invitation from Patricia with more details about the challenge.