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

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.

...and a Few More Links

• Matthew Nickerson, founder of the Private Historian, is profiled in Classic Chicago Magazine.

• Book Riot’s list of 12 great indigenous memoirs

• Creative activities to plot your life and revisit your memories

• The story of J.P. Morgan’s ‘personal librarian’—and why she chose to pass as white

• Raphael Simon on whose material is whose when everyone in the family is a writer

• Some fun back-to-school memories

• Check out the latest issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.

Short Takes