“Tell your story. Take the data of your life and turn it into real people doing real things and you will move mountains. You will change the world.”
—Dave Lieber

Bearing Witness to Stories of Others

THE FINE ART OF LISTENING
“Good listeners ask good questions. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned as a journalist is that anyone can be interesting if you ask the right questions.” Kate Murphy, author of You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters, on how to talk less and listen more.

CREATING A NARRATIVE IDENTITY
“When the future is running out, can we make more of the past? I often struggle with my role as a caregiver for patients at the end of life. I know the most healing things I can offer aren’t the things I usually do,” writes Dhruv Khullar, M.D., M.P.P. in this thoughtful piece. What are those healing things? “To sit. To listen. To explore what it’s all meant.”

FULL CIRCLE
A son’s photographic journey through Alzheimer’s with his dad results in a grant with which he plans to create a book. What’s up next inspires me just as much: “He has begun making appointments with his mother, who is living in his childhood home, to photograph her…. She plays Mahjong, goes to the grocery store, keeps busy. She is full of life. And he wants to be there with her, documenting it.”

FIGHTING FOR THE ANONYMOUS
“It hurt like hell to hold her story. It hurts like hell to tell it. It would hurt a thousand times worse than hell if I hadn’t stopped to hear it. We are to blame when we do not memorialize the living,” writes Beth Kephart in this “memoirist’s chant.”

Telling Our Own Stories

SEALED WITH LOVE
“A different human wrote to the 24-year-old me than the one who wrote to the 44-year-old, but there are aspects of her in these later ages,” writes Ann Napolitano, a novelist who writes to her future self every ten years. “One of the lessons in these letters is that our lives have chapters—I just happen to have an envelope to mark each of mine.”

NO EXCUSES
For anyone intimidated by the idea of writing their life story, here are four specific tactics to write their way in, one memory at a time, and finally get that memoir started.

PICTURES HOLD STORIES
“Photos will spark your memory much better...if a small number of them are curated into an album. This more manageable collection of photos will increase the chances you’ll engage with them on a meaningful basis later on.”

Voices of the Holocaust

January 27, 2020, was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and many media outlets helped to remember and honor the six million Jewish victims and millions of other victims of the Holocaust. A handful follow.

NEVER FORGET
Edith Fox sometimes told friends she wanted the words “Holocaust Survivor” on her tombstone. But she didn’t want to talk about what she had endured. It was simply too painful. Until her health recently began to fail and she decided, at age 90, that she didn’t want her story to die with her.

“LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN”
In an excerpt from A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman’s Harrowing Escape from the Nazis, Patrick Modiano introduces us to the sweeping journey of Françoise Frenkel's No Place to Lay One’s Head, which Modiano opines belongs in the company of literary giants.

FACES, LIVES
Survivors: Faces of Life After the Holocaust is a photo portfolio by Martin Schoeller, who “felt that it was his professional and personal responsibility to not only reflect on and learn from the Holocaust, but to help memorialize it” with these unflinching portraits of survivors.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Echoes of Memory is an ongoing collection of survivor reflections and testimonies from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The remembrances are varied and poignant, well worth reading—and sharing.

...and a Few More Links

• Renovated museum celebrates New Orleans' Italian history; Sicilian visitors can also learn about their own personal history.

• Using cutting edge technology to recover an audio treasure

• Maia Fischler of Life Writer Personal Histories in Oregon celebrates a recent autobiography completion.

• Residents of a senior living community in Minnesota have released their third book of personal histories, Distinctly I Remember: More Stories We Love to Tell.

• Tips on archival preservation of your papers and mementos

• How Phillip Lim learned to cook by following his nose back to the fragrant dishes of his childhood.

• Helping young kids create a grandparent journal 

Short Takes