Life Story Links: Blog Roundup, May 15, 2018
“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” —Kazuo Ishiguro
On Process and Progress
JUST DO IT
Ignoring an instinct to preserve family stories can be an expensive trade-off. And most of us know this—so we do we wait? Last week on the blog I explored the perils of procrastination.
FROM JOURNAL TO MEMOIR
Patricia Charpentier of Florida-based Writing Your Life discusses the benefits of keeping a Five-Year Journal and how to mine your entries for your memoir.
FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH
Ever wonder if you could benefit from a professional genealogy consultation? The New York Genealogical & Biographical Society tackles the issue in helpful detail.
THE BLUE BACKPACK
Object writing is a technique of constraining your writing to the concrete and specific, letting a “thing you could drop on your foot” be a firm central point around which the story unfolds, says Sarah White of First Person Productions in Madison, Wisconsin, who offers up this essay as inspiration.
TAKE NOTE
In honor of Mother’s Day, Lisa Lombardi O’Reilly, founder of Your Stories Written in California, dives into some family letters to get to know the women in her family a little better.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
Try creating a place-line, instead of a timeline, to aid with organizing your memoir, suggests Massachusetts–based editor Nancy West: a list of places you’ve called home throughout your life—each “a tangible repository of memories.”
New & Noteworthy
LEGACY MOMENTS
Legacy Republic is among the first developers to be a part of the Google Photos partner program, and will be one of the first to launch the integration with Google Photos to their customers.
THE WALLS BETWEEN US
“Every division—metaphorical or real—is a story,” observes award-winning writer Beth Kephart, who invites writers to submit true, previously unpublished memoiristic stories of between 300 and 3,000 words that speak to or illuminate the place of walls in our personal lives or world.
FUTURE OF HISTORY?
On May 5, The Phi Centre and the MIT Open Documentary Lab presented Update or Die: Future Proofing Emerging Digital Documentary Forms.
Listen Up!
Grab a pair of headphones or plug in during your morning commute for these recent podcast offerings from our colleagues:
- Kansas City–based Amy Woods Butler speaks to Denis Ledoux of the Memoir Network on how to grow business as a memoir professional in episode 15 of The Life Story Coach podcast.
- California–based Peta Roberts’s podcast Storyical, which offers encouragement from ordinary people about how they started recording their life histories, features memoirist Libby Atwater in the latest episode.
WHAT PODCASTS DO YOU LOVE???? I am looking for recommendations for storytelling, family history, documentary, and memoir themed podcasts for an upcoming post—please share in the comments below!