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The Beneficial Effects of Life Story and Legacy Writing by Pat McNees (Journal of Geriatric Care Management, Spring 2009)
"Stories only happen to people who can tell them."
~ a line from Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus (p. 19)
"Every time an old person dies, it's like a library burning down."
~ Alex Haley
"The adventure you're ready for is the one you get."
~attributed to Joseph Campbell
Ultimately, memoir writing is about giving a piece of oneself to history. "This is the truest thing anyone can do," says Pat Lee, quoted in the story "Library helps memoirists tell their story" (Alex Parker, Chicago Tribune 10-16-09)
“I wanted it to sound natural,” he said. “Just like me a-settin’ and talking to someone — just like it was in person.” He added: “It was a lot of remembering, and sometimes it took a while to remember what happened and how, but it got done. Some of the memories maybe wasn’t like I’d like to have, but I wanted it to be just like it was.”
...His secret, Mr. Stanley says he feels certain now, is that he never changed. “I give myself credit for being in this business for so long,” he said. “I started out the way I was raised, in the old-time mountain style, and I’ve never wavered from it. I’ve always stuck to my roots. I think that means a whole lot to the audience — the people knows exactly what to expect.”
Old-Timer, Still Telling Mountain Tales Charles McGrath, NYTimes, about Ralph Stanley, old-time mountain music artist, and his new memoir, Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times, written with Eddie Dean
"Sing your song, dance your dance, tell your tale."
~ Frank McCourt, Teacher Man
My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History , ed. Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg ($19.95). Read excerpts here. Read a review here.
"At last, a collection that shows the "why, what, and how" behind memoir as legacy. Spanning more than a century, these intriguing reflections of personal as well as global social and political history are told in the unique voice and viewpoint of each storyteller."
~ Susan Wittig Albert, author, Writing from Life, founder, Story Circle Network
“This anthology sings with Walt Whitman’s spirit of democracy, a celebration of our diversity. Each selection is a song of self; some have perfect pitch, some the waver of authenticity. All demonstrate the power of the word to salvage from the onrush of life, nuggets worth saving.”
~ Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story and Writing the New Autobiography
"Do I -- do we -- remember only those scenes that fit neatly into the central narrative in which we're most invested, the one that dovetails most cleanly and neatly with the sense of self that we've chosen or that's been imposed on us by the people around us?"
~ Frank Bruni, Memoirs and Memory (by the author of Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater"In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from."
~ Alex Haley
“Families are united more by mutual stories -- of love and pain and adventure -- than by biology. ‘Do you remember when . . .’ bonds people together far more than shared chromosomes . . . a family knows itself to be a family through its shared stories."
~ Daniel Taylor, in The Healing Power of Stories"Be honest, dig deep, or don't bother."
~ Abigail Thomas
"If you have a skeleton in your closet, take it out and dance with it."
~ Carolyn MacKenzie
"Being married is like having a color television set. You never want to go back to black and white."
~ Danny, in a story from a Story Corps interview
"A friend took me to StoryCorps as a gift, as a surprise. I had never heard of StoryCorps. So I thought I was going into—I had no idea what I was going in to do. It was a gift. It was a gift. And I was happy to accept the gift.
"And I was surprised to hear myself. As everyone has said, something happens in that booth, where your very private thoughts that rumble around in your head and your memories suddenly come forth, and the voice that Dave just talked about, that’s your soul. Somehow it reaches down and touches that part of us that’s not often touched....
"I think when we don’t speak things out loud, when they stay inside of us, they take on a different meaning. And it’s not only the listener who hears our story. I think when we speak and hear our own words out loud and remember things behind the words and the feelings, it takes on a different meaning. So I became not only a speaker, but also the listener, of my own words. And it had a profound effect upon me."
~Mary Caplain, about her experience doing a 40-minute interview with StoryCorps (link below)
I can't stress enough how different it is to write about the real and the unreal. When I started writing my memoir my whole metabolism changed. I'd just turned 50 and I assumed it was just age, but I didn't want to get out of bed in the morning and I had the most delicious lie-ins of my life! It was just sheer emotional exhaustion, I now realise. Communing with your significant dead is what it amounts to, and that is an exhausting thing. Not unpleasant, but still hard work."
~ Martin Amis, on BBC's website about writing one's memoirs
"The real family legacy is the stories, not the sterling."
~ Andrea Gross
"Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life - and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative,in small ways and perhaps large ones..."
~ Benedict Carey, Science section, The New York Times
"This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage."
~ Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe
"There are no ordinary lives....by stepping into the great gift of memory, we liberate ourselves.”
~Ken Burns, about the PBS series,The War
"Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth. People do it all the time: they destroy papers; they leave instructions in their wills for letters to be burned."
"Bell wrote in 2001, to announce that he had finished the first part of his archive, he said that the obsolescence of software and technology was a threat to a computer archive. “A lot of things you may not be able to read a decade later,” he said. “Will the jpeg format still be in existence? Will Word 6 be readable? I wrote an article called ‘Dear Appy’ ”—for applications. “Basically, it was saying, ‘Dear Appy, How committed are you? Signed, Lost Data.’ Data can be lost in a disk, in a system, it can be lost in a standard somewhere. That’s still a massive problem. If you look at all the problems that we can think about in the decade, ten, fifty, a hundred years, that’s by far No. 1. The one that bugs me more than anything else is that.”
Alec Wilkinson, "Remember This?" in The New Yorker
One regret I have: I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids."
~ Robert De Niro
"When Ken Schrader told me Herman's story would not be the one people would expect, I was intrigued. What could there possibly be beyond the happy-go-lucky guy who so effortlessly charms everyone? Well, let me tell you that I expected the laughs. I didn't expect the tears. And by the time we finished he had made me realize that he is one of the most fascinating people to ever strap on a helmet. I mean, ever."
And the process has been something of a revelation for Wallace himself. "I started out on this project, viewing it as a way to leave something for my children. But as we went along I realized that it was actually a funny kind of therapy. I told Joyce things that I hadn't told another living soul except my wife Kim. Then seeing important events in my life and racing in print, I understood why it's so easy for me to bond with the fans—most people's lives are about dealing with disappointment, broken promises, and failed dreams, as well as great joy and satisfaction. I've lived the Great American Dream on the tracks, but I've lived the Great American Nightmare in the garages, too. I've just never known what to expect next—but it all happened whether I was ready or not."
~ From a story on coastal181.com about the autobiography of Kenny Wallace, a popular NASCAR driver and SPEED TV personality, written with Joyce Standridge
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Writers and Editors (site rich in resources for both)
E-mail Pat(pat at patmcnees dot com)
An Imaginary Farmer (my nephew Mike's interesting blog about moving his wife and six children to a farm in Utah, while working in IT--foodies, check it out!)
View from the Grove (down-to-earth blog of home manager Wendy, my niece in Utah)
My Chosen People, by Abigail Rasminsky (my goddaughter's modern story about an old holiday)
Montana Horses blogRenee Daniels-Mantle, my cousin's daughter, writing about life among horses)
Wingsuit Base Jumping (brief video of something to consider for your next adventure)
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Telling your story
Writing your memoirs or telling your family story
(Storycatching, life telling -- visually, orally, in print, audio, video -- capturing a life story for future generations)
Everyone has a story to tell but many of us need help telling it — or finding the time to record, collect, and edit the stories of other family members. Once we overcome shyness or modesty, however, we almost all enjoy reminiscing. As the years advance, a "life review" is particularly rewarding, but at any age it can be a great pleasure and an amazing source of insights. If you're one of the younger members of your family, take my word for it: You may not be eager to hear family stories now, but eventually you will.
Get those stories now — before memories fade, and while people are still alive. If nothing else, get those stories recorded — you can decide later whether you want to do something more formal and coherent. Having those voices on tape, having the stories behind those photographs preserved, is a far more meaningful legacy in the long term than most other physical legacies. And in the short term the material can enliven a special occasion, such as a major anniversary, birthday, or memorial service. Indeed, one way to improve the care an elderly patient receives in a hospital or nursing home is to write a brief history of their life and tape it to the door, making them a person with a story and not just another old patient.
An experienced interviewer with a good tape recorder can capture memories that your family will cherish for generations. (Most people find the prospect of writing about their life daunting — and fail to write in their real “voice.” Taping your stories can be a first step toward helping you “write” your own story.) If someone in your family has stories to tell, and can't tell them on their own, encourage them to work with an interviewer. If they don’t know where to begin, bring out a box of old family photos, and have them tell stories about the days those photos were taken. Start with a family photo history, with captions! Make a CD of it for everyone in the family. Do it NOW! Don't put it off to the distant future. So often I hear people express regret about the stories they didn't get and wish they had now. Keep it simple, but do it now!
As a professional journalist with great curiosity about the lives of others, I've helped research and write several personal, family, and organizational histories. What can you expect when you hire someone to help you with all or part of yours? In general, we conduct interviews, have the interviews transcribed, organize and edit the material, help you find your "voice" (if you're telling the story in your own voice), and generally help you capture the essence of your life story. Everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone realizes how their life might interest others, especially in their own family — or field. I am often hired by someone to capture the life story of a loved one. And it needn't be one person telling the story. Sometimes when stars in the family story were raised in the "never toot your own horn" tradition, I get others in the family (or the company, or the field) to tell part of their story. Nothing is more boring than mere bragging: you want to know exactly WHY they were the greatest, and you also want to know about their foibles, which are often best (most amusingly) told by others. (It's just as interesting to hear that Grandpa, the successful businessman, habitually pocketed sugar packets from the restaurant as it is to hear that he spoke at banquets, and such details make his portrait more human.)
The process of the life review is invariably therapeutic, especially for the elderly, and getting that life story recorded (however humble or fancy the package) is a wonderful gift to the next generation, and to the generations after that. A life story needn't be an ambitious project and can proceed in stages. You can start with interviews: Get those memories on tape while the memories are still there to be captured. Get an elder to identify and tell stories about the people in those old photos. You can decide later if you want those interviews organized, edited, and transformed into a more polished manuscript and printed as a book. Or start by writing, and if writing is a chore, work with a writing coach or a personal historian--they can give you assignments and help you if you get stuck, or you can sit at a computer and write together, with them helping you remember and interpret what went on in your life.
TIP: Start with a timeline, a chronology. List all the important and not-so-important-but-memorable things that happened in the life of the person you are writing about. Use timelines like those I've provided links to, to help trigger memories. Looking through old photographs and memorabilia also helps trigger memories. See useful links below, in fairly random order.
Ordinary people, extraordinary lives
As a professional writer, I have helped many ordinary people remember important life events, and find the shape of their life story, usually at the behest of someone else in the family. The first gentleman whose life story I helped tell was an Ohio businessman in his late 80s, Warren Webster. Webster had lost both legs to diabetes, had lost his wife after 70 years of marriage, and was understandably depressed. He had retired from what he considered to be a modest career in manufacturing and was puzzled why anyone would want his life story, but telling it transformed him — brought the sparkle back to his eyes, made him feel as important as the family knew he was. As I wrote a story based on his interviews, I read it aloud to him, as his vision was failing. Webster was a factory worker who rose to the executive suite. When I read aloud, “Webster decided that a life with dirty fingernails was not for him,” he said, “You can quit right there. That’s the whole story.” But there was much more: The story of his career reflected changes in American culture and in the transportation industry in the twentieth century, the chapter about his wife Mary's decades-long struggle with bipolar disorder offered a glimpse of American attitudes toward mental illness in midcentury, and his story was ultimately published as a book, An American Biography,for sale on Amazon.com. It became a wonderful memorial to his life.
Life stories needn’t be so ambitious. I am working now on a photohistory of a family that fled to California from Kansas in the dustbowl and Depression of the 1930s. Most life stories are created mostly for the family — for the generations to come in a particular family — but could well become valuable to future historians, as I hope this one will be.
Equally important to history, I think, are the memoirs of Dr. Thomas McNair Scott. I spent many hours interviewing Tom with a view to helping him write his memoirs, for private publication for his family and friends. A delightful man with great curiosity and (I learned from his former colleagues) a gift for diagnosis, Tom had become a pediatrician early in the twentieth century, when pediatrics was just becoming a field in America; it wasn't yet a field in England. Tom had a long, illustrious career teaching and practicing at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and elsewhere, and a long and happy marriage to Dwight McNair Scott, who did biomedical research. At the request (and with the help of) his children, Tom finished his memoirs shortly before his hundredth birthday, not long before his death (see excerpts below).
But Enough About Me What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves? Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History (New Yorker,1-25-2010)
Face to Facebook with the Past. Erika Schickel (L.A. Times opinion page) on reconnecting in cyberspace with high school friends whose memories of facts and events threaten to pollute our personal storyline.
Families put memories on paper with help of local company. Malinda Reinke (Dominion Post, 12-28-09) interviews personal historian Rae Jean Sielen's clients about the process of creating a permanent record of the family's story for future generations). One these "accidental memoirists" start, the memories start flooding back--and those who feel they are the last living person remembering things about the family capture them for generations to come. To see rest of story, click on "Continuation" at top of page or click here.
How to Write a Memoir: Be yourself, speak freely, and think small (William Zinsser, American Scholar, Spring 2006)
Make History: The 9/11 Museum (add your story to the collective telling of the events of September 11). Here's Steve Rosenbaum, with
I've Got My 9/11 Story. What's Yours? (his account of the filmed records he collected and donated)
The Moth: Storytellers Finding Success on Stages Large and Small: Going Solo Gets Crowded by Alex Williams, NYTimes 8-14-09; Songs of Themselves (Jim O'Grady, NYTimes, 11-14-08); and The Moth, a nonprofit group that runs storytelling events in New York and Los Angeles.
Not all the victims of Hitler died before he did. Mike Shatzkin, who blogs about publishing and digital change, posted this entry between engagements; it is a fascinating example of history made vivid through personal history.
Scanning old photos? Find useful info here on how to make a digital file of an old photograph: Scanning Basics 101 (Wayne Fulton's useful site), which includes useful pages such as this Scanning and Printing Resolution Calculator. Read up a little on how to do it (or hire someone who knows what they're doing).
What's the Point? Bettyan Schmidt (guesting on Women's Memoirs) urges you to include stories with those scrapbook photos, not just headings: Tell stories about the memories those photos represent.
VIDEO TRIBUTES AND DOCUMENTARIES
These tributes are wonderful gifts and bring life to a gathering, whatever it's for. Whether it's a simple slide show set to music or a well-crafted video or DVD with zooms, pans, titles, captions, and other professional touches, these creations are good for birthdays, bar mitzvahs, graduation parties, engagements, wedding parties, anniversaries, memorial services, funerals, or any social gathering or celebration at which shared memories will be valued.
These are not in alphabetical order but mixed up to provide a variety of viewing experiences, with some of my favorites toward the top.
Susan's Garden: A Video Love Letter (on YouTube) and a story about its making: Client makes 'perfect gift' for SCORE advisor (Jan Norman, Orange County Register, 11-21-09)
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SOURCES FOR MUSIC, IMAGES, VIDEO CLIPS AND RELATED MATERIALS,
INCLUDING PRESERVATION RESOURCESIf you are making professional productions for sale and for profit, you may end up paying a lot for music and images. If you are doing a family production to share only with friends and family, you are probably working on a slimmer budget. Luckily a fair number of sources exist for free or lower-cost images and music, of particular use if you are trying to do a Ken-Burns-style combination of voiced narration, music, and images. Do your homework first on rights. Click on Clearing rights and finding rightsholders on the Writers and Editors website. The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978, by Sarah Greenough, Diane Waggoner, Sarah Kennel, and Matthew S. Witkovsky
Finding background music for video biographies, podcasts, presentations, etc.
Creating a video biography for your family or a client? You may commission a score or you may want to use "buy-out" music: royalty-free music that you pay for up front, for use in a commercial video production, film score, podcast, and so on. (An example of royalty music: Frank Sinatra singing "My Way.") Here are sites some personal historians in video use (with thanks to members of the Association of Personal Historians for the recommendations):
• Custom Songs by Erik (Erik Balkey, and here's his song Crazy in Love)
• Davenport Music Library (buy a CD containing royalty-free music for audio and video production and to play for telephones on hold)
• DeWolfe Music
• Freeplay Music
• Fresh Music
• Internet Archives Live Music Archives
• Music Bakery
• Omnimusic
• PBTM Library, instanddownloadmusic.com (royalty-free pro background music)
• PD Info (list of public domain songs, buyout production music, public domain sheet music, from Haven Sound at www.pdinfo.com
• Powerful Presentation Music (for training presentations, Bob Pike Group)
• Premium Beat
• Royalty Free Music Library
• Rumblefish Music Licensing Store
• Shockwave-Sound.com (a library of online royalty-free music, stock music, and downloadable sound effects)
• 615 Music
• Sound Snap
• Zoom License (music licensing for videography & digital imaging--for montages, professional wedding and event videography, etc.)
Finding vintage music from a particular year or place
The Web is wonderful for tracking down music from a certain place or period, and sometimes you can actually listen to bits of the music. Here are some good sites for finding vintage music (tell me of any I've failed to list):
• Billboard’s #1 Song on Any Given Date in History (Josh Hosler’s site)
• Dismuke's popular songs from the 1920s and 1930s (audio files)
• Fifties Web (material from 1950s and 1960s
• Free Play Music
• Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada and Australia
• Music for funerals, wakes, and memorial services
• Old Forty-Fives.com ((music and other nostalgic items from the 1950s and 1960s, good for bringing back old memories--but NOT public domain; you must clear rights)
• Perfessor Bill Edwards (Ragtime and other old-time piano music, 1910-1919)
• Popular hymns
• Popular Song Recordings from the Victrola (1913-1919), Besmark
• Popular Songs in American History
• The Year in Music (Wikipedia’s Timeline of Musical Events—Google a year date and “in music”).
[Go Top] The Photo Detective, blog of Maureen Taylor, who solves photo mysteries based on visual clues.
Sources for images:
• American Heritage Guide to Sight and Sound (Best of the Web links)
• American Memory (Library of Congress)
• Animation and Cartoons
• AP Images(for professional image buyers)
• Art Beats (stock footage)
• Art Resources (fine art images from museums around the world, and if their search engine doesn’t find what you want, talk to their real person)
• Clipart.com
• Corbis (for professional productions)
• Flickr Commons (help describe Library of Congress photos by adding comments, tags)
• Flickr: The Library of Congress photostream (Flickr makes available 3,000 photos from two of the Library of Congress's most popular collections)
• Fotosearch (stock photography and footage, large selection)
• Free and commercial stock photography sites (Jourdan Wilkerson very helpfully describes and compares many sites, indicating price range or if free)
• FreeStockPhotos.com (check out excellent links to free photo sites along right side)
• Gallery of Graphic Design (check out the categories!)
• Getty Images (royalty-free stock footage and commercial-quality footage, from rare archival film to daily entertainment video)
• iStockphoto (royalty-free stock photos, relatively inexpensive)
• Library of Congress Archive (historical prints and photographs
• Library of Congress webcasts
• Photos of the Great Depression and New Deal (FDR Library)
• Life Magazine Photo Archive (hosted by Google)
• Maps.com (royalty-free maps)
• Map Resources (royalty-free vector maps)
• Molly Maps (custom hand-drawn maps and views)
• morgueFile (public image archives for creatives by creatives)
• Moving Pictures Archives (and while you're there, check out other Internet Archives)
• National Archives (including wonderful wartime photos)
• Old Magazine Articles
• Open Video Project (shared digital video collection)
• Picture-Desk.com (Kobal Collection, for movies, TV, entertainment, and The Art Archive, good fine art site, with helpful people)
• Prelinger Archives (over 2,000 films)
• Prints and Photographs Reading Room (Library of Congress)
• Public domain images
• Shorpy (great historical images)
• TinEye (reverse image search engine)
• The 25 best sites for finding stock photos (TutorialBlog)
• Universal newsreels (from before television)
• U.S. Government Photos and Images (mostly public domain, but as always, read the fine print)
• Visual resources online (American Library Association, links to great sites, historical societies, etc.)
American Folklife Center events (online archive of webcasts of concerts, lectures, symposia from 2000 on)
Inflation Calculator (CPI) and West Egg's Inflation Calculator (how much was X worth in 19yy, in today's dollars? with links to other inflation-related sites)
Sites where you can learn what the weather was like on a certain date at a certain location:
SSDI, the Social Security Death Index, explains Linda Coffin, of History Crafters, is an index to only one kind of record, in one kind of repository. It's not a primary source the way a death certificate or a death record would be, so you might get discrepancies between it and official documents or other databases. Another place to search: the Social Security Death Master File, but the Social Security Administration does not have death records for everyone and doesn't guarantee the veracity of these records. (Which, as Linda observes, is what makes genealogy research so interesting.)
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DOING ORAL HISTORIES OR VIDEO INTERVIEWS
An oral history is quite different from a video interview, but some of the same practical information applies so I am grouping them together.
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ORAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS ONLINE
• American Life Histories (manuscripts from the Folklore Project, WPA Federal Writer's Project, 1936-1940)
• Baylor University Institute for Oral History (oral histories and documentaries about Texas history)
• Born in Slavery (Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938)
• Dakota Memories Oral History Project: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection (what it was like growing up second- or third-generation German-Russian on the Northern Plains, with an emphasis on childhood memories and family relationships--with video clips, etc.)
• Experiencing War (Stories from the Veterans History Project)
• Florida Voices (Florida oral history collections)
• Frontline Diplomacy (The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training)
• Holocaust Personal Histories (U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum)
• In the First Person (an index to nearly 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world--letters, diaries, oral histories, and personal narratives)
• In Their Own Words (NIH researchers recall the early years of AIDS)
• In Their Words: AETN's WWII Oral History Project (testimony from Arkansas's WWII generation)
• Japanese American Oral History Project (University of California, Fullerton)
• Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World
• Listening Is an Act of Love (StoryCorps' National Oral History Project
• Mountain Voices (interviews with over 300 people who live in mountain and highland regions in Mexico, Peru, Lesotho, Kenya, Ethiopia, Poland, Pakistan, India, Nepal, and China)
• Oral History Centers and Collections Oral History Association's excellent links)
• Oral History Project of the Social Security Administration (SSA)
• Repositories of Primary Sources (over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar, compiled by Terry Abraham)
• Sephardic American Voices: A Jewish Oral History Project (actively collecting through 2015)
• Sound Portraits (listen online to several StoryCorps stories)
• Stories from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma
• StoryCorps Stories
• Telling Their Stories (oral history projects conducted by high school students, with Holocaust survivors and refugees, WWII camp liberator/witnesses, Japanese American internees, residents of San Francisco's Fillmore District, and elders who witnessed the struggle to achieve voting rights for blacks in the 1960s) -- sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)
• 376th Heavy Bombardment Group Oral Histories (World War II veterans based in North Africa and later in southern Italy)
• U.S. Latino & Latina World War II Oral History Project (University of Texas at Austin)
• Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (excerpts edited by Maxine Hong Kingston)
• Voices of Civil Rights
• Voices of Feminism Oral History Project (Women's History Archives at Smimth College)
• Voices of the Holocaust (British Library collection)
• The West Point Center for Oral History (stories of the American soldier, in war and peace, in development)
• Women of Four Wars (Veterans History Project)
• Women in Journalism (Washington Press Club Foundation Oral History Project)
• World War II Submarine Veterans History Project (California Center for Military History)
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BOOKS TO HELP YOU GET STARTED WRITING YOUR OWN LIFE STORY
If you buy or borrow only one book, I'd start with Tristine Rainer's. These are listed vaguely in order of how much I recommend them if you're trying to write about your own life.
· Rainer, Tristine. Your Life as Story: Discovering the "New Autobiography" and Writing Memoir as Literature. An excellent guide to memoir writing that probes well below “First I did this and then I did this,” asking you to think about your life. Some object to her de-emphasis on historical accuracy.
· Franco, Carol and Kent Lineback. The Legacy Guide: Capturing the Facts, Memories,and Meaning of Your Life. Moving from facts to memories to meaning, this guide takes you through the seven stages of life, to recall forgotten moments and discover their significance. Good examples.
· Baldwin, Christina. Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story. Says Baldwin, “Our life story is our constant companion,the litany that guides our every move and thought. So we need to make our lives a story we can live with, because we live the life our story makes possible.”
· Thurston, Dawn and Morris. Breathe Life into Your Life Story: How to Write a Story People Will Want to Read. Advice and examples on “showing” rather than "telling"; creating credible interesting characters and settings; writing from the gut; alternating scene and narrative; generating suspense, etc.
· Goldberg, Natalie. Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir. Motivates and provides lots of writing prompts, ways to get into writing about your life through a "side door," an approach Abigail Thomas also uses
· Norton, Lisa Dale Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (about finding "memory pictures," finding your voice and the heart of your story, transforming experience on the page)
· Mary Borg. Writing Your Life: An Easy-to-Follow Guide to Writing an Autobiography. Questions to tease out a life story, writing tips, and excerpts from real autobiographies.
· Judith Barrington. Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit. A primer, with advice on such aspects of memoir as balancing the needs for accuracy and good storytelling.
· Duane Elgin, Colleen Ledrew. Living Legacies: How to Write, Illustrate, and Share Your Life Stories. How to write your stories and illustrate them with photographs, memorabilia, and other images (including digital format).
· Linda Blachman Another Morning: Voices of Truth and Hope from Mothers with Cancer. A book for parents challenged by serious illness, to help and inspire them to leave stories and messages for the children who will survive them.
· Hampl, Patricia. I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (explores the act of memoir-making, the tension between memory and forgetting (inventiveness as part of the search for emotional truth), the art of storytelling, and the value of the first draft, as a mystery dropping clues about the narrator's feelings (to borrow from reviewers’ comments)
· Birkerts, Sven. The Art of Time in Memoir (Then, Again). Learned of this book from one of my students: shows how the great memoirists break the rules, especially about mixing present and past tense. “Apart from whatever painful or disturbing events they recount, their deeper ulterior purpose is to discover the nonsequential connections that allow those experiences to make larger sense; they are about circumstance becoming meaningful when seen from a certain remove.”
· Hamilton, Nigel. How To Do Biography: A Primer (a brief interpretive history of life stories, or at one reviewer called it, "a zesty romp through millennia of biographical portraits")
· Zinsser, William. Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past. Using his own story as an example, the author of excellent books on writing well shows how to be selective in choosing the stories to tell and the details to use.
· Thomas, Abigail. Thinking About Memoir. (a tiny volume with slim content, good writing prompts -- many of them available through her piece in AARP )
http://www.aarpmagazine.org/people/everyone_has_a_story_to_tell.html
· Zinsser, William, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Very good talks by Russell Baker, Annie Dillard, Alfred Kazin, Toni Morrison, and Lewis Thomas.
· Zinsser, William, ed. Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography. Thoughtful talks (and biography shop talk) by Robert A. Caro, David McCullough, Paul C. Nagel, Richard B. Sewall, Ronald Steel, and Jean Strouse.
· Kotre, John. White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory. Interesting insights.
· McDonnell, Jane Taylor. Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir. With a special emphasis on writing "crisis memoirs," finding "our own meaningfulness, even in the midst of sadness and disappointment." (This book may be hard to find.)
· Spence, Linda. Legacy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Personal History. Useful memory prompts.
· Rosenbluth, Vera. Keeping Family Stories Alive: Discovering and Recording the Stories and Reflections of a Lifetime. Good on interviewing and recording techniques.
· Kempthorne, Charley. For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History. An encouraging guide.
· Ledoux, Denis. Turning Memories into Memoirs: A Handbook for Writing Lifestories. Workshop in a book.
· Zimmerman, William. How to Tape Instant Oral Biographies: Capture Your Family's Living History
· Johnson, Marilyn. The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. A delightful account of how those final stories get told.
· Biography: A User's Guide, by Carl Rollyson
Three anthologies of life story writing and reminiscence
· My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History ed. by Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg, a great gift for that person whose life stories should be recorded or told but who keeps saying, "Who cares what happened in my life?" Read excerpts here and order here to order directly from APH. Backstories about the process of getting the stories into print will be of particular interest to those who want to help others tell their life stories. "At last, a collection that shows the 'why, what, and how' behind memoir as legacy." ~ Susan Wittig Albert, author of WRITING FROM LIFE, founder of Story Circle Network
· Listening Is an Act of Love, edited by Dave Isay (stories about home and family, work and dedication, journeys, history and struggle, and 9/11), from the StoryCorps Project
· Born Before Plastic: Stories from Boston’s Most Enduring Neighborhoods (Vol. 1: North End, Roxbury, and South Boston) and My Legacy Is Simply This (Vol. 2: Charlestown, Chinatown, East Boston, and Mattapan), from Grub Street’s Memoir Project (giving seniors a chance to turn their memories into published narratives).
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BOOKS FOR LIFE STORY WRITING OR REMINISCENCE GROUPS
Reminiscence and life review, especially guided by someone who knows how to make the most of the experience, is an important developmental phase, in which we older adults take stock of our lives and, with luck, begin to see both pleasant and unpleasant memories as part of what shaped our identity. With aging, retirement, divorce, widowhood, and separation from our children, we lose roles we once played and may experience less sense of identity and self-worth. Life review, however done, can be therapeutic, and in groups, under a masterful leader, can also be enormous fun. Good groups bond. Creative juices flow. Hearing each other's stories brings back our own often forgotten memories, good and bad, which in the presence of sympathetic others can be healing.
Two books I have found particularly useful and interesting in terms of how to run such a group (including how to deal with disruptive, self-absorbed, or shy participants):
· Kaminsky, Marc, ed. The Uses of Reminiscence: New Ways of Working with Older Adults. Interesting reading even if you don't plan to lead a reminiscence group for elders, and useful if you do.
· Birren, James E. and Donna E. Deutchman, Guiding Autobiography Groups for Older Adults: Exploring the Fabric of Life. Provides questions to provoke discussions on different themes, transitions: On the major branching points in your life, on family, on major life work and career, on the role of money in one's life, on health and body image, on sex roles and sexual experiences, on experiences with and ideas about death, on loves and hates, on the meaning of life (aspirations and goals), on the role of music, art, or literature in your life, and on your experiences with stress.
You may also find these books helpful:
· Schneider, Pat. Writing Alone and With Others (an update of The Writer as an Artist, by the founder of the Amherst Writers and Artists Press and workshop method in Amherst, Massachusetts)
Transformational Reminiscence: Life Story Work, by John A. Kunz, Florence Gray Soltys, and others, provides professional insight into the process of helping older adults with reminiscence and life review.
Here's a new book that looks useful only for academic courses in which students are STUDYING life writing:
Teaching Life Writing Texts, ed. Miriam Fuchs, Craig Howes
Selection from
STARTING OVER
by Herman Sheets with Pat McNees
"Although Oskar [Kraus] was one of the more famous members of the family, my grandmother continued to think of him as her idealistic and impractical younger brother, always in need of her unsolicited advice. As I recall, she summed up his friends, efforts, and accomplishments like this: “First Oskar gets interested in and spends most of his career writing about Brentano. He could have picked someone noncontroversial to spend his time on, but no, he has to pick Brentano, the only professor to ever be expelled from the University of Vienna. And why was Brentano expelled? Because in 1894 he decided to argue that the Pope was not ‘infallible,’ a remarkably stupid thing to do in Vienna, the self-appointed capital of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire.
“Next, what does Oskar get involved in? He supports hiring at the University of Prague some controversial civil servant from the Swiss Patent Office who isn’t even a lawyer. This Einstein wants to change all the laws of physics! First of all, no one understands anything he talks about. Everyone knows about Newton and the apple, how does he refute that? I don’t even think Oskar believes what Einstein is saying.
“Then Oskar gets involved with all those Czechoslovak nationalists. You know, like that former professor, Tomáš Masaryk, and his like-minded friends. The fact that both Masaryk and Oskar studied in Vienna with that expelled Professor Brentano clearly indicates that they have no practical sense. Also, anyone with any sense knows that the biggest tragedy of the Great War was the break-up of the Austrian Empire into all these silly little countries with no history and no culture!
“And as for his friend Albert Schweitzer, well at least he is not controversial. He has a lot of degrees and is well intentioned, but, like Oskar, has no practical sense. He is off in Africa so no one has any idea what he is doing or who he is.
“And finally, Oskar makes friends with Bertrand Russell in England. What good is a friend like him? He’s the most controversial person in the universe. What can you say about a mathematician who thinks he is a philosopher?”
~From Chapter 1, “Life in Germany and Czechoslovakia.”
Click here to order STARTING OVER
BACK JACKET COPY:
Hermann Chitz's life, which began quietly in 1908 in the Kingdom of Saxony, was to span a century and two continents. He escaped to America from Hitler's Europe; his parents, assimilated Jews, stayed behind. With a Prague doctorate and patent in hand, he landed in New York in 1939, and changed his name—starting over as Herman Sheets.
In wartime he worked on critical aspects of the atomic bomb that would end the Second World War. In peacetime he directed research and development for Electric Boat's nuclear submarine program. At the peak of his career, in a single year, his wife died unexpectedly and he was fired for displeasing Admiral Hyman Rickover.
As a single parent, with three of his six children still at home, he started his career over again in the University of Rhode Island. Not until his own children were educated and launched did he remarry and take on an expanded family. This is the remarkable story of an immigrant, inventor, ocean engineer, technical consultant, and family man who consistently turned difficult transition into new beginnings.
center>From Chapter 1, “Life in Germany and Czechoslovakia.”
Click here to order STARTING OVER
SELECTIONS FROM THE MEMOIRS OF DR. THOMAS McNAIR SCOTT
the late Philadelphia pediatrician-researcher-educator
Following are extracts from My Century by the late pediatrician, medical educator, and medical researcher Thomas McNair Scott (reprinted here by permission):
"Delivering babies in the poor parts of Dublin was quite an experience. You went into the room, drove out the chickens, and delivered the baby. Very often the new father would ply you with whiskey. I managed to escape the whiskey. On the first delivery I made, instead of a baby I found a rare condition called a hydaditiform mole, a cancer of the placenta. I was very proud that I recognized it and called the hospital for help."
***
"My fellowship at the Thorndike was to end in June of 1931, but in the spring of that year the recently founded American Pediatric Society held its annual meeting in Atlantic City. Child care as a separate discipline was introduced to America in the mid 19th century by Abraham Jacoby, a German doctor, practicing in New York. Noting the poor care that children were receiving, Jacoby had made the care of children the basis of his practice, initiating such things as pasteurization of milk and immunizations. He must have taught other doctors to follow his example for he was appointed professor of child health at the New York College of Medicine in 1861. From this beginning arose the group of doctors who became pediatricians, but the first pediatric organization in the United States, the American Pediatric Society, wasn't founded until 1928. I had enjoyed my six months' training in child health at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in London very much so I decided to go to Atlantic City to attend the pediatric meeting. I traveled down from Boston by train, more than an eight hour journey. While at the meeting, I fell in with some students from Johns Hopkins and, seizing the opportunity, I asked them if I could hitch a ride with them to Baltimore. Thus it was that I took part in the discussion of cases at the weekly 'Grand Rounds' with Dr. Edwards A. Park, one of the country's leading pediatricians.
"Shortly after I returned to Boston, I received a letter from Dr. Park, asking if I would be interested in a job as the resident in the pediatric outpatient department. It seems that the resident he'd chosen for Outpatient care had come down with tuberculosis and had been sent to a sanitarium. I quickly replied to him that I was very interested but that I had had only six months' experience in pediatrics. He took me anyway."
***
"Medical knowledge and treatments have changed since the days I was a resident at Hopkins. When I entered pediatrics, for example, the standard of medical care called for treating cases of infants with pneumonia by bundling them up and sending them with devoted nurses to sleep in the fresh air on the roof. Also, at that time, many children had mastoiditis from middle-ear disease, which then required emergency surgical intervention, mastoidectomy. Now both of these diseases are treated, and indeed prevented, with antibiotics, but in those days there were no antibiotics.
"There was a real resistance to change when I was in training. Medicine had a nihilist mind set. While Fleming had discovered penicillin in 1927, and had shown that it killed bacteria in the petri dish, nobody in clinical medicine had taken notice of it. Although Salvarsan, an arsenical, had been shown to cure syphilis in 1903, no other advances were made in the control of infectious diseases until 1935, when Domack discovered Sulfanilimide with its powerful therapeutic antimicrobial action. Then, with the Second World War coming on, clinical medicine rediscovered penicillin and Flory initiated full scale production of the antibiotic, which became available for U.S. Army use only, in the early 1940s. The Army used it to cure syphilis, which was prevalent during the war. After the war, penicillin became widely used and the mindset changed.
"Attitudes toward pediatric patients have also changed. In the 1930s, when I was a resident, children were kept in the hospital for a very long time, to get over whatever illness they had. Their parents were rarely allowed to visit, only once a month, for fear they would introduce infection into the hospital. In addition, in a study of hospitalized infants who were cared for in every way except that they weren't held, most of those babies failed to thrive and many of them died. That study called attention to the importance of touching and love in the care of infants. In the 1950s, a knowledgeable psychiatrist at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, John Rose, realized that strict visiting rules were a mistake. Thinking that the nurses might object to any change in their routines, he persuaded them to try parental visiting three days a week. The nurses, soon realizing how much more quickly the children recovered, and how much burden having the parents there took off them, came to Dr Rose and asked, "Can't we have it every day?" This major change was not recognized as a real therapeutic advance at the time, and Rose died of complications from diabetes shortly after daily visits became routine at the Children's Hospital. But in my mind, this was a major advance in child care, which subsequently has became standard practice through out most of the world.
"We often discovered things as we worked. Cardiologist Helen Taussig, for example, ran the cardiac clinic for Dr. Park. She saw numerous babies with Tetralogy of Fallot, who were blue at birth for lack of oxygen, because their veins and arteries were transposed. She suggested that if one could surgically switch the vein and artery, these 'blue babies' could be saved. Dr. Blalock, a surgeon at Hopkins, was persuaded to try this operation. It was successful, and the baby being operated on turned from blue to pink. This procedure, the Blalock-Taussig operation, introduced cardiac surgery for babies and Dr. Taussig became known as the blue-baby doctor."
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OBITUARIES AND OBIT WRITING
• Alt.obituaries ("notices of dead folks"), an online group for obituary lovers
• Obituary Forum (blog for the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (and fans)
• The Late Show with Gordon Pinsent (an unconventional take on the art of the obit — CBC radio documentaries of a range of Canadians, from a street kid with dwarfism to an elderly man obsessed with sailing through the Northwest Passage)
• The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, a delightful book by Marilyn Johnson, whose website is here.
• Society of Professional Obituary Writers administered by Alana Baranick, author of Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers
• Obituary search engines and indexes at libraries, universities, and societies (Ancestor Hunt's obituary search portal)
• Links to obituary sites for 750 newspapers in North America, Europe, and Australia
• Obit Magazine (good reading online, for those who want more on the subject, including exemplary obits!)
• Good Bye! (the late Journal of Contemporary Obituaries (archives 1996-2002)
• Adam Bernstein on the difference between British and American obits and a link to the Telegraph (U.K.) obit page, with its distinctive obit style
• Post Mortem (a Washington Post blog about "the end of the story") and an Editor & Publisher story about the blog.
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Writing or telling life stories
What is an ethical will? A legacy letter
A loving testament, or legacy letter, sharing your life experiences and lessons with the next generation
Michael Kilian's message of hope for a newborn
Read aloud at a memorial service decades later
Telling your story
Everyone has a story to tell. What's keeping you from telling yours? Become a storykeeper or personal historian or find one.
Pat's writing workshops and presentations
Learn to write articles, reports, ethical wills, or life stories (memoirs and beyond).
Eulogy for Eleanor
Mom — hardworking, sassy, and full of surprises
Washington Biography Group
Mutual support and discussion
An American Biography
Social history through the life of an ordinary Midwestern businessman.
Medical mysteries, patient stories, and practical links
The boy in the plastic bubble
John Travolta played the boy in the movie. The real story ended far differently.
A bad heart and housemaid's knee
Thin little Marian had a cholesterol problem most people have never heard of.
The NIH Clinical Center
You've probably never heard of this national research hospital and clinic. But someone you know may be able to benefit from it directly and all of us do, indirectly.
Anatomy of medical error
Prepare for skill-based slips and rule- and knowledge-based errors
Dancing, food, good books, and other diversions
Book Groups, Recommended Titles
Favorites of several book groups
Bag lunches (attention, parents!)
What is the single lunch-bag item most hated by all children?
Caviar
What heightens the caviar experience is the price of those little gray or black sturgeon eggs.
Dancing: A Guide to the Capital Area
Links to dancing venues and calendars for the Washington, D.C. area.
Dating -- again!
Midlife "first dates"
Love at First Waltz (by Cheryl Kollin)
Did she fall in love with the man or the waltz?
Swing, lindy, jitterbug, and shag
Also related: jive, hustle, hand-dancing.
Buffalo Gap Dance Camp
All the dancing your feet can take
Ballroom dance
Choosing a school of dance
Portobello mushrooms
The big ones, with dirty stems
Contemporary Latin American Short Stories
“A rich, varied, and highly rewarding collection,” says Joyce Carol Oates
Ceilis
Ceilis (Irish dancing)
Dying, mourning, and other inevitable events
Dying: A Book of Comfort
“This remarkable collection, coming from personal experience and wide reading, will help many find the potential of growth through loss.” —Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the hospice movement
Selections from Dying: A Book of Comfort
For those dying, for caregivers, and for the bereaved
Girls and science
Cool science sites
Cool science sites
New Formulas for America's Workforce:
Girls in Science and Engineering
Best practices for teaching science--to strengthen the science workforce.
Practical matters
Learning Styles
Identify children's learning styles and improve their ability to learn.
Homework without tears
Six weeks to hassle-free homework.
Teens and alcohol
Why parents should be concerned.
Scared speechless? Join Toastmasters
Public speaking is a craft, not an art. It can be learned.
The truth about dry cleaning
Can you wash it if it says "dry clean"?
Organizational histories
YPO: The First 50 Years
A frank history of the Young Presidents’ Organization.
By Design (Crown, the BMW of forklifts)
The little lift truck that could — a story of brilliant marketing in America's heartland.
Online Shopping
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