Life Story Links: August 31, 2020
“One thing I have learned about remembering is that it is a social process: it happens in collaboration with other people. [My grandmother’s] memories with me may not be the same as her memories with others. The reality of remembering is always contextual.”
—Charles Fernyhough
Ah, if only the back-to-school season were as carefree as past years… Kids in an unidentified school circa 1913. Photograph by William Davis Hassler, printed from original glass plate negative, courtesy New-York Historical Society, New York Heritage Digital Collections.
Kitchen Confidential
THE STORIED RECIPE
Last week I interviewed Becky Hadeed, the story- and food-loving host of the inspiring podcast The Storied Recipe. Read about a few of my favorite episodes here (probably unsurprisingly, they’re with everyday folks about their most cherished food memories).
A LIFETIME’S WORTH OF FADED RECIPES
“My recipes tell stories. If they were pared down, edited and orderly, my memories would be, too.” Joyce Purnick makes a case for revisiting your old, grease-stained recipes every once in a while (even if you no longer cook from them).
The Power of Photographs
A PLACE FOR PICTURES
“There’s nothing wrong with storing your favorite snapshots on Instagram or in the cloud, but digitally browsing through your memories will never feel as special as taking a photo album off the shelf and physically flipping through the pages.” Amen. The Strategist showcases 10 great photo albums for every occasion.
SAVE YOUR PHOTOS MONTH
September is Save Your Photos Month, and among the 40 free virtual classes available are a few by personal historians including my own, Share the Story of Just One Photo, as well as Martie McNabb’s live Show & Tale: Where Were You On 9/11? Pre-registration is required, but you are free to watch the videos at your convenience through November 1, 2020.
SORTING YOUR FAMILY PHOTOS
“The difference between 3,000 unlabeled photos versus 300 photos organized by category can be the difference between your child learning their history or not,” Eric Niloff of photo organization company EverPresent says in this piece that provides a basic framework for getting your own mass of family photos in some semblance of order.
TREASURE HUNT
“Through experience, I have learned what does and doesn’t work when it comes to reaching out to long-lost cousins” in an effort to get family history photos that aren’t online, Melissa Knapp writes in this post with concrete tips for using descendancy research to find new (old) photos of your relatives.
“REBOOTING MEMORIES”
“People are forgetting wartime memories. We need to revitalize those old memories by using the latest method of expression and delivering it to the hearts of many people.” In this case, “melting frozen memories” via colorized photographs.
Personal Iconography
BELOVED STUFF, REBORN
“It’s so satisfying to give new life—and new purpose—to old stuff. You get to keep the memories while renewing your home.” Susan Hood of NYC–based Remarkable Life Memoirs shares some inspired ideas from her own life.
POSTER GIRL
“Even before I’d seen a single episode of Sex and the City, I was versed in the art of performative self-reflection. And then Carrie Bradshaw sashayed into my life. She didn’t just make auto-documentary look glamorous. She made it look like a job.” Brittany K. Allen uses touchstones of popular culture to walk us through her journey as a writer.
On Nonfiction Writing
ELEVATE YOUR MEMOIR
National Association of Memoir Writers is running a six-week virtual Memoir Boot Camp starting September 22 with a different teacher each session, including Jacqueline Woodson, Claire Bidwell Smith, and Larry Smith.
AN INVITATION FROM HISTORY
“The pandemic is only one of the seismic forces that converged on American life this year,” Oregon–based personal historian John Hawkins writes. “There is a certain advantage to being the one using the keyboard or the microphone instead of relying on others to record their thoughts.”
TRUTH OR DARE
“I’d done my best to get the facts correct as I wrote, but I had thousands of pages of archival documents, photos, trial transcripts, and newspaper clippings, as well as hours of interviews.” Emma Copley Eisenberg thoroughly and thoughtfully dives into the topic of fact-checking nonfiction writing.
STORY SHARING FOR NON-WRITERS
The experts at the Biographers Guild of Greater New York this week share three basic approaches you can take to ensuring your life stories are told and preserved for the next generation, even if you do not consider yourself a writer.
Legacy through Stories
A LETTER TO THE DEAD
I often tell people who are struggling to craft a meaningful tribute of their lost loved one to write a letter to them—tell the deceased directly what you loved and admired about them. This letter to John Lewis in the wake of his recent passing is a sublime example of this approach.
“MY FAMILY’S SHROUDED HISTORY”
“Inhibited by the silences in our families, we turn to books. But here was something rare: the answers to questions I hadn’t known how to ask, and a way to map my family’s stories into what I had learned of this history, each illuminating the other,” Alexander Chee writes.
THEIR PAPU
Ricardo Ovilla “lives on in his granddaughters’ stories. To them, he will always be the tender hearted, marimba-loving, menudo aficionado who stopped at nothing to see his children laugh. They knew him simply as ‘Papu.’ ” Listen in below:
DIASPORA, RECONSTRUCTED
“My Kashmiri grandmother is illiterate. I wonder what she’d say if she knew her progeny wrote her unsent letters, wrote so she wouldn’t be lost to history. My grandmother, all four feet and nine inches of her. Housewife. Teen bride. When she video calls, she stares at my father and she cries and she cries.” High school student Yasmeen Khan on her fractured provenance.
...and a Few More Links
Photographs of generations of Black suffragists crafted narratives and became “decidedly civic currency.”
A look at an array of services for creating a digital legacy for a lost loved one
Watch Thomas Allen Harris in dialogue with Marci Brennan, a professional photo organizer, followed by a Labor Day–themed community photo share.
Colorful murals help prompt memories for people with dementia.
Short Takes