If you’re new to Monday’s Link Roundup, welcome! My collection of links is very idiosyncratic. I find articles that “tickle my fancy” and that I hope will interest others with a passion for personal and family histories, life stories, memoirs, writing, or genealogy. Enjoy your visit!
- The Art of Obituaries.[KQED radio interview]“Some people think of obituaries as sad. Not obit writers, though. It’s been said that the best obits are actually about life and that death is just the footnote. We discuss the craft of obituary writing, what kind of life warrants an obit and the effect of the Internet and social media on how we remember the dead.” [Thanks to Wendy Ledger VoType Transcription Services for alerting me to this item.]
- The Ethical Implications of Parents Writing About Their Kids. “The ubiquity of confessional writing has spilled over into confessions that implicate not so much the author as the author’s still-underage offspring. Readers are meant to celebrate confessional parenting-writing for its courage, perhaps also because it is a rare creative (sometimes lucrative) outlet for women who identify primarily as mothers. Yet these parents’ “courage” involves telling stories not theirs to tell. Confessional writing is about risk. An author telling of her own troubles risks her own reputation and relationships. But an author doing the same about her kid risks primarily his, not hers.”
- America’s First Man in Orbit Recording. “From a mail-order placed in September 1962 the original recording of ‘America’s First Man in Orbit’ was sold on 33 1/3 vinyl to relive the exciting new territory from the comfort of your living room. Listen to the full recording digitized here:”
- What is a biography of a poet for? ” Whom is it for? In the time it takes to read John Keats: A New Life, you could read all of Keats’s poems. If you stick to the major poems, you could read them several times. But unlike a biography, great poems can be hard to read; they demand that you read very slowly, not dispensing with the language in favor of its extractible information, as one might when reading a biography, but rather lingering over the language in spite of a dearth of information…Even the most seasoned reader has more experience with the intricacies of people than the intricacies of poems, so a good book about a poet can focus our experience of reading, returning us to the language of the poems with a renewed vigor, with an appetite for varieties of difficulty that may have eluded or even repulsed us in the past.”
- How to Format the Interior of Your Book. “If you’re interested in putting together a print version of your book, then it’s especially important to make sure your book’s interior looks as professional as possible. You might have written the next Moby-Dick, but if customers are so used to the way that big publishing houses format their books that they might be put off by yours if it’s not similar! First, here are some things you need to think about:”
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In this Monday’s Link Roundup there’s so much good stuff to choose from. As a closet designer, I was particularly drawn to The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design. This is a must on every designer’s wish list. As someone who volunteers at our local Hospice, I was deeply moved by Hospice Hand Portraiture. And if your business involves the gathering or tellingof stories, you’ll want to read Telling Your Story: The Secrets To Content Branding.
- People Of The Bookshelf. “Alpha by subject … or by dinner party seating rules? Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks on a shelving obsession.”
- Are You Overwhelmed by Marketing? “Does it seem like there are just too many things to do to market your business? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by marketing ideas, plans, and tasks, especially when many of them involve learning new skills. And then people are always telling you about something else to do. But you’re only one person. You can only afford to pay for so much help. Is it really even possible to do everything about marketing that others say you should? Here are four steps to find a clear path out of marketing overwhelm.”
- Hospice Hand Portraiture. “As a hospice nurse and photographer I have the honor to witness and capture the unwavering expression of love that endures between people living with terminal illness… Hand portraiture preserves this important expression of love. Each hand is different; a symbol of identity that embodies character and tells stories. Hands reveal honest emotion. Hands are for holding.”
- The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design. “Every once in a while, along comes a book-as-artifact that becomes an instant, inextricable necessity in the life of any graphic design aficionado. This season, it’s The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design — an impressive, exhaustive, rigorously researched, and beautifully produced compendium of 500 seminal designs…”
- Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No. 1.[Paris Review Interview] “The Liars’ Club, Karr’s 1995 memoir of her Gothic childhood in a swampy East Texas oil-refining town, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, sold half a million copies, and made its forty-year-old author, who was then an obscure poet, a literary celebrity…For a writer who has shared herself with the public in three memoirs, Mary Karr is an extraordinarily elusive interview subject. Nearly two years passed between our initial contact, in July of 2007, and our first session.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this aerticle.]
- 9 Of The Most Beautiful Words In The English Language. “I’ve riffled the pages of scores of old dictionaries and ransacked my father’s old army trunks, which now contain hundreds of my journals and notebooks. More than once during my restocking I’ve thought of the startling line in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, where Captain Hook is described: “The man isn’t wholly evil; he has a thesaurus in his cabin.” Recently, I felt even more vindicated about my ardent belief in the beauty of word books when I heard the deadpan comedian Stephen Wright say on late-night television, “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
- Telling Your Story: The Secrets To Content Branding. “Facts are boring but putting facts into a context with emotion makes them memorable. Stories help you connect with people on a sensory level…The late Steve Sabol, the man behind NFL Films, once said “tell me a fact and I’ll learn, tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”
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Tagged boohshelves, book design, books, content branding, English language, graphic design, hand portraiture, hospice, How to, interview, life story, Marketing, Mary Karr, memoir, overwhelm, Photos, solutions, Steve Sabol, stories, storytelling, The Phaidon Archive, Tips, words, your story
Over the past year Monday’s Link Roundup has brought you 336 links to articles of particular interest to personal historians, genealogists, storytellers, and memoir writers. In case you missed some of these articles, here are 7 of the best.
- The art of bookplates – in pictures. “A bookplate, or ex libris, is a small print for pasting inside the cover of a book, to express ownership. By the late 19th century, bookplates had developed into a highly imaginative form of miniature art. The British Museum’s new book showcases some of the many plates in their extensive collection. Browse through some of the best here.”
- The power of place: Robert Caro. “Show, don’t tell” is a mantra of narrative writers everywhere, but even the most useful adage can lose meaning with repetition. Before a lunchtime audience of writers at the Second Annual Compleat Biographer Conference on Saturday, legendary biographer Robert Caro reinvigorated the concept.”
- Belongings. “There are three million immigrants in New York City. When they left home, knowing it could be forever, they packed what they could not bear to leave behind: necessities, luxuries, memories. Here is a look at what some of them brought.” [Thanks to Lettice Stuart of Portrait in Words for alerting me to this item.]
- Dear Photograph: A website with a window into the past. “In the past month, a summery, slightly sad website has made the trip from non-existence to international exposure. It’s called Dear Photograph, and its premise is simple: Take a picture of an old photo being carefully held up in front of the place it was originally taken, so it appears to be a window into the past.”
- miniBiography and the 99%. “David Lynch’s Interview Project,[is] an online series of short video documentaries centering on the lives of “normal” people across America. In Interview Project’s 121 mini-biographies, the filmmakers (including Lynch’s son Austin) ask complete strangers piercing, existential questions. It is a source of ever-renewed wonder that each stranger has an answer, and that the answers are so often so rich and brimming with hard-luck stories and lived experience.”
- Objects and Memory. “The documentary film Objects and Memory depicts experiences in the aftermath of 9/11 and other major historic events to reveal how, in times of stress, we join together in community and see otherwise ordinary things as symbols of identity, memory and aspiration. In its exploration of people preserving the past and speaking to the future, Objects and Memory invites us to think about the fundamental nature of human interaction.” [Thanks to cj madigan of Shoebox Stories for alerting me to this item.]
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Tagged "Objects and Memory", belongings, biography, book design, Bookplate, British Museum, David Lynch, Dear Photograph, documentary, historical, How to, immigrants, Interview Project, Life stories, memories, memory, miniature art, New York city, old photographs, photo, Robert Caro, stories, Tips, United States, video, Writing
Don’t miss Reflections in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup. It’s a powerful reminder that behind every aged face there was once a younger self with dreams and ambitions. If you’re a serious blogger, you’ll find some practical wisdom in 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging.
- Robert Caro’s Big Dig. “Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms.”
- Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love. “…when you are facing the unknown, they only way to know anything for sure is to act. When you are dealing with uncertainty — and whether you are going to make any money from your passion at this point is definitely an uncertainty — you act. You don’t think about what might happen, or try to predict the outcome, or plan for every contingency. You take a small step toward making it a reality, and you see what happens.”
- Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now. “We need a new playbook,” says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. “The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true.” The Start-Up of You, written by Casnocha and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is that playbook. It argues that we can no longer expect to find a job, instead we must make our jobs. As Hoffman says, we have to “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs, it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”
- Reflections. A poignant reconstructed portrait series where older people gaze into a mirror at a reflection of their younger selves . Created by photographer Tom Husey.
- Social media self-promotion scheme draws authors including Margaret Atwood. “As bookshops teeter and publishers sway in the shifting landscape of the digital age, authors are being urged to go out and find their own readers by a new $20m (£12.5m) fund that will pay them a dollar for every book sold. With early adopters including Margaret Atwood and FlashForward author Robert Sawyer – who claimed the scheme would have added $20,000 to his income from audio over the past two years – the fund is being launched by digital audiobook site Audible at the London Book Fair this weekend.”
- Book Design: Choosing Your Paragraphing Style. “Anyone who wants to do their own book design can spend some very worthwhile time studying books that are old. I mean really old, like going all the way back to the beginning of printed books. Early on, I found these books and the book typography that’s used in them very stimulating when thinking about how I wanted the books I was working on to look.”
- 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging. “Ever since I started in business, I’ve always loved Seth Godin. He’s a brilliant marketer and a great writer. In fact, he runs one of the most popular blogs…And while many people view him as “America’s greatest marketer,” there is a lot to learn from him about blogging.”
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Tagged Audible, Ben Casnocha, biography, blogging, book design, books, Caro, entrepreneur, How to, making money, paragraph style, publishing, Reflections, Robert Caro, Seth Godin, social media, Tips, Tom Husey, wisdom
This Monday’s Link Roundup will tickle the fancy of typography geeks. If you’re one who loves fonts, check out A Periodic Table Of Typefaces and 6 Variations on Drop-Cap Typography.
One of my favorite articles is Memories of Mom’s cooking. For those who are working with or caring for someone with dementia this is a must read.
- What It’s Like To Write A Woman’s Life. “Women’s History Month starts on Thursday. All through March, Tell Me More will dig into inspiring, bold and sometimes disturbing stories of notable women — from Cleopatra to Coco Channel. To launch the biography series, host Michel Martin talks with two essayists about why it’s important to tell women’s stories, and how that storytelling has evolved.”
- Why Memoir Matters. “… memoir can also be looked at as the most literary form of something most of us engage in, actively or passively, most of our lives and even after our deaths. I refer here to what academics call “life writing”…[it] refers to all the forms in which human lives get inscribed or represented, whether public or private, written or graphic, print or electronic, static or interactive. And the forms are constantly evolving and proliferating.”
- Character Witness. “A far cry from staid desk jockeys, biographers regularly court ecstasy, terror and obsession in illuminating their subjects.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- Memories of Mom’s cooking. “It’s a cold, blustery day and I’m planning to cook a hearty beef stew with the help of my elderly mother. This may not sound remarkable, but it is when you consider she lives several hundred kilometres away in a complex care facility. With advanced vascular dementia, she spends much of her time roaming the halls in her wheelchair, asking the care aides if they’ve seen my father. He passed away two years ago.”
- For Typography Geeks, A Periodic Table Of Typefaces. “USA-based designer Cam Wilde of Squidspot created a Periodic Table for typeface junkies.The ‘Periodic Table of Typefaces’ is “the style of all the thousands of over-sized Period Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world,” according to Wilde. The Periodic Table features 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces of today.”
- How Not To Hurry. “…often we compete by trying to show how busy we are. “I have a thousand projects to do!”, “Oh yeah? I have 10,000!”. The winner is the person who has the most insane schedule, who rushes from one thing to the next with the energy of a hummingbird, because obviously that means he’s the most successful and important. Right? Maybe not.Maybe we’re playing the wrong game—we’ve been conditioned to believe that busier is better, but actually the speed of doing is not as important as what we focus on doing.”
- Book Design: 6 Variations on Drop-Cap Typography. “The tradition in book design of making the first letter in a paragraph larger than the rest of the type goes back pretty far. In fact, it predates printing entirely. This practice started with scribes…Today, this practice survives in the drop capitals we see at the beginning of chapters. But like everything else in book design, it’s best to be guided by the long traditions of bookmaking when deciding how to use them.”
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Tagged biography, book design, cooking, dementia, family stories, Geeks, How to, memoir, memories, Michel Martin, not rushing, NPR, Periodic Table, recipes, slowing down, storytelling, Tips, typography, Women's History Month, women's stories
In this Monday’s Link Roundup, take a look at Your Problem Isn’t Motivation. It’ll kick-start your new year. For something completely different watch the engaging and sobering 5 minute video Life in 4,748 Self-Portraits.
- Books That Are Never Done Being Written.“An e-book…is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”
- Your Problem Isn’t Motivation.”Motivation is in the mind; follow-through is in the practice. Motivation is conceptual; follow-through is practical. In fact, the solution to a motivation problem is the exact opposite of the solution to a follow through problem. The mind is essential to motivation. But with follow through, it’s the mind that gets in the way.” [Thanks to Ronda McLean of Insight Life Stories for suggesting this item.]
- New Videos From Archipel Steal the Show. “The digital preservation-related video show, that is. The set of newly released videos from the Belgian project “Archipel” are the latest digital preservation videos to hit the scene. The Archipel project is a recent collaboration by organizations in Belgium, to study digitization and digital preservation of cultural heritage materials.”
- Four Steps to (Quickly) Share Your Business Story. [Video]“Communications coach Carmine Gallo shares tips on how to craft your business story — covering all the essential elements — so you can tell it it in 60 seconds. He shares the four critical questions you must answer to get your message across to prospects.”
- A Secret, A Kiss: ‘The Moment’ Your Life Changed. “The six-word memoir conceit grew into a popular series of books, but the editors knew it was tough to share a meaningful story in so few words. So Smith Magazine prompted its community to write about the moments that changed their lives — the moments of clarity, the things that happened to them, the things they made happen.”
- Life in 4,748 Self-Portraits.[Video] “It started simply enough in 1999. Jeff Harris, a photographer based in Toronto, took his first self-portrait, something he has since repeated every day. His visual diary now amounts to 4,748 photos and they tell a very personal story.”
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Tagged book design, business story, digital preservation, E-book, elevator pitch, How to, Jeff Harris, memoir, motivation, pagination, publishing, self-portraits, Smith Magazine, Tips, Writing
In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup, if you self-publish, don’t miss Book Design for Self-Publishers: Raw Materials. This is a terrific site for anyone involved in book design. And if you’re like me and don’t include pricing on your website, you might change your mind after reading Why We Are Afraid to Talk Pricing.
- Telling Life Stories Through Quilts. “Generations of women have been telling stories in fabric — with quilts. Lisa Morehouse paid a visit to one quilting bee in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley. Many of the group’s members emigrated to work in the local apple orchards and vineyards.”
- End of life: You shared your stories. “As part of the Globe’s in-depth series on End of Life decisions in the 21st century, we asked you to tell your stories around this difficult topic. Readers from across the country joined the conversation.”
- The Life Reports II. “A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I’ve tried to extract a few general life lessons.”
- Not Your Grandmother’s Genealogy Hobby. “Wikis, social-networking sites, search engines and online courses are changing genealogy from a loner’s hobby to a social butterfly’s field day. New tools and expansive digital archives, including many with images of original documents, are helping newbies research like pros.”
- Why We Are Afraid to Talk Pricing. “Think about the last time you went to a website for a product or service that you couldn’t buy outright online. Did it list prices? Or did the site encourage you to call for more information? How many times do you walk away from a purchase simply because you couldn’t get enough information on pricing to make an informed decision?”
- Book Design for Self-Publishers: Raw Materials. “When you sit down to design a book, there are organizational tasks you have to address right at the beginning. Getting your raw materials organized and making sure your workflow will produce an efficient publishing process are important enough to spend some quality time on. Let’s take them one at a time.”
- Family Tree Magazine Podcast Episode Notes. “Tips on how to get relatives to discuss family history, a discussion of the Historic American Cookbook Project, and news on the Genealogists for Families project at Kiva.com. Plus: Learn more about creating a family history book from Family Tree University’s Nancy Hendrickson.”
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Tagged book design, End of life, family history, family stories, genealogist, genealogy, Historic American Cookbook Project, How to, Life Reports II, Life stories, link roundup, Marketing, pricing, quilts, self-publishing, social networking, Tips
In this Monday’s Link Roundup, don’t pass up Affirmation, Etched in Vinyl. It speaks passionately to why personal historians do the work they do. As someone who loves a pen in my hand, I was intrigued by Why creative writing is better with a pen. For a little blast of nostalgia, take a look at What Record Stores Looked Like in the 1960s.
- How Do You Spell Ms. “Forty years ago, a group of feminists, led by Gloria Steinem, did the unthinkable: They started a magazine for women, published by women—and the first issue sold out in eight days. An oral history of a publication that changed history.”
- Getting Ready for Next Year–Now. “While the end of the year is likely not in the minds of many, it’s closer than you may think.So before the ball drops and that tax deadline gets even closer, it’s a good time to think about the many things you can do to prepare for the end of the year–and the promising year ahead.”
- Why creative writing is better with a pen. “In a wonderful article published on the New York Review of Books blog the poet Charles Simic proclaimed “writing with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper is becoming an infrequent activity”. Simic was praising the use of notebooks of course, and, stationery fetishism aside, it got me thinking about authors who write their novels and poems longhand into notebooks rather than directly onto the screen.”
- Affirmation, Etched in Vinyl. “For years I tried to construct a viable idea of my long-gone father by piecing together scraps of other people’s memories. I was only 6 when he died,…My father’s death stole many things from me, including the sound of his voice. For instance, I have tried to remember his laughter from that final night — its timbre and roll — but my mind is an erased tape. I possess the knowledge of his laughter and of Angie and Johnny’s bubbly white noise but have no memory of the sounds themselves. It’s as if I have garnered these details by reading a biography penned by a stranger.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- 7 Little Things That Make Life Effortless. “Life can be a huge struggle, most of the time, and for years it was a struggle for me.I’ve gradually been learning what causes that struggle, and what works in making life easier, better, smoother.Life can feel effortless, like you’re gliding along, if you learn to swim smoothly, to glide, to stop fighting the waters of life and start using them to buoy you up.”
- What Record Stores Looked Like in the 1960s. “Just think: kids being born today will probably never see the inside of a record store. And why would they? Buying music used to involve wandering around a store browsing, picking things up based on cover art, putting them down based on scornful glares from record store employees, and generally being outside your house. Now, buying music usually amounts to nothing more than a click of the mouse from the safety of your couch.”
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Tagged 1960s, Arts, book design, Charles Simic, Creative writing, Gloria Steinem, How to, link roundup, memories, Ms. Magazine, New York Review of Books, oral history, Pen, Photos, record stores, Tips, typeface, Writers Resources, Writing
“You know a design is good when you want to lick it.”~ Steve Jobs
We all love good design. That’s why the iPod and Ikea have been so successful. Design is the difference between something that is OK and something that is memorable. If you hope to have a successful personal history business producing books, you’ll want to include a designer on your team. Here are four important benefits of good design. Good design affects … Read More
Posted in Design, Life stories, Marketing, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged benefit, book design, book designer, design, graphic design, Life stories, Marketing, Personal historian
A Happy July 4th to all my American readers. If you’re taking it easy today, why not settle back and check out some of the great links in this Monday’s Link Roundup? My favorite is Any Last Words? It made me ponder what I’d want for the opening line of my obituary.
- What Is the Difference Between a Hobby and a Business? “It’s important to get the right answer to this question, because it has broad implications regarding your taxes and bookkeeping. In this post, we’ll discuss this important topic and provide some additional resources that you can turn to with questions.”
- Best-Ever Guide to Integrating Stories into Speeches, Presentations, Indeed, Any Influential Message. “A couple of weeks ago… I noted that Terrence Gargiulo, who delivered a commencement speech recently, was “considering doing a meta analysis of how [he] worked with the craft of story making to research, design, and deliver this talk. Well, he’s done it, and the resulting white paper is a wonderful primer on bringing story into the communication of any kind of influential message, including speeches and presentations.”
- Any Last Words? The narrator of Timothy Schaffert’s new novel The Coffins of Little Hope is the 83-year old obituary writer of a small-town newspaper in Nebraska. “Inspired we asked you to provide the first sentence to your own obituary…The responses — humorous, whimsical, and poignant — rolled in, and we asked the authors of our favorites to read them.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- Chicago Billboards, 1942. “This film produced by the outdoor advertising industry in the 1940s is a great slice of everyday history. It shows some classic product advertisements, vintage Chicago street scenes and antique vehicles. We also get an in depth story about how outdoor advertising works. This third part is in gorgeous color including some great footage of public transit.”
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Tagged Blurb, Blurb book templates, book design, English language, history, How to, last words, link roundup, Resources, small business taxes, storytelling guide, Tips, vintage outdoor advertising
