Tag Archives: memories

Encore! How Old Letters and Recovered Memories Bring Satisfaction and Hope.

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.
 ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 

Last week I was doing some spring cleaning and came across a collection of letters I had written to my parents some forty-five years ago. At the time, I was a young man teaching in Ghana. After University I’d joined CUSO, a Canadian voluntary organization similar to the Peace Corps, and had been assigned to the West African country for two years. I’d asked my mother to keep these letters as a partial record of my experience…Read more.

Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup, if you swoon over typography, you’ll want to take a look at Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili.  It’s a feast for the eyes.  And for a more mindful approach to living, be sure to read A Primer on Full-Screen Living.

  • What is Narrative Therapy? ” Narrative therapy starts with the understanding that everybody’s life is multi-storied to an almost infinite degree.  If I were to sit down with you, and you were to talk non-stop 24 hours a day for 30 days about different things that have happened to you in your life, you would only have just begun to scratch the surface of all the stories associated with your life.  That’s because  stories are much more than events themselves.  They are perspectives, ways of making meaning about the situations we encounter.”
  • Book Review: Patrick Nathan on Boarded Windows. “The act of remembering — on a literal level it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it… What you’re remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now. […] The more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes. The more it becomes about you and the less about what actually happened.”
  • Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili. “For more than three decades, graphic designer Louise Fili* has been producing some of the most consistently exquisite typography, frequently hand-drawn and building upon thoughtfully curated vintage sources. In her decade as art director for Pantheon Books, she created nearly two thousand book jackets, each with remarkable attention to detail.”
  • Boost Your Freelance Brand 100 Percent with Your Expert Status. “To build a lucrative freelancing career, it isn’t enough to have the best skills out there, despite what these reality television shows may indicate. But you do absolutely have to be an expert: you need to be the person that advises your client so that they get the result they want, not the project they asked for.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
  • This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It). “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
  • Book Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price. “When is a book a book, and when is it something more? What is it that matters about books, and where is that meaning made? Why, and how, do we value books? And how has the meaning of books changed: what did books mean in an era experiencing the rapid rise of print, and what do they mean to us now as we shift into the digital age? These are all questions raised by Leah Price’s engaging and incisive How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.”
  • A Primer on Full-Screen Living. “What’s full-screen living? It’s a life where we allow one thing to take up the entirety of our attention — going into full-screen mode, like a video on your computer — while allowing everything else to fade into the background. Let’s take a look.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Happy Labor Day! I hope you’re resting from your labors today. If you’re looking for an enjoyable diversion, why not check out my Monday’s Link Roundup?  Every week I bring you an eclectic  mix of articles that I find fascinating and that relate in some way to life stories, memories, and self-employment.

  • In Andalusia, on the Trail of Inherited Memories. “There are scientific studies exploring whether the history of our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field, known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and that the lives of our grandparents — what they breathed, saw and ate — can directly affect us decades later.”
  • The Next Big Idea From Twitter’s Founders? “Evan Williams and Biz Stone think their new site, Medium, could mark an “evolutionary step” in web publishing…their new venture, a platform for collecting and displaying stories, images, musings and more, isn’t just noteworthy for its web-visionary pedigree …In a sense, Medium’s intended to be a Pinterest for our own lives, an elegant repository for photos, projects, and stories we’ve actually lived, as opposed to a re-blogged clearing house for pictures of wedding dresses and eggs baked into avocados found elsewhere around the web.”
  • Apps for Journaling, Keeping track of your memories…“How do I keep my professional life separate from my personal life without driving myself crazy. I want to list a few apps that are possible solutions to this… I also want to list some differences between all of these that I have found.”
  • All About Me: How Memoirs Became the Literature of Choice. “Memoirs are the great equalizer of writing. In a genre utterly non-denominational, there is room for any story in any pattern of prose. The Christian Science Monitor reports that memoirs have seen sales increase from $170 million to $270 million since 1999. Most nonfiction MFA writing programs are geared substantially towards the genre; Hunter College even requires prospective students to submit a memoir proposal as part of their application. Many bookstores can count their autobiography sections among the most frequented and their popularity thrives.”
  • Anaïs Nin on Self-Publishing. “Besides artist and author, Nin was also a publishing entrepreneur. In January 1942, she sets up her own small press in a loft on Macdougal Street, and soon set out to print and self-publish a new edition of her third book, Winter of Artifice, teaching herself typesetting and doing most of the manual work herself.From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 (public library) comes this beautiful passage on the joy of handcraft, written in January of 1942 — a particularly timely meditation in the age of today’s thriving letterpress generation and the Maker Movement.”
  • Peter Sellers: His Life in Home Movies. [Video]“Peter Sellers was a compulsive home movie maker…In 1995, fifteen years after Sellers’s death, producers from BBC Arena sorted through his extensive archive and assembled some of the best footage for a film called The Peter Sellers Story. In 2002 they shortened it into The Peter Sellers Story: As He Filmed It (above), which tells the story of the comedian’s life almost exclusively with footage from his own camera.”
  • Attracting High-End Clients. ” Everyone wants to attract more clients. But I think it’s even more important to set your sights on attracting more High-End clients.”

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The Best of Monday’s Links Roundup.

These are some of my favorite articles  from last year. If you missed them the first time around, now’s your chance to catch up.

  • A Brief History of Film Title Sequence Design in 2 Minutes. “In his graduation project, an absolutely brilliant motion graphics gem, Dutch designer and animator Jurjen Versteeg examines the history of the title sequence through an imagined documentary about the designers who revolutionized this creative medium.”
  • A Crash Course in Marketing With Stories. “If you want your marketing to really sizzle, if you want people to remember it, you need to turn your marketing messages into stories. I’ve broken down the classical elements of story below so you can begin to think like a storyteller, and make your marketing messages stick.”
  • 10 Essential Books on Typography. “Whether you’re a professional designer, recreational type-nerd, or casual lover of the fine letterform, typography is one of design’s most delightful frontiers, an odd medley of timeless traditions and timely evolution in the face of technological progress. Today, we turn to 10 essential books on typography, ranging from the practical to the philosophical to the plain pretty.”
  • When Data Disappears. “…if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it.”
  • Selling My Mother’s Dresses. “Some of my favorite things — including the sundress I’m wearing today and the Winnie the Pooh car that Jay is pushing our daughter in — are from someone else’s life. I find no joy in shopping at regular stores anymore…I love trying to sniff out a memory from a bud vase or a favorite song from a case of L.P.’s. The stains and broken switches, the bend in the knee of an old pair of jeans. Sometimes I just want to look at how many Mason jars one person can collect and imagine what they might’ve held. It’s comforting to know that someone has breathed and laughed inside a sweater before me. That I am part of a continuum.” [Thanks to Mary M. Harrison of Morning Glory Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
  • Tracking Personal Histories Across Time. “Sander Koot’s series Back from the Future is a pairing of new portraits of the individual with an older picture of that person from years past.. he only photographs individuals after interviewing them. “In this project, I ask people to find old portraits of themselves, of which they have good memories,” says Koot. “When talking to them about the picture, you see them reliving the happy moment. Only after I know all the details about the past of that picture, (do) we start the shoot.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Happy Civic Holiday to my Canadian compatriots. Being in a holiday mood, I’ve selected some summery items for this Monday’s Link Roundup. Two of my favorite articles are My summer memories are up for sale and Why road trips rule over resorts. And if you can’t get away, then the next best thing might be to read a travel memoir. Check out some good reading at A World On The Page: Five Great Travel Memoirs.

  • The Science of How We Came to Live and Breathe Stories. “Stories aren’t merely essential to how we understand the world — they are how we understand the world…In The Storytelling Animal, educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively.”
  • Memories, Lighting the Corners of Minds. “I went to the annual conference of biography writers last year in Washington DC…I soon realized how much biographers depend on written records, and how often those written records are letters. Letters that have gone the way of the dodo bird in our new electronic world…I realized personal memoirs would be the only written records of what it was like to grow up in West Virginia before electricity. Before a lot of things. Someday in the not too distant future, if you want to know what it was like “back then” these memoirs will be the only way to know.Thus,these memoirs can serve a much greater social purpose than simply memoir. They are the written records of how we lived. It isn’t an indulgence to write them. It’s a social imperative. There may not be a lot of people who want to read these memoirs. There may only be one. But that one might be a historian doing research in the far distant future and if we want them, those kids of ours, to know what it was like, we have to tell them now.”
  • Why road trips rule over resorts. “Road trips have inherent downsides – people throwing up, bad hotels, children fighting in the back seat – but the odd thing is that as people grow into adults, they remember this with fondness. Those difficulties are put into a sentimental context of family memory,” says Susan Sessions Rugh, a history professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who wrote the book Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations.”
  • Historians discover medieval banking records hidden under coats of arms. “A rare accounting document, half-concealed beneath a coat of arms design, has revealed the activities of Italian bankers working in early 15th century London, decades before the capital became a financial powerhouse. The discovery was made by economic historians at Queen Mary, University of London.”
  • My summer memories are up for sale. “My Mum sent me a real-estate listing today. It turns out that my uncle is selling the old family cottage where we spent our summers when I was a kid. And since nobody in the family can afford to buy it, pretty soon it will no longer be a part of the family at all.”
  • Are You Brilliant At Marketing? “Are you brilliant at marketing? We think you can be., We’ve assembled some great links meant to boost your marketing creativity. Check them out and see how “brilliant” you can become.”
  • A World On The Page: Five Great Travel Memoirs. “Let’s stay put this summer. Let’s live other lives from the comfort of our couches. Crank the AC and allow these five books to take you to other worlds. But be warned: These are dangerous places, the underbellies of our great cities. You’ll meet unforgettable characters: a future first lady, a one-booted hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail, a young Angela Davis. You’ll encounter beauty, bravery, chilling strangeness — and you won’t even have to take off your Slanket.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

This Monday’s Link Roundup has its usual eclectic mix. For the “shock of the old” take a look at Vintage Ad Sexism.  If you’re a Dorothy Parker fan, you’ll love  Dorothy Parker and the 5 Senses. Her clever use of the senses is a perfect jumping off point for memory prompts. And Seth Godin reminds us of the hard reality of marketing in The unforgiving arithmetic of the funnel.

  • Dorothy Parker and the 5 Senses. “I found three great Parker quotes that show her intriguing use of the five senses. The first two below are ones that I feature in my SheWrites post today…The third one, I selected to share with you here. Below it is a special writing prompt that it inspired.”
  • Why can smells unlock forgotten memories? “The toy cupboard at my grandmother’s house had a particular smell. I cannot tell you what it was, but sometimes now, as an adult, I will catch a whiff of it. The smell brings with it memories I thought were lost, memories of visits to my grandparents’ house, of my grandmother, and of playing with the toys from the toy cupboard. But why do smells have this power to unlock forgotten memories?”
  • 5 Steps to Turn Audiences into Clients. “Public speaking can be one of the most powerful methods for an independent professional to land new clients. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Before you book your next speaking engagement, ask yourself these five questions to make sure you’re on the right track to turn your audience into clients.”
  • The unforgiving arithmetic of the funnel. “One percent.That’s how many you get if you’re lucky. One percent of the subscribers to the Times read an article and take action. One percent of the visitors to a website click a button to find out more. sparked by an idea and go do something about it. And then!”
  • The myth of English as a global language. “English spelling is notoriously inconsistent, and some have gone further, calling it “the world’s most awesome mess” or “an insult to human intelligence” (both these from linguists, one American, one Austrian)…How did this unsystematic system come about? And is it really that bad? Some say that there are only a few hundred deeply irregular words, but the trouble is that most of them are common. Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle even went so far as to claim that we have “close to an optimal system”, though that takes a deal of argument to convince.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

If you’re a memoir writer, you’ll find some gems in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. My favorite, Just enough about me, is a charming first-person account of an 80-year-old woman’s experience at writing her self-published memoir. And don’t miss The meaning of memoir. The author argues that memoirs are still of importance in today’s Facebook  and Twitter universe.

  • Writing Memoir, Quotes, and Books. “Working on my memoir, I’ve turned to many, many (many many, too many) books with tips on how to get started, organized, and inspired.  I also read a lot of what other authors say about the process and will share quotes here, as well.”
  • The Legend Library: A video record of our theatrical legends. “This series of exclusive video interviews is one of our most important initiatives, capturing the stories of our theatrical legends. Conducted by actor/director RH Thomson, these comprehensive interviews will preserve our [Canadian] theatrical heritage for generations to come.”
  • Just enough about me. “It was a Sunday in May, 2010, and I was two-finger-pecking at the keyboard on my computer, composing another anecdote for my memoir, which I hoped to self-publish in time for my 80th birthday in May, 2011.”
  • Milestone Memories. “I’ve been thinking about milestone’s a lot recently. Late May through early July is major milestone season for my family and me. I graduated from high school on May 28. and began my first job on June 5, which was also the day I first met the man I married a year later…Milestone moments deserve to be celebrated and commemorated. Many call for celebration in person with others. All are compelling story topics on their own merits.”
  • The meaning of memoir. “Even in an age of tweets and Facebook posts and personal websites and talk-show bookings, there are things only a memoir — a sustained written meditation on an individual experience — can do. In his introduction to “Memoirs” (1972) by W.B. Yeats, Denis Donoghue wrote that Yeats “is not given to the intrinsic pleasure of confession, he is concerned with the meaning of a life, not with its mere content.”
  • Day One Stories. “In 2011, hundreds of people across the country were asked to photograph their first day of retirement. These photos and the accompanying documentaries capture a moment of transition in a life.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

For Ken Burns fans,  this Monday’s Link Roundup includes a terrific 5 minute video,  Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling. In Skepticism About Stories: The “Narrababble” Critique,  you’ll find a challenge to the popular view that people’s lives are a collection of stories.  And find out if you live in one of America’s well- read cities by checking out What Are The Most Well-Read Cities In America?

  • Alzheimer’s Patients Turn To Stories Instead Of Memories.[NPR] “Storytelling is one of the most ancient forms of communication — it’s how we learn about the world. It turns out that for people with dementia, storytelling can be therapeutic. It gives people who don’t communicate well a chance to communicate. And you don’t need any training to run a session.”
  • Life Writing. [pdf] “This special virtual edition of Life Writing presents eight articles that have a clear connection with the themes of the upcoming conference of the International Auto/Biography Association, to be held in Canberra, Australia, in July 2012. The conference is called ‘Framing Lives’, and its title signals an emphasis on the visual aspects of life narrative: ‘graphics and animations, photographs and portraits, installations and performances, avatars and characters that come alive on screens, stages, pages, and canvas, through digital and analogue technologies’ (www.iaba2012.com).”
  • The Colossal Camera that will capture Vanishing Cultures. “One photograph, no retakes, no retouching, just a pure honest photograph and a giant camera that will travel 20,000 miles across the US to photograph American Cultures. Vanishing Cultures is an astounding and completely unique concept…This one of a kind monumental camera will be transported by a huge truck trailer, due to it’s extremely large size. His [Dennis Manarchy] aim is to capture cultures that are rapidly fading from society and to feature their portraits on 2-story sized prints displayed in stadium-sized traveling outdoor exhibitions along with the amazing negatives and the stories behind the people and cultures.”
  • Skepticism About Stories: The “Narrababble” Critique. “…it is a very popular idea in psychology, philosophy and various social sciences that people experience their lives as a story or collection of stories. For example, the philosopher Dan Dennett explains the mind as a master novelist: “We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography,” he has written. Moreover, says the philosopher Galen Strawson, there’s a parallel claim in the air that this is A Good Thing: that each person should be able to understand his/her life as a meaningful story, with an arc and a recognizable end. Strawson, though, is having none of it. He thinks these ideas, which he’s called “narrababble,” are a fad.”
  • What Are The Most Well-Read Cities In America? “Amazon has released their second annual list of the most well-read cities in the country, based on their book, magazine and newspaper sales data in both print and digital, since June 1, 2011. The statistics are per capita, and only include towns with more than 100,000 residents.”
  • What’s so special about biography? “It is my contention that biography has a unique way of helping us to understand what we are like as people. There have been true Golden Ages and Reigns of Terror in the fabric of human history; but, by examining the lives of real, flesh-and-blood human beings who inhabited those places and times, we can see the similarities and the constancy of human nature throughout that history. So, how does biography accomplish this in ways that other genres cannot?”
  • Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling.[Video] “In explaining his own view on filmmaking, Burns rolls out that old quote from Jean Luc-Godard, “Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.” But he has his own response to the famous proclamation: “Maybe. It’s lying twenty-four times a second, too. All the time. All story is manipulation.”

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The Best of Monday’s Link Roundup.

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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