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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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.”

• 7 Things You Can Do Today to Improve Your Book Design. “We all want to make our books better, more readable, more attractive to both buyers and reviewers. Here are 7 things you can do today to improve the design of your book and create a great-looking product.”

• 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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In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup I particularly enjoyed My life story is written on my bookshelves. It reminded me once again how much the objects in our lives are touchstones to memorable stories and events. My grammarian friends will definitely want to check out Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?  It’s Slate magazine’s new television program exploring all kinds of language issues.

• 99 Tiny Stories to Make You Think, Smile and Cry. “Sometimes the most random everyday encounters force us to stop and rethink the truths and perceptions we have ingrained in our minds.  These encounters are educationally priceless.  They spawn moments of deep thought and self-reflection that challenge the status quo and help us evolve as sensible individuals.”

• Old Quilt Provides a Glimpse of History. “Sometimes the best genealogical finds are not in public records but in old objects — an address book, a box of surveyor’s tools, a set of military dog tags. In my case, I discovered a great deal about my family’s history buried in a box at an estate sale halfway across the country.”

• My life story is written on my bookshelves. “After 20 years of living and reading together, we have gathered what some might call a sizable library. One problem: We don’t actually have a library to put the books in…It was time to take action…Our books show what we’ve cared about, where we’ve visited (or perhaps wished to visit) and the challenges we’ve faced. How could I give that away?”

• In ‘Pilgrimage,’ Leibovitz Explores Portraits Without People. [PBS video]“Known for portraits of celebrities and musicians, Annie Leibovitz has given herself a new assignment: capture striking landscapes and visit the homes of iconic figures to document significant items from their past. Jeffrey Brown and Leibovitz discuss her “Pilgrimage” book and exhibition at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.”

• Lost Malcolm X Speech Heard Again 50 Years Later. “Last semester, Brown senior Malcolm Burnley took a narrative writing course. One of the assignments was to write a fictional story based on something true — and that true event had to be found inside the university archives…Malcolm X came to speak at Brown University in Providence, R.I., on May 11, 1961. Burnley noticed that at the end of the article, there was a brief mention of another article — also from the Brown student newspaper — written by a senior named Katharine Pierce. Her article was the reason Malcolm X wanted to visit Brown.”

• Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From? “In the first episode of Slate’s new language program Lexicon Valley, producer Mike Vuolo and On the Media co-host Bob Garfield explore the history of the terminal preposition rule, and whether there are good reasons to follow it. Lexicon Valley is a new audio program created by Mike Vuolo. In the coming weeks we’ll explore a broad array of issues surrounding language. They’ll range from linguistic pet peeves, syntax, and etymology to sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, and the death of languages.”

• Who Owns Your Personal History? “In an era when nearly everything we do is recorded, we have less control over what we choose to remember, and perhaps more crucially, what to forget.”

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If you’re searching for a way of creating a free professional promotional video for your business, look no further. Check out My Business Story in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup. And reenacted photos in Back to the Future will forever change how you look at childhood pictures of yourself.

• Moby Offers Up Free Music to Filmmakers. “If you’re an indie filmmaker, non-profit filmmaker or film student, you can head to MobyGratis.com, register for the site, and then start browsing through a fairly extensive catalogue of recordings — 120+ recordings in total.”

• The Late Word. “When we speak of literature, we should not imagine that we are speaking of some stable and enduring Platonic entity. The history of literature has always been about its highly mutable institutions, whether bookstores, publishers, schools of criticism, or, for the last half century, the mass media.”

• StoryCorps Gives Voice to Critically Ill. “[StoryCorps]has created the StoryCorps Legacy initiative. Partnering with hospitals, hospices and cancer centers, it helps people with life threatening medical conditions record their stories.”

• My Business Story. “Google and American Express know every small business has a BIG story. So we’ve created MY Business Story to help you make a professional-quality video. It’s free and easy. Just tell your story and we’ll take care of the rest.”

• A Plethora of Writing Prompts for Creative Writing and Journaling. “Having a list of prompts that you can pull from every day in order to help you practice your craft, even if it’s just for ten minutes a day, can be very helpful. In addition, sometimes creative writing prompts can help spark an idea when you’re stuck on a short story or some other fiction piece that you’re writing.”

• Back to the Future. “I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future.”

• 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.”

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Last year I had the privilege of hearing First Nation elder STOLȻEȽ ( John Elliot) of the WASÁNEĆ (Saanich) territory address the 16th Annual APH Conference in Victoria, B.C.  He spoke reverently of the stories that were passed down to him about the land and sea and animals and the values to live by… Read more.

To get your week started, this Monday’s Link Roundup has a little something for everyone. For the technology inclined, check out Edit Photos In the Cloud and The DV Show. For nostalgia buffs, don’t miss One Big Collection of 300 Vintage TV Ads.  It’s fabulous! If you love typography, you’ll love 10 Essential Books on Typography.  Do you like to tidy up loose ends? Then Wake-up Call: Write Your Obituary may be just what the doctor ordered.

• Edit Photos In the Cloud. ” As more and more people and internet companies turn to The Cloud (a non-local storage location for data) for their daily computing activities, massive storage systems in personal computers are becoming less and less necessary. But the process of photo editing is still typically done the old fashioned way — by importing pictures onto your computer’s hard drive and editing them with a specialty (read: expensive) piece of photo editing software. But that’s all starting to change with the advent of cloud photo editing sites and apps. This guide will walk you through how to use our favorite web-based photo editor, Feather, by Aviary.”

• Amazon Simple Email Service. “…a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service.”

• Wake-Up Call: Write Your Obituary. “Although it sounds a bit macabre, writing your own obituary—or asking a friend or a family member to do it for you—can be an excellent wake-up call that can help you make important changes in your life. There’s more on this below.”

• The DV Show: Podcasting the INs and Outs of Digital Video. “Hosted by Brian Alves, a 22-year veteran of video production, a crack team of 12 seasoned media professionals and one Entertainment Attorney, the shows feature answers to listener questions, careful reviews, product news, tips, tutorials, contests and high-profile interviews with industry professionals — all in a quick and engaging format for thousands of listeners to enjoy worldwide.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]

• 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.”

• One Big Collection of 300 Vintage TV Ads. “Thanks to vintage advertising we can get at least some idea of what TV used to be like, which features used to be a big deal, what technology was exploding onto the scene, and what ad managers thought would sell the latest in entertainment.”

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In this Monday’s Link Roundup you’re in for some chuckles with the video Hilarious and Surprising Predictions of the Future…From the 1960s! And for some vacation reading load up your eBook reader with selections from 20 Best Websites to Download Free EBooks.

• 10 Ways to Beat Online Obscurity. “Listen, I’ve got some bad news for you. More than likely, no one knows who you are. And more than likely, they never will. How can I say that with such authority? Easy.”

• 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.”

• 1000 Lives In 100 Words. “… is here to remind us that our lives are important. It’s here to remind us that it’s not the years in your life; it’s the life in your years. Because we’ll all end up as 100 words someday. So let’s make each one count.”

• 20 Best Websites To Download Free EBooks. “It would be nice if we’re able to download a free e-book and take it with us. That’s why we’ve again crawled deep into the Internet to compile this list of 20 places to download free e-books for your use.”

• A Story for Every Purpose. “On the Internet, you will find no lack of efforts to collect and share stories, either on an ad hoc basis, or as a site’s raison d’etre. Following are a few that have caught my eye recently.”

• NYTimes.com’s most looked-up words for 2011.“One of the cooler-but-lesser-known functions of NYTimes.com is its word “look up” feature: Double-click on any word in the text of an article — insouciance, say, or omertà — and a little question mark will pop up. Click the question mark, and you’ll get a definition of the highlighted word directly from the American Heritage Dictionary.”

• Hilarious and Surprising Predictions of the Future…From the 1960s! (video) “Nothing should make a futurist more wary than looking at the history of the profession and seeing how hilarious its mistakes have been. Jetpacks, flying cars, death rays…the future isn’t quite what the past hoped it would be.”

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This past week I’ve been reminded how much our treasured possessions are a window into the stories of our life. My frail, ninety-one year old mother has  started to go through her modest collection of jewelry. She’s carefully trying to match each piece with a relative or friend she thinks would appreciate having it after she has died.   As I was sitting with her, she began telling me the stories behind each piece. There are the art deco black-and-white … Read More

Our people lived as part of everything. We were so much a part of nature, we were just like the birds, the animals, the fish. We were like the mountains. Our people lived that way. We knew there was an intelligence, a strength, a power, far beyond ourselves. We knew that everything here didn’t just happen by accident.

~  David Elliott Sr. (Saltwater People, School District 63 (Saanich, 1990)

Last year I had the privilege of hearing First Nation elder STOLȻEȽ ( John Elliot) of the WASÁNEĆ (Saanich) territory address the 16th Annual APH Conference in Victoria, B.C.  He spoke reverently of the stories that were passed down to him about the land and sea and animals and the values to live by.

I was moved by his dedication to his people and by the importance he places on the preserving and recording of their stories. Too often I find myself caught up in the mechanics of my work as a personal historian. There’s marketing to do, blog articles to write, and deadlines to meet. I forget about the sacredness of our work. And by sacred I don’t mean religious. I mean knowing someone deeply, being touched by our common humanity, and venerating the interconnectedness of all life.

What can we do to rekindle the “sacred” in our work? Here are some thoughts.

Begin with our elders.

We need to connect regularly with our own past and show reverence for our elders. This might mean ending or starting each day with some personal expression of remembrance and gratitude for family members who hold a special place in our hearts. It could mean being mindful of the elders in our community and extending a smile or helping hand.

Make time for reflection.

We need to take time out from our busyness for reflection. We need to connect to our sacred moments. Find a space where you can sit quietly and recall a sacred moment in your life. Remember what was happening and how it felt. Let that moment wash over you.

Listen for The connections.

There’s a Bantu expression, Ubuntu, which translates as  I am because you are; you are because I am. It speaks to our interconnectedness as human beings. When I’m working with clients, I’m aware that some part of their stories touches my own.

Create A personal belief statement.

We  need to find a statement that gets to the heart of what we do as personal historians. It’s not just words to use in a tag line but a touchstone that can remind us of why this work is sacred. Start by writing, “I am a personal historian because I believe that…”. Play around with phrases until you have an Ah-Ha! moment. For me that moment came when I wrote, “I am a personal historian because I believe that preserving memories is an act of love.” Whenever I lose my way, I try to remember that statement and why I’m doing this work.

Write it. just don’t think it.

We know how much we learn from listening to our clients’ stories.  But how many of us have actually told our clients this in writing? Too often I’m guilty of not taking the time  to pen a thank you note that acknowledges the wisdom that I’ve gained from my clients.

keep a “thank you” file.

I have a file where I keep the letters of appreciation I’ve received from clients and their families over the years. It also includes excerpts from personal histories that particularly touch me. When I need a pick-me-up, I go to that file and read through the collection. It reminds me of why I do this work and reconnects me to the sacred.

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch.

~ e. e. cummings

Photo by Cornelia Kopp

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In this Monday’s Link Roundup check out PageKeeper. It’s the perfect gift for your bookworm friend. It’s already on my Christmas list! For a sobering and fascinating look at changing cultural touchstones, I recommend Beloit College Mindset List.

• Story Development Ideas.“You have read, or heard me say, stories make a speech or sales presentation more interesting, memorable and ‘visual.’ Remember, your audience remembers what they ‘see’ in their minds more than the words you use. In my sales presentation training I recommend you call your satisfied clients and interview them about their experience of doing business with you.”

• BBC Documentary: Memory Wars. “… oral history has been firmly associated with the voices of the ‘ordinary’ citizen – a view of turbulent times from the bottom up. It offers a different version of the unfinished business of the past, be it war, revolution or dictatorship.  In this two-part documentary Alan Dein explores how oral history collides with the official version that has been committed to history books – particularly in nations where the outcome is still bitterly contested.”

• You Tube Time Machine.“The You Tube Time Machine is a collection of audio and video snippets from 1860 (that is NOT a typo!) through 2010 that provide a history of movies, videos, and sound recordings. I rather enjoyed looking at some of the older ones, before 1920. These are really corny and it is difficult to imagine anyone paying money to see them. However, when moving pictures were still a novelty, I guess it didn’t take much of a plot to entice audiences to watch.”

• Study: Audio recordings of US history fading fast. “New digital recordings of events in U.S. history and early radio shows are at risk of being lost much faster than older ones on tape and many are already gone, according to a study on sound released Wednesday.”

• Beloit College Mindset List. “Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall…The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since “digital” has always been in the cultural DNA, they’ve never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat.”

• 8 Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity And Stifle Your Success. “…research shows that once you get beyond an I.Q. of about 120, which is just a little above average, intelligence and creativity are not at all related. That means that even if you’re no smarter than most people, you still have the potential to wield amazing creative powers. So why are so few people highly creative?”

• PageKeeper. “I’ve used a PageKeeper bookmark for several years and love it. Once in place it stays put. You don’t have to do anything until you’ve finished reading whatever book you’ve put it in. It keeps your place for you without you having to move it, or dog-ear the page.”