Monthly Archives: October 2011

Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on October 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

Another Monday’s Link Roundup brimming with a harvest of goodies. If you’re looking for a thoughtful essay on memory, take a look at Memoirs and Memories. And for a fascinating item on the history of traveling libraries, you’ll want to read Some little-discussed history of the traveling library.

  • Asking Permission. “As I work on various projects I often see images that I’d love to include in a publication. Locating the owner is often difficult. But before you can use an image in a publication or on a website, you need to obtain permission from the owner. Here are a few tips to help.”
  • Books: A Living History. “In Books: A Living History, Australian historian Martyn Lyons (of A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World fame) explores how books became one of the most efficient and enduring information technologies ever invented — something we seem to forget in an era plagued by techno-dystopian alarmism about the death of books.”
  • 10 Traits that Make You a Master Networker—and Grow Your Business. “Networking is more than shaking hands and passing around business cards. Based on a survey I conducted of more than 2,000 people throughout the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, it’s about building your “social capital.” The highest-rated traits in the survey are the ones related to developing and maintaining good relationships.”
  • Memoirs and Memory. “…as I came to see that our memories aren’t really patchy; they’re patchworks, oddly and randomly retrieved bits and scraps that we weave together into something we believe to be a more integrated, seamless fabric than it really is… I don’t worry that the scenes are significantly inaccurate or even remotely embellished. I worry about what’s not there and might have made for an even better story.”
  • Is This the Future of Punctuation!? “People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.”
  • Some little-discussed history of the traveling library. “Mary L. Titcomb, who sent out that first traveling library in 1905, popularized it evidenced via all kinds of metrics. In fact today, all 50 U.S. states still have traveling branch library services. “They’re traveling cathedrals of beauty and truth and peace,” says Anne Lamott.”

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Encore! What’s the Difference Between Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Life Stories?

Posted on October 27, 2011 | Leave a comment
My mom far left with her sister, mother, and brother

I must admit that I haven’t given much thought to the finer distinctions between life stories, memoirs, autobiographies, and personal essays until I came across Sharon Lippincott’s fine blog The Heart and Craft of Life Writing .  In a January post she loosely defines an array of life writing approaches: … Read more.

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Do You Want To Be a Successful Personal Historian?

Posted on October 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

Why do some succeed and others fail? In a word – persistence.   It’s that ability to get knocked down, pick yourself up, and keep going. Success of course is entirely in the mind of the beholder. Success to one person is failure to another.

Increasingly people find their way to my blog looking for the key to a successful career as a personal historian. I don’t have a magic formula. But what I do know from years of experience is that without persistence  nothing of real value can be achieved.

There are plenty of obstacles on the road to becoming a successful personal historian. I’ve selected four. Your success will largely be determined by whether you persist and overcome these obstacles .

 The Isolation Obstacle

Your home office can be a lonely place. This is especially true if you previously worked in a business where you socialized with fellow employees.

There are ways to minimize the isolation. You can network through social media, join professional associations, and participate in service organizations. But the truth is that a good part of your personal history work will be spent alone.

Failure to overcome this isolation and persist can give you second thoughts about being a personal historian.

The Fear Obstacle

This is the biggest obstacle to your success.

There’s so much to fear when starting a new personal history business. There’s  the fear of marketing yourself, the fear of doing the wrong thing, the fear of not having enough money to live on, the fear of being a competent interviewer, and on and on.

Fear can paralyze. An ability to keep going in spite of  your fears spells the difference between success and failure.

The Cash Flow Obstacle

If you’re used to a regular paycheck, get ready for a shock. For the first couple of years you’ll  find  more money going out than coming in.

In order to persist through the lean times you’ll need to be able to call on all your financial ingenuity.  If you don’t have a reserve of funds, or a part-time income or the support of friends and family or the thriftiness of a Scotsman, you may not be able to continue.

The Experience Obstacle

Personal historians come from a wide range of professions but no one comes to the business fully experienced.   It’s the kind of work you learn over time and largely by doing.

There are a host of basic skills you need – marketing, interviewing, editing, project management, and sales, to mention a few. Being able to clearly identify your business shortcomings and showing persistence in overcoming them spells the difference between success and failure.

Conclusion

Let me leave you with these inspiring words on persistence by American naturalist and author, Edward O. Wilson.

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.  

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’m a sucker for clever animation. In this Monday’s Link Roundup you won’t want to miss a real charmer, Spike Jonze’s Stop-Motion Bookstore Love Story. And if you’re concerned about digital preservation, take a look at this Library of Congress article Digital Preservation-Friendly File Formats for Scanned Images.

  • PBS Off Book: Type. “In episode 2 of Off Book, typeface designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones outline the importance of selecting the right font to convey a particular feeling. Graphic designer Paula Scher talks about building identity in messaging, while Eddie Opara uses texture to create reaction. Infographic designers Julia Vakser and Deroy Peraza map complicated data sets into digestible imagery, mixing color, graphics and type.”
  • The 20 Most Iconic Book Covers Ever. “We recently read an article over at We Made This in which Nick Hornby writes that ”the days of the iconic jacket illustration, the image that forever becomes associated with a much-loved novel, are nearly gone. The stakes are too high now.” If this is true, it’s just another way that advertising is ruining our lives, since one of the things we love best about the book as art object and experience is the way well-designed covers complement and enhance your reading, and the way they figure in your mind when you remember a book.”
  • The Memoir and Children’s Privacy. “An article published in The Times on Monday [August 30, 2009] discussed the controversy over “The Lost Child,” a memoir by a British writer, Julie Myerson, who chronicled her son’s drug addiction. After Ms. Myerson’s son, now 20, condemned the book, which was published in the United States this week, debate flared in Britain over whether it was proper for the author to expose her son’s troubles and over what the boundaries should be in memoir writing. Is it inappropriate and even harmful to expose the private lives of minor children, in particular? What privacy lines should be observed, if any, in writing about family members and others?”
  • Spike Jonze’s Stop-Motion Bookstore Love Story. “…[this] lovely short film … was created by Spike Jonze—director of Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are, and so on—and the handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan. Among Le-Tan’s creations are limited-edition, felt book-clutches based on the famous covers of literary classics. Le-Tan met Jonze in Paris, and he asked for a Catcher in the Rye embroidery to put on his wall, … Le-Tan asked for a film in return.”
  • Old San Francisco Pictures Online. “If you or your ancestors ever lived in San Francisco, don’t visit this site! It is addictive. You’ll spend hours looking at the pictures! Dan Vanderkam moved to San Francisco in 2007 to work at Google. He became fascinated with his new city’s history and soon found the San Francisco Public Library’s online repository of old pictures. However, he quickly became frustrated by the site’s awkward user interface. He thought, “there must be a better way.”
  • Digital Preservation-Friendly File Formats for Scanned Images. “From a preservation standpoint, some digital file formats are better than others.  The basic issue is how readable a format remains over the course of time and successive waves of technological change.  The ideal format will convey its content accurately regardless of advances in hardware, software and other aspects of information technology.”

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Encore! As Personal Historians, How Do We Rekindle “The Sacred” in Our Work?

Posted on October 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

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.

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News Flash! Being Relaxed Makes People Spend More Freely.

Posted on October 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

The  recent issue of  the Journal of Marketing Research  examined the correlation between relaxation and consumer spending. It turns out that all things being equal consumers are more willing to pay higher prices if they feel relaxed.

It’s no surprise then that we find luxury products typically displayed in high-end boutiques that ooze comfort and elegance. Commenting on the research Wired Magazine wrote:

Why does relaxation turn us into spendthrifts? When we feel safe, we are better able to fully focus on the potential rewards at stake. Instead of worrying about price, we can contemplate the advantages of having a sophisticated camera, or the thrill of falling through the air. As the psychologists demonstrated in subsequent experiments, those subjects who were more relaxed thought less about particulars – the specific cost of the gadget or the dangers of the risky behavior – and more about the abstract pleasures they were trying to purchase.

What has all this to do with personal historians?

We are in the business of providing a high-end product. Asking individuals to part with $10,000 or more for a personal history requires more from us than offering up a good resume, a nice smile, and an attractive brochure.

If as the research suggests a relaxed personal history client is more likely to say yes to  a life story, shouldn’t we be looking at ways we can enhance the “relaxation” factor?

Here are some ideas worth considering:

Website 

Take a look at  Dolce&Gabbana for some clues on how a high-end retailer provides a very subdued and relaxed online presence. Now examine your website. Is it friendly, inviting, and easy to navigate? Are the colors and photographs calming. Does it offer free resources? Does it have space to breathe? Does the copy tell a heart-warming story? In other words, does it feel relaxed!  If you’ve said yes to all these, then you’ve made a good start. If not, then you’ve got some work to do.

Brochures

As with your website design similar rules apply to your brochure – easy on the eye, inviting, and friendly. Also check out the feel of your brochure.  Is it silky smooth and durable like an expensive art card? Avoid stock that’s flimsy and feels cheap.

Setting

If possible, choose to meet clients in a calm, relaxing setting. A good choice is often the client’s home. People are usually at ease in their own place unless it’s crawling with rambunctious kids and pets. ;-)

If you can’t meet in a client’s home, consider a location that’s subdued and attractive such as a boutique bakery/café, a quite corner of an elegant hotel lobby, or perhaps even your own home.

Appearance

If you’re hungry for a contract, you’re going to be telegraphing this regardless of your outward expression. A look of desperation in your eyes does nothing to put potential clients at ease.

A more relaxing approach is to assume nothing and make the meeting an opportunity to learn more about your client’s wishes. Go with the idea of helping this person realize their personal history project even if it doesn’t in the long run involve working with you.

Trust

We know from experience that trusting someone puts us in a more relaxed frame of mind. I’ve previously written about this in 3 Keys to Creating Trust with Potential Clients.

Conclusion

As personal historians we need to judiciously apply all the marketing techniques at our disposal in order to reach potential clients and gain their confidence.

The “relaxation” factor isn’t a magic bullet. But combined with other marketing approaches it can give you an added advantage.

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Photo by Sarah Ackerman

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on October 17, 2011 | 2 Comments

This Monday’s Link roundup has the perfect solution to kick-start your week – Celebrity Autobigraphy. It’s  drop dead funny and a stark reminder that trivia in the guise of memoir is just bad writing. On a more serious note, I highly recommend the interview with Dudley Clendinen in “..building stories from life and choosing grace in death.”

  • Where Stories Are Remembered. “Mr. Kamara has taught for two decades at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But as with his forebears, the identity that means the most to him is that of a storyteller. “Not the kind of storyteller you listen to when you’re sitting around a fire, and maybe it’s raining, and you’re scared to go home,” he said. His stories have to do with genealogy, cosmology and similarly great subjects, and are told while others dance and perform music, making them true multimedia performances.” [Thanks to APH member Marcy Davis for alerting me to this item.]
  • Sixth National Women’s Memoir Conference. [April 13-15, 2012 Wyndham Hotel, Austin, Texas] “Stories from the Heart VI will bring women from around the country to celebrate our stories and our lives. Through writing, reading, listening, and sharing, we will discover how personal narrative is a healing art, how we can gather our memories, how we can tell our stories. “
  • Dudley Clendinen on building stories from life and choosing grace in death. “Our latest Editors’ Roundtable examines Dudley Clendinen’s “The Good Short Life,” a career journalist’s startling response to being diagnosed with ALS…Clendinen has written for GQ, the St. Petersburg Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times, among many other publications. Clendinen was kind enough to take the time – a commodity that has become precious to him – to talk with us about his essay. In these excerpts from our conversation, he addresses using his life as material, coming out on the op-ed page of the New York Times, and the upside of getting “paid to die.”
  • Everybody Has a Story. “The story starts with a dart and a map. Over a shoulder, the dart is thrown, and where it stops no one knows. Once the dart lands on a town, Steve Hartman goes there and calls someone up on the phone and interviews them. Admittedly, it’s a unique way of getting a story, but his “Everybody Has a Story” segments on CBS’s The Early Show are being emulated on local newscasts and in newspapers across the country. Actually, Hartman got the idea for the segment from newspaper reporter David Johnson of Idaho’s Lewiston Morning Tribune.”
  • The Rise of “Awesome”. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was awesome.  If this sounds like an irreverent approach to the famous first lines of the gospel of John, I can assure you it’s not. “The word was God,” according to the original. But repeatedly in the Bible, God is “awesome”… How did this once-awe-inspiring word become a nearly meaningless bit of verbiage referring to anything even mildly good?”
  • Celebrity Autobiography. “How does Vanna flip her panels?  What does Stallone have in his freezer?  Why did Burt and Loni topple from the upper tier of their wedding cake?  What makes the Jonas Brothers get along?  Find all this out and more in the new hit comedy “Celebrity Autobiography” where super star memoirs are acted out live on stage.  Audiences walk away from the show asking, “ Did they actually write that?”  Yes, we couldn’t make this stuff up!”
  • How to Manage the Risks of Having Your Own Business. “Starting a business is risky. Horribly, terrifyingly risky. Nearly all new businesses fail — that’s the official statistic, right? Some say 4 out of 5, some say as many as 95%. Successful entrepreneurs have a different kind of DNA from the rest of us. Ice water runs through their veins. They thrive on risk. The more insane the odds, the better they like it. For those of us who have families, or who just don’t feel like living on ramen for the next four years, we’re probably better off keeping the day job. Do you believe any of those? Because I call B.S. on all of them.”

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Encore! What Gardening Can Teach You About Growing Your Business.

Posted on October 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

Do you want your business to grow? Then why not apply some basic gardening know-how to your enterprise?

It’s  harvest time here in Canada.  And I have a bumper tomato crop. Well, it’s just one pot but it’s outdone itself. It got me thinking that running a business is not unlike  nurturing a garden…Read more.

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My Dears, Don’t Miss These 20 Fabulous Articles on Interviewing!

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 4 Comments

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.
~ W. Edwards Deming,  American author and lecturer.

A good personal history interview is like a symphony – complex, engaging, and harmonious. Over the past three years I’ve written extensively about the art of the interview and assembled these articles here in one convenient list. Enjoy!

  1. Are You Asking the Courageous Questions?
  2. How Prepared Are You to Interview Terminally Ill Clients? 
  3. Come to Your Senses and Unlock Childhood Memories.
  4. What Do You Do When Facing a Reluctant Family Story Teller?
  5. How to Use “Acknowledgment” to Build a Better Interview. 
  6. How to Listen with Your Eyes.
  7. The #1 Secret to a Successful Life Story Interview.
  8. Are You Creating a Supportive Milieu for Your Personal History Interviews?
  9. Caution: End-of-Life Interviews May Unlock Traumatic Stories.
  10. How to Boost Your Interviewing Skills.
  11. Avoid These Three Interviewing Pitfalls.
  12. What I’ve Learned About Getting “Truthful” Interviews.
  13. 4 Action Steps to a Good Life Story Interview.
  14. How to Listen With Your Third Ear.
  15. Want To Do A Better Job of Listening?
  16. How to Interview A “Challenging” Subject.
  17. How to be An Engaged Listener.
  18. How to Interview Someone with Dementia.
  19. Do You Make These Interviewing Mistakes?
  20. Nine Secrets of A Good Interview.

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Photo by Erica La Spada

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on October 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian compatriots! This Monday’s Link Roundup has its usual eclectic mix of articles. One on my favorites is 7 Playful Activity Books for Grown-Ups. If you’re looking for something to lighten your day, then one of these books may just do the trick. Also don’t miss a fascinating story about Vintage Report Cards from the early 1900s and what they reveal about daily life.

  • The Benefits of Speaking Aloud. “Giving sound to what had been a silent process puts writers in the role of their readers. This extra step gives writers an objective view of their content. Bestselling author Nicholson Baker calls his version of the verbalizing process “speak-typing,” in which he dictates to himself and types as he speaks.”
  • 7 Playful Activity Books for Grown-Ups. “The intersection of childhood and adulthood is a frequent area of curiosity around here, from beloved children’s books with timeless philosophy for adults to quirky coloring books for the eternal kid. Today, we turn to seven wonderful activity books for grown-ups that inject a little more whimsy and playfulness into your daily grind.”
  • When a Dictionary Could Outrage. “…the furor over Webster’s Third [1961] also marked the end of an era. It’s a safe bet that no new dictionary will ever incite a similar uproar, whatever it contains. The dictionary simply doesn’t have the symbolic importance it did a half-­century ago, when critics saw the Third as a capitulation to the despised culture of middlebrow, what Dwight Macdonald called the “tepid ooze of Midcult.” That was probably the last great eructation of cultural snobbery in American public life.”
  • Five ways to work a conference. “It’s conference season, and the challenge for most attendees is how to turn the hothouse of ideas they are exposed to into marked improvement back in the office.” [Thanks to Philip Sherwood of Lifewriters for alerting me to this item.]
  • Vintage Report Cards from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. “After discovering hundreds of early 1900s report cards from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, Paul Lukas is publishing his findings online in a series called “Permanent Record” on Slate. The written assessments are historical artifacts as well as ephemeral relics of daily life, describing some students as “slow,” and others as “very ambitious,” “irritable at times,” or a “nice type.”

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