Tag Archives: Writing

Encore! Bringing the Dead to Life: Writing a Biography of an Ancestor.

Posted on November 21, 2012 | 2 Comments

The other day I was asked if I had any ideas about writing the biography of a dead family member. This struck a responsive chord in me. For some time I’ve wanted to write  about my mother’s father, my grandfather. He was only thirty-two when he died in 1920. A Winnipeg fire fighter, he succumbed to the great flu pandemic that was sweeping the world. My mother was only two when he died and she had few stories about him…Read more.

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Encore! 9 Great Links to Help With “Pesky” Grammatical Stuff.

Posted on November 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

grammar

I’ve a confession to make. I’ve never been great with  grammar. Maybe that’s why I work primarily in video ;-)   I’m sure some of you more keen- eyed grammarians have spotted the odd blunder or two in my posts. However, when I do write major pieces I always rely on a good editor to polish my work. For those of you who prefer to work on your own, here’s a great list…Read more.

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on October 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

In this Monday’s Link Roundup, do yourself a favor and read My 6,128 Favorite Books.  It gives a whole new meaning to “avid reader”.  And for those of us who are trying to improve our marketing abilities check out How to Generate Attention and Interest. Forget the “elevator speech”.

  • Leo Baeck Institute Launches DigiBaeck German-Jewish History Archive. “Leo Baeck Institute (LBI), the premiere research library and archive devoted exclusively to documenting the history of German-speaking Jewry, has completed the digitization of its entire archive, which now provides free online access to primary source materials encompassing five centuries of Jewish life in Central Europe.”
  • Dropbox makes the easiest way to send photos. “Dropbox (site) adds a higher level of automation to digital-image sharing. All you have to do is snap the picture; if you’re connected to the Internet, Dropbox immediately uploads the image to its servers, then downloads it to a folder on your computer and to other Dropbox-capable devices. Once the photos are on your computer, sharing them with friends and family can be just as automatic.”
  • How to Generate Attention and Interest. “Someone asks you what you do and you respond with your best “elevator speech” but nobody seems to be interested. You write emails and marketing materials that seem to say the right thing, but very few people respond. You’re confused because you’ve targeted your market, talked about all your benefits and value and still you don’t get the response you want.”
  • 100 Ideas That Changed Photography. “[a]…concise and intelligent chronicle of the most seminal developments in the history of today’s most prevalent visual art. From technical innovations like the cyanotype (#12), the advent of color (#23), the Polaroid (#84), and moving pictures (#20) to paradigms like photojournalism (#66) and fabrication (#93) to new ways of looking at the world like aerial photography (#54), micro/macro (#55), and stopping time (#49), each of the ideas is accompanied by a short essay contextualizing its history and significance.”
  • My 6,128 Favorite Books. “I started borrowing books from a roving Quaker City bookmobile when I was 7 years old. Things quickly got out of hand. Before I knew it I was borrowing every book about the Romans, every book about the Apaches, every book about the spindly third-string quarterback who comes off the bench in the fourth quarter to bail out his team. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but what started out as a harmless juvenile pastime soon turned into a lifelong personality disorder.”

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

Posted on September 26, 2012 | 2 Comments

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.

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on September 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Can a photograph be true or false? It’s a a thought-provoking  interview with filmmaker Errol Morris. And if you want to improve your website’s credibility, and who doesn’t,  check out How to Improve Your Website Trust Factor.

  • The Ultimate History Project. “In recent years, an academic job crisis has led many highly trained historians to leave their profession.  The Ultimate History Project draws on the skills of many of these scholars, providing them with an opportunity to publish and promote their scholarship.  The Ultimate History Project also encourages faculty members to write for the general public and it provides a forum for academically trained historians to work alongside avid genealogists, independent historians, and collectors, enabling them all to collaborate and learn from one another.” [Thanks to Francie King of History Keep for alerting me to this item.]
  • Dead Again. “Two decades ago, the Book Review ran an essay, “The End of Books,” in which the novelist Robert Coover questioned whether print could survive the age of “video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks, and in particular out in the humming digitalized precincts of avant-garde computer hackers, cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks.” Was the book as “dead as God”? …Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.”
  • Hints for Memoir Writers from Woody Allen. “A few months ago, I pulled a page from Bloomberg Businessweek. The article was called, “The Woody Allen School of Productivity” and the author was John Lopez. The premise was that there are valuable lessons in examining a career that has been as successful as Woody Allen’s. Between 1965 and 2012, 47 years, Allen has directed 43 films. Just about one a year…John Lopez researched Allen and came up with eight points. I’ve turned five of these into tips for memoir writers. With thanks to Lopez for this inspiration.”
  • The Last Pictures: A Time-Capsule of Humanity in 100 Images Sent into Space for Eternity. “Inspired by cave paintings, Sagan’s Golden Record, and nuclear waste warning signs, MIT artist-in-residence Trevor Paglen set out to create a collection of 100 images, commissioned by public art organization Creative Time, to be etched onto an ultra-archival, golden silicon disc and sent into orbit onboard the Echostar XVI satellite this month — at once a time-capsule of the present and a message to the future.”
  • How to Improve Your Website Trust Factor. “Is your website harming the trust and credibility of your business? Are people worried or put off when they visit you online? Could your site be working against you rather than working as a business asset? I’m sad to say that this is more common than we would like…The GOOD news is, a lot of the problem areas that cause mistrust or unease in your visitors are easy to fix. Check out these factors and see if improvements can be made in your own site:”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on September 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

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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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on August 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

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.

Posted on July 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

In this Monday’s Link Roundup I seem to have been intrigued by disappearing things. There’s Disappearing Ink Book, ideal for the procrastinator. Endangered Languages, an online resource to record languages in danger of disappearing. And  Vanishing Languages, a National Geographic site containing some frightening statistics on the weekly disappearance of languages.

On a lighter note you might want to check out Top Punctuation Howlers.

  • Disappearing Ink Book. “For less voracious readers and those with busy lives, finishing a book can be an elusive task continually pushed to the bottom of to-do lists, right along with reorganizing a closet and learning French. A small Argentinean publisher, Eterna Cadencia, has found a way to combat this: They created an ink that begins to fade away after only two months of interaction with light and air.”
  • India’s paper trail runs for centuries. “Hundreds of years before the colonizers came, Indians were counting, sorting and filing with a precision that the British could only hope to envy. They went deh-be-dehi, or village-by-village, he [Mohammed Irfann] said in the mellifluous Persian of the Moghul Empire, and they made meticulous lists of everything from castes to trees. Dr. Irfann, archivist in the Oriental Division of the Indian National Archives, understands how monumental a task that was. He is near the end of more than 25 years of work cataloging a trove of 137,000 Moghul documents, known as the Inayat Jang Collection.”
  • Endangered Languages. “…an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat.”
  • Top Punctuation Howlers – The Comma. “What’s so great about the comma? It clears away ambiguity, confusion, and on occasion steers us away from cannibalism. For example: Martha finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.“
  • Vanishing Languages. “One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?”
  • “I Am Allergic to Abstraction” by Carlo Rotella. “What does it mean to explore the world through stories? Martin Eiermann sat down with scholar and writer Carlo Rotella to talk about vivid characters, Bostonian accents, and the future of suburbia.”
  • 11 Ways to Bore the Boots Off Your Readers. “I’ve collected the 11 most common mistakes bloggers make that bore the hell out of their readers. And of course, if you prefer to engage, entertain, and entice your readers … just turn these around, and make your content really work.”

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Book Review: The Wealth of Your Life: A Step-by-Step Guide for Creating Your Ethical Will.

Posted on June 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

Ethical Wills aren’t  new. In fact they go back to Biblical times. But it’s within the last few decades that they’ve grown in popularity. People feel the need to leave something more than their worldly possessions.  They want to convey to loved  ones what they value, what has made their life meaningful, the hopes they have for their family and friends, lessons learned, and their regrets and achievements.

An excellent place to start composing your own Ethical Will is with Susan Turnbull’s  The Wealth of Your Life: A Step-by-Step Guide for Creating Your Ethical Will.  This is the third edition of her popular book first published in 2005.

Having designed and run numerous workshops on Ethical Wills myself, I was eager to work through Susan’s guide. To begin with it looks gorgeous. In fact it looks so good I was hesitant to begin writing in it! The 40 page guide is divided into 5 steps: imagining your audience, opening lines, reflecting and making notes, integrating your thoughts, and composing your Ethical Will.

A number of the changes in the Third Edition are cosmetic – changing fonts, redesigning the layout, and adding new visual elements. The core content, however, remains basically unchanged.

What’s new  is that some of the steps have been expanded and are easier to follow. This is particularly true in Step Three: Creating Your Ethical Will which is the core of the guide.  It’s divided into five themes:  your feelings, your values, your perspective, your history, and your will or estate plan.

I know from experience how difficult it is to identify core values. It’s not something we’re asked to do every day.  Step Three’s Your Values theme has been improved by the addition of a referral list of 82 values.  To further aid readers to discover their values they’re asked to write down An activity or role that gives my life meaning and purpose. Then they’re prompted to identify The personal values that are reflected. And finally, readers are asked to consider The biggest reward of that activity/role. These prompts helped me see more clearly why some activities had meaning and purpose in my life.

I worked my way through all the sections of the guide and found that the prompts really  helped me extract the juice from my life. All that remains now is  to take all my notes and complete writing my Ethical Will.

It would have been helpful to include in the guide a few tips on the  process of preparing an Ethical Will. We’re all different in how we like to do things but these few suggestions would give readers some guidance.

  • Make a date with yourself when you can spend quiet, uninterrupted time each day to reflect on the prompts in the guide. Writing your Ethical Will is not something to be done in one sitting. It takes time.
  • Write the way you talk. You’re not trying to win the Nobel Prize for literature.  Friends and family will appreciate hearing your authentic voice.
  • Read aloud what you’ve written. If you stumble over something, rewrite it.
  • Don’t let too much time pass between working through the guide and creating your Ethical Will. A few days delay is okay but a few weeks will rob you of momentum. And there’s the danger you might never get back to completing the final step of actually writing your Ethical Will.
  • When it come time to compose your the final version of your Ethical Will consider handwriting it on archival quality paper.  Even if you’ve done a draft on your computer, handwriting adds a very personal note.

If you’re curious about Ethical Wills and looking for guidance in composing one, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of The Wealth of Your Life. Remember the words of Bertrand Russell, “One must care about a world one will not see.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on June 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

In this Monday’s Link Roundup check out the animated talk 5 Things Every Presenter Should Know About People. If you make presentations, I highly recommend it.  And for something creative and fun, be sure to watch Publisher Creates Inspirational Book Sculpture Video.

  • 10 Important Life Lessons We Learned from Children’s Books. “This week, one of our favorite children’s book authors and illustrators of all time, Chris Van Allsburg, turned 63. Allsburg’s books were formative literature for us as children, so to celebrate the author’s birthday, we were inspired to think about all the life lessons we learned from children’s books — both picture books and early chapter books — that still stick with us.”
  • 8 Things You Should Include In Your Terms of Service Agreement. “If you’ve been a solo freelancer for any significant stretch of time, you’ve probably learned the hard way that a work project can go horribly wrong. They turn out to be life lessons in the long run, but there are ways to protect yourself.”
  • The Life Biographic: An Interview with Hermione Lee. “Acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee talks about life-writing as a scholarly and literary pursuit: the fictions and facts that make up written lives, rules that can be broken, conventions that change and motives that remain the same.”
  • Participatory Archives: Moving Beyond Description. “Last week, the Library of Congress Archives Forum hosted a talk by Kate Theimer of the popular blog ArchivesNext…Theimer spoke on the subject of participatory archives, highlighting the ways that archives can use crowdsourcing projects to increase user engagement and understanding, while also enhancing the information and resources that they provide.”

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