This entry is a bit of an addendum to my New Year’s Eve posting about 2008 as the year of personal narrative in which I agreed that 2008 was a starting point but predicted that personal narrative will just get bigger and bigger. I talked about social media as part … Continue reading
Category Archives: Storytelling and Journaling, Memoir, Lifewriting
Has 2008 Been The Year of Personal Narratives?
Gena Haskett, writing on blogher, thinks so: From identity politics to Twitter tweets this has certainly been the year of the personal narrative. It is the search for your story told by another being that shares or reflects your thoughts, feelings and, at times, pain. It is the need for … Continue reading
Digi-Scrapping: Who Knew?
I never cease to come upon new forms of and uses for storytelling. Just discovered a site and blog called We Are Storytellers, which focuses on “digital scrapbooking” or “digi-scrapping,” which I’d never heard of. The illustrations of digi-scrapping pages look as though they are photos of paper scrapbook pages, … Continue reading
Holidays Are a Great Time to Give the Gift of Family Stories
In a column in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley newspaper, the Statesman-Journal, Jeanine Stice rails against consumerism at the expense of sharing family stories at Christmastime. She notes that she’s met people who … … don’t measure their soul with statistics but instead with real-life stories. So instead of reading statistics and … Continue reading
Best Ways to Tell Family Stories with Photos
Family history has been on my mind of late. My sister Robin has been doing quite a bit of genealogical research, as well as scanning old photos and artifacts. We have fragments of family-history Web sites online, but I’m getting ready for a major revamp, re-design, and consolidation. The author … Continue reading
Things I Like about Tokoni (and a Few Things I Don’t)
Tokoni is a story-sharing site that’s about a year old and has ties to eBay (investments, plus its founders were eBay execs). I like Tokoni as it offers features that could easily keep one absorbed for hours. The full “about us” description of Tokoni appears below, but here are my … Continue reading
Storied Lives: Mundane, Mediocre, Unremarkable?
Two portrayals of life stories that may seem unremarkable … but the charm and pull of these stories is truly in the eye of the beholder. As a child of the 50s and 60s, I have long been fascinated by that era — from movies made during that time to … Continue reading
Where Were You on This Day in History? We All Remember Our Stories
I cannot think of Nov. 22 without remembering JFK’s assassination. Nov. 22 means nothing to my husband because he was born in 1960 and has no memory of JFK’s death in 1963 (I imagine President-elect Obama, born in 1961, also has no memory of this day). But history is full … Continue reading
Third-Person Stories: More Trustworthy?
Does anyone agree with this assertion set forth by Terje Johansen in an article called Writing Your Bio on WritingWorld.com? Write in Third Person. People automatically give more trust to what is said of one person by another, than to what people say about themselves — even when they know … Continue reading
Another Value-Added Memoir
A quickie addition to my entry about “value-added memoirs,” concerning people who do wacky or obsessive things, often for a finite period, and then write about them. Latest addition: An unnamed a 35-year-old writer, performer, and artist living in Chicago who is living as Oprah advises for a year and … Continue reading