You Know You Wanna Craft Your Memoir … Here’s Some Guidance

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I definitely have memoir on the brain as it seems like a lot of what has come across my desk and screen in the last couple of weeks has been memoir-related. It is indeed so important to leave our story, our legacy, for others.

Here are a couple of resources I’ve recently come across:

Memoir Guide “explores memoirs, the impulses that lead to them, the stylistic and observational skills required to write them, and the assumptions that underlie them,” writes Gene Bodzin, the person behind the site. Bodzin notes that the memoir he (I’m assuming it’s a he) has been writing for more than 10 years, So Where Are You Now? Discovering Chaos on the Road from Certainty is at the heart of the discussion. Visitors can read the memoir online. A new section of the memoir comes on line every three days, and Bodzin has set up cool tools to enhance the reading experience.

A section of Essays offers thoughts in two categories, “Observing and remembering your life” and “The writing process.” Bodzin also offers a blog, Memoir-Guide Companion.

Silvia Tolisano writes on her Langwitches Blog about the importance of leaving something of yourself behind for descendants. In an entry titled Digital Storytelling-What will your Great-Grandchildren Know About You?, she writes:

In one hundred years, our present will be “a life long gone.” What will we leave behind for our descendants, so they can piece together the puzzle of Who we were?

  • What would you like your great-grandchildren to know about YOU?
  • What was your life like?
  • How did you look?
  • Where did you live? How did the town/city look?
  • What was important to you?
  • Who did you call family?
  • How did you spend your days? Work? Hobbies? Free Time?

Tolisano goes on to point out how easy and inexpensive it is in our times to capture both still and moving digital images, and she offers a number of ideas for tools to use and what can be done with them.

The stories we leave behind can provide important clues for our descendants to understand their own lives. I’m thinking of my sister, whose intensive quest into family history began with her curiosity about our great grandmother, Grace Neal (pictured), who spent a large portion of her life in an insane asylum. (Read my sister’s account here). Poor Grace was in no shape to record her story for posterity, but her life is such a mystery that it would have been nice if her loved ones had left more information. It’s probably testimony to the shame attached to mental illness that they didn’t.

Miss This Week’s Storytelling/Leadership Webinar? You Can Still Experience It Along with Resources

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If you’re lamenting that you missed the Terrence Gargiulo/Shawn Callahan webinar that I wrote about earlier in the week, you can experience it here, thanks to the presenters’ generosity.

The presenters also provided a slew of additional resources:
Selecting a Story Tool
One of the questions we get asked the most is, “how do you know what story to tell?” It’s an excellent question. This is a simple tool for helping people select an effective story.

Information About the Story-Based Communication Skills Model
Background and description of the nine story-based communication skills.

Story-Based Communication Assessment Tool
Assessment measures nine story-based communication skills. Based on extensive research with Fortune 500 leaders and recipient of the 2008 HR Leadership Award from Asia Pacific HRM Congress.

Job Aid for Eliciting/Triggering Stories
Three Steps For Eliciting Stories From Others

White Paper: Using Stories in All-Hands-On Meetings
Large gatherings of people are a prime opportunity to incorporate stories into the proceedings. Careful thought and planning go into how to weave stories into the flow of the event. We explore several different strategies.

Book of Self-Development Exercises
Series of self-development exercises mapped to the nine story-based communication skills. Exercises can be done either individually or used with leaders to develop their skills.

Anecdote Circle Guide
A step-by-step description of a technique for gathering stories as part of a wider business-narrative program.

How to illustrate the value of storytelling — stories are memorable
A 4-minute video on one way to garner the support of senior management to engage in storytelling activities.

A Simple Explanation of the Cynefin Framework
A 4-minute presentation explains the Cynefin Framework and how you can use it to show people why they would be interested in business narrative.

Three journeys: A narrative approach to successful organisational change
This whitepaper outlines an approach to effecting change in an organisation using narrative techniques.

Terrence and Shawn also invited folks to follow them on Twitter…

Shawn

Terrence

Storytelling + Anonymity = Healing

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I’ve been writing recently about storytelling for healing and “memoirs-on-the-go” — autobiographical writing in blogs. (And, by the way, here’s a poignant take on a different kind of memoir through social media.)

An article by David Spark on SocialMediaBiz reminded me of a site that brings these concepts together and adds a third concept — anonymity.

Spark writes:

Experience Project (EP) is a unique social network in that it promotes anonymity. Most social networks focus on promoting yourself as a brand and connecting you to your friends by name. EP members are anonymous and are able to connect through each other’s stories. EP is not the first anonymous social network. It’s just the first one I know of that doesn’t have a predefined agenda. With other social networks joining them automatically identifies you as a rape survivor, someone suffering from MS, or some other ailment or a physical/emotional tragedy. While these social networks are all valid and helpful, people are first seen by their issue or ailment. It’s hard to break out of that image and when you overcome that issue, then there’s no reason to be on that specific social network.

As of this writing, anonymous contributors have shared nearly 3 million experiences (dare we call them “stories?”) on Experience Project, which launched in 2007 and describes itself like this:

As the world’s largest living collection of shared experiences. and the premier passions-based network, experience project is a comfortable and supportive place for individuals to share and connect with others around the things that matter to them most. With over 24 experience categories, experience project is the definitive online social conversation destination for people to connect with others who really get “it” — and them.

I’ve actually written about the Experience Project before — almost a year ago, and the site has clearly evolved since that time. While its intentions seem to have remained consistent, the site seemed a tad voyeuristic back then, while now it seems more bent toward helping people with issues realize they are not alone.

Spark interviewed users of the Experience Project about how the site “helped them cope with their concerns.” Anonymity was an important element in this particular healing storytelling.

Stories Matter in the Quest for Social Change

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Marshall Ganz, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a civil-rights activist has written a thought-provoking article, Why Stories Matter: The Art and Craft of Social Change on the site Sojourners Magazine.

Ganz notes that it’s not effective to simply tell people to follow the values of social change you are hoping to imbue in them. Instead, he writes, “we talk about them in the language of stories because stories are what enable us to communicate these values to one another.”

Ganz cites three parts of every story: “a plot, a protagonist, and a moral.”

He writes of plot: “What makes a plot a plot? What gets you interested? Tension. An anomaly. The unexpected. The uncertain and the unknown. … We are all infinitely curious in learning how to be agents of change, how to be people who make good choices under circumstances that are unexpected and unknown to us.”

The protagonist’s choice results in the moral, Ganz writes:

The outcome teaches a moral, but because the protagonist is a humanlike character, we are able to identify empathetically, and therefore we are able to feel, not just understand, what is going on.

A story communicates fear, hope, and anxiety, and because we can feel it, we get the moral not just as a concept, but as a teaching of our hearts. That’s the power of story. That’s why most of our faith traditions interpret themselves as stories, because they are teaching our hearts how to live as choiceful human beings capable of embracing hope over fear, self-worth and self-love over self-doubt, and love over isolation and alienation.

The key question Ganz raises is:
HOW DO WE recapture that power of public narrative and learn the art of leadership storytelling?

Ganz asserts that a leader must first tell a story of self: “You don’t have any choice if you want to be a leader. You have to claim authorship of your story and learn to tell it to others so they can understand the values that move you to act, because it might move them to act as well.”

The second story is the story of us, and the third is the story of now, Ganz writes:

[The story of us] is an answer to the question, Why are we called? What experiences and values do we share as a community that call us to what we are called to? What is it about our experience of faith, public life, the pain of the world, and the hopefulness of the world? It’s putting what we share into words.

The fierce urgency of now … is realizing, after the sharing of values and aspirations, that the world out there is not as it ought to be. Instead, it is as it is. And that is a challenge to us. We need to appreciate the challenge and the conflict between the values by which we wish the world lived and the values by which it actually does. The difference between those two creates tension. It forces upon us consideration of a choice. What do we do about that? We’re called to answer that question in a spirit of hope.

Our goal is to meet this challenge, to seize this hope, and turn it into concrete action. After developing our stories of self, then we work on building relationships, which forms the story of us.

Here are individuals and organizations that are telling the story of us and the story of now:

    • “The face and voice of homelessness” (I could not find any other name) explains the vlog Invisible People:

For years I’ve used the lens of a television camera to tell the stories of homelessness and the organizations trying to help. That was part of my job. The reports were produced well and told a story, but the stories you see on this site are much different. These are the real people, telling their own, very real stories… unedited, uncensored and raw.

The purpose of this vlog is to make the invisible visible. I hope these people and their stories connect with you and don’t let go. I hope their conversations with me will start a conversation in your circle of friends.

After you get to know someone by watching their story, please pause for a few moments and write your thoughts in the comments section, or maybe email them to a friend and link back to this vlog. By keeping this dialog open we can help a forgotten people.

    • Fonografia Collective is dedicated to bringing local and international stories about human rights and social issues to a wider audience. By combining traditional approaches with multimedia storytelling, we focus on how important global issues like development, economic trends, the environment, health care, immigration, or poverty affect people’s everyday lives. Since 2005, these stories have taken us to the U.S.-Mexico border, Panama, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, Turkey, and Haiti.
    • Mike Best of Georgia Tech collects stories in post-conflict environments, countries recovering from civil war, genocide or other disasters using a tool he and his team developed, called MOSES; i.e., Mobile Story Exchange System (which doesn’t seem to have its own Web site but is explained here and here). As Ethan Zuckerman notes, “most of the people Mike works with were forced out of school by war and are illiterate.” MOSES “allows participants to record and browse videos using an interface that uses pictures and speech, though no text. The system is portable and was moved throughout the country, tested in different areas. Mike’s team uses a model called HDF — heuristic evaluation, diaspora evaluation and field evaluation – to sharpen the designs. This allows a team based in Atlanta, Georgia to try and develop tools that can work in Liberia. … The system has generated hundreds of videos, and thousands of Liberians have participated.”
  • PCI-Media Impact “uses creative media to mobilize individual, community and political action in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, environmental conservation and sustainable development, and human rights and democracy.” See examples here.

A Few Nuggets from A Storytelling Leadership Webinar

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I just finished attending a terrific webinar with Terrence Gargiulo of MakingStories and Shawn Callahan of Anecdote. I have attended several of Terrence’s webinars, but this was my first one with Shawn. This was the second presentation of this webinar; the pair presented it last week at a time more geared to Eastern Hemisphere audiences.

I thought I would try to do a quick brain dump of some nuggets I picked up while they re fresh in my mind.

The webinar offered far more information than I can convey here, but here are a few takeaways:

    • The presenters provided value even before the webinar by sending the Anecdote whitepaper I’ve cited before and that anyone can get as a free download: The Vital Role of Business Storytelling. The presenters also provided links to additional resources:
    • About 55 people from all over the world attended. A few countries I heard mentioned were Canada, Scotland, Spain, as well as the US. Terrence asked what temperatures were like in attendees’ locales, and it seemed to be hot everywhere.
    • The mention of Scotland promoted Shawn to mention the Johnnie Walker video with actor Robert Carlyle that has been much mentioned in the Twitterverse recently. It’s a terrific rendition of the story of Johnnie Walker.
    • Shawn and Terrence compared the Triple Threat of show business (singing, dancing, acting) with the Triple Threat of storytelling: Storylistening, Story triggering, and Storytelling. They like the term “Triple Thread” better than Triple Threat because of the way stories are interwoven. An attendee suggested the term Triple Helix.
    • Shawn stressed that he spells “storylistening” as one word for the same reason one of his professors spelled “prehistory” as one word — so the word represents a real discipline.
    • Shawn spoke of evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar, whose research has shown that 65 percent of human conversation consists of “who has done what to whom,” about which Shawn writes on the Anecdote Web site: “This type of small, almost invisible storytelling has the greatest impact on who we are, how people view us (our reputation) and how we see this world.
  • Terrence and Shawn discussed the age-old question of what exactly a story is. Shawn mentioned that a story generally has some sort of time marker, and to be effective, has an unanticipated aspect. I did a screen-capture of the slide they used for the “Unanticipated” point (at right). As Shawn pointed out, we automatically construct a story about why this woman has marshmallow Fluff in her hair; when humans need to make sense of a situation, they tell a story about it.
  • The presenters introduced the concept — new to me — of the Storytelling Spectrum — where at one end is “Big S” Storytelling: legends, fairy tales, epics, hero’s journeys and the other end is “little s” storytelling — including anecdotes, examples, and recounts. Business storytelling, Shawn and Terrence said, gravitates toward the “little s” end.

The webinar was well-presented, content-rich, replete with extra resources, completed within its scheduled time — and free. Can’t beat the generosity of the storytelling community.

Employers Pay Attention to Your Personal Story

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A few months ago, personal-branding guru Dan Schawbel sent me a review copy of his book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, which came out this spring.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to review it yet for A Storied Career’s parent site, Quintessential Careers, but I thought about it recently when I read Part 6 (of a planned 10) of an ongoing personal-branding story by Marcos Salazar on Dan’s blog. More about that later.

In Me 2.0, where Dan tells the saga of landing his first post-college job, he writes, “As I went to a series of interviews, I noticed that hiring managers paid attention to three items: the personal story that I told, my CD portfolio [a tool he had prepared to distinguish himself from other candidates], and my enthusiasm. My storyline gave the hiring managers an understanding of my personal identity and career strategy as well as my perseverance, which clearly reflected my desire for the position.”

As far as I can tell, that’s Dan’s last mention of his story (and, again, I have not yet read the book), but his disciple, Salazar, says a lot more. His Part 6 blog entry is entitled My Personal Branding Story Part 6: Narrative, Context, and Being a Purple Cow.

Salazar talks about using stories in networking situations. After giving a couple of compelling examples of stories he told while networking, Salazar writes:

… our brains are wired to think in terms of narratives. Storytelling is one of the few universal human traits that spans across cultures and all of known history. They captivate the mind and elicit emotions that become tied to themes, events, or characters. When this happens, our story gets implanted into memory easier and much more permanently. This is why creating a narrative about your personal brand is infinitely better than simply stating your job title.

In Part 7, Salazar talks about carrying through one’s story to online venues, such as blogging:

Whether we realize it or not, we are all creating a narrative about ourselves online. Everything we post, comment on, or upload is contributing to the story of who we are online — potentially to millions. And even if you don’t make a conscious effort to create an online presence, that too is a narrative because you are leaving your personal brand to chance.

Salazar then presents a story-based test for maintaining one’s personal brand:

… one thing to always keep in mind is that anything you post could have an impact on the narrative you are trying to create. So when forming a strategy, ask yourself, “How is this going to contribute to the story I want to tell?” Finding answers to this question will provide you with a good guide in developing a strong personal brand both on and offline.

I would love to know more about how Dan Schawbel developed and told his story (and indeed what the story was) and how employers engaged with it — because I am convinced this employer desire to hear the candidate’s narrative is a huge untold story in the hiring process.

I am heartened by the way Salazar uses his story as a test how strong his personal brand is.

Storytelling’s Far from a Lost Art: More on Memoirs on the Go

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“One thing that people ask me all the time is: ‘is storytelling dying?'” said Dale Jarvis, the Intangible Cultural Heritage development officer for Newfoundland, in a transcript of a podcast interview on PreservationToday.com

I know what Dale’s talking about. I constantly see articles lamenting “the lost (or dying) art of storytelling.” Maybe it’s because I am acutely tuned in to storytelling, but “lost” and “dying” are the last adjectives I would apply to storytelling.

Dale’s response:

I really believe that things are always in a constant state of evolution. I think traditions are always changing, and I think that the rise of things like YouTube indicate that people are really passionate about storytelling. They really want to share their own personal stories.

So, it is sort of a really great democratization of storytelling in a way. Maybe people don’t sit around and tell the long-form fairy tales in quite the same way that they used to, but people are incredibly interested in sharing their own personal stories and creating stories and sharing them.

Yes. On Friday, I talked about this phenomenon particularly with regard to blogging. In that entry, I quoted academician Cynthia Franklin: “I argue that blogs are serving as a kind of ‘memoir-on-the-go…”

Here are a few more examples of blogs that are “memoirs on the go” (suggested by Joel Kelly on Ingenioustries in an entry entitled The keys to a storytelling blog:

    • The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, the blog of Jelisa “J-Money” Castrodale, “a freelance writer and stand-up comic who is fueled by an enamel-eroding Diet Coke habit and an insane love of music, both of which put her in the categories of ‘good at Jeopardy!’ and ‘annoying to have at parties.'” Kelly describes the blog like this: ” The story is Jelisa’s life. We know she’s kind of broke, loves running, and has had plenty of hilarious dating misadventures. And she’s trying to get more professional writing work. The content [comprises] her posts about what goes on in her life.”
    • Gaping Void, the blog of Hugh McLeod, a cartoonist who sells limited-edition prints, published a book in June (which as of today, Aug. 17, is No. 1 in Amazon’s “creativity” category. He is also CEO of Stormhoek USA, a small wine brand out of South Africa, which just launched in America. Kelly says: “The story is Hugh living in Alpine, Texas, doing some futile marketing and making awesome artwork after having been a traditional ad man for 10 years. The content [comprises] his cartoons and marketing insights (often the same thing).”
    • Vegan Dad, who describes his blog this way: “When you have kids, supper has to be on the table every night. And when you are a vegan, the drive-thru, the deli counter, and TV dinners/frozen convenience foods are not an option. So, you do the best you can. This blog is a record of what my family eats. It’s not always a totally complete meal, not always photogenic, and sometimes it’s leftovers. But, it is a realistic look at a vegan family in a northern Ontario city that is not always vegan-friendly.” Kelly: “Story — A, well, vegan dad who wants his family to be healthy and eat great food. He’s got a few boys and a brand new vegan daughter, and he wants to share the cool food he makes for them with other vegans. Content — Amazing recipes. They’re usually fairly simple because we know from the overall story that he’s a busy guy.”

Maximum Fun, of which Kelly say: “Story — Jesse Thorn, 28, is living his dream of hosting a public radio show (and podcasts), despite the odds (it doesn’t really make him much money). He struggles, he finds success, and you’re on the journey with him of living his dream. Content — The episodes and blog posts themselves. The things he creates and controls. Each episode of his show or podcasts are framed by the fact that he’s young, fairly broke, but having a huge amount of fun interviewing his heroes and hanging out with his friends.”

What They’re Tweeting about Storytelling

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Time for my monthly look at storytelling zeitgeist in Twitterland. Here are items that have gained significant attention:

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia – November 2008 from niko on Vimeo.

    • Yikes! Is “storytelling” merely a buzzword? @lindadong tweeted: “I’m so sick of buzzwords. No more ‘innovation’ ‘storytelling’ ‘experience’ or ‘usability'”!
    • I liked this quote from Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri that Scott Zeitz tweeted: “The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”
    • Storytelling practitioners and fans will find familiar material in The Need for Storytelling Skills on Silvia Tolisano’s Langwitches blog. These four summary points suggest reasons we need storytelling skills, an argument author Lori Silverman crusades for:
      1. There is more INFORMATION out there than ever before in human history. We (and our students) need to learn how to find, evaluate and make sense out of all this information that we are bombarded with through many types of different media.
      2. WHAT HAPPENS when we have obtained this/these information/facts? What do we do with it? How will we remember? How will we archive for future retrieval?
      3. It is precisely THAT ability (organize/connect/remix/create) that we need to foster in ourselves and our students . The ability to put these facts in context. The amount of facts alone (without context) just overwhelms us.
      4. Storytelling (putting information in a narrative context) might be the answer to our need to make sense of this vast information that is available to us anytime, anywhere and anyhow.
    • This technically multifaceted site from Louis Vuitton, A Journey Beyond, “connects history, storytelling, and the thrill of a journey with an iconic brand.” It presents perspectives from astronauts Jim Lovell, Buzz Aldrin, and Sally Ride. My laptop couldn’t quite handle the technical requirements, so I didn’t see too much. The site is impressive, but I didn’t see enough to form an opinion on the storytelling.
    • A re-tweeted TED talk was characterized as explaining why storytelling needs interactive imagery. In the talk, information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. …he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?
    • Another quote I liked, this one from @KathySierra: “Don’t learn PPT/Keynote, learn how the brain works. Learn storytelling. Study filmmaking. Apply learning theory. Inspire.”
    • This piece by Melinda Partin from Fast Company garnered attention: Brand Storytelling: Connecting With Your Audience. She describes a storytelling ad her company created:

      … When sharing the story of the AT&T 8525 by HTC, a Windows Mobile smartphone, we targeted harried business people who needed real-time access to their productivity tools, such as email and Microsoft Office programs, at all times. An out-of-home campaign in airports, subway stations and table trays on Alaska Airlines jets showed how the 8525 kept users calmly connected, as if they were sitting in their offices. An emotional need was met — to stay calm and connected — while the consumer was actually in a usually stressful travel environment.

    • In Storytelling tools: Audit Your Intellectual Capital — 7 Ways to Find Your Stories, Elizabeth Sosnow raises the specter that corporate entities trying to promote themselves in social-media communities face “story fatigue.”

  • Another technologically and visually stunning Flash site, The Ropewalker created Twitter buzz for “really slick storytelling.”
  • Yet another good quote, which I believe comes from @ChuckWendig: “Future of storytelling: multimedia, illustrated stories, co-created in real time by author, audience, and fictional characters.”
  • The Whitehouse got kudos for video storytelling (with music): “Inside the White House: Letters to the President”

And in a final piece of Twitter-worthiness, author Dave Eggers’ project, Once Upon a School is all about telling “stories about how all kinds of people — from celebrities to retired journalist — are doing their part to improve their local schools.”

My Community-Supported Agriculture Story

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One of my occasional departures from curating and commenting about storytelling material — and instead telling the story of my own life ….

The day crackled with anticipation yesterday. The hours passed slowly, and we felt like children on Christmas Eve.

Finally, it was time to pick up our box …


A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I’d been influenced by the book Omnivore’s Dilemma and had realized the importance of knowing your food’s story — the story of where it comes from.

That epiphany inspired me (and my husband) to subscribe to a Community-Supported Agriculture organization (CSA). I knew about these organizations because my best friend has subscribed to one for about six years and frequently described the bounty of produce she received every summer Friday. I was thrilled to learn a CSA was available in the Kettle Falls area.

The USDA’s National Agricultural Library defines CSAs like this:

CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production. Typically, members or “share-holders” of the farm or garden pledge in advance to cover the anticipated costs of the farm operation and farmer’s salary. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s bounty throughout the growing season, as well as satisfaction gained from reconnecting to the land and participating directly in food production.

Among many other advantages is the knowledge of exactly where your food has come from, the flavor and quality of just-harvested produce, the satisfaction of supporting local farmers, and relief that you are not supporting big-agra practices, including consumption of fossil fuels from shipping produce to you from distant locales.

I was thrilled to consume a dinner consisting mostly of foods I had just picked up from the farm — BLTs on whole-wheat bread and fresh broccoli.

Since I’m not a big fruit eater, I might have preferred a bit less fruit and a few more veggies.

But the excitement of wondering what’s in the box each week will sustain me through mid-October.

Memoirs on the Go and the Blurring of the Personal and Public

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I came across an interesting interview last week with Cynthia Franklin, author of Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today. I was attracted to the interview by Scott Jaschik because I sometimes think about and consider writing about my all-too-short academic life as a college instructor.

But the part of the interview that grabbed me the most was this response by Franklin:

I argue that blogs are serving as a kind of “memoir-on-the-go,” one that allows for dialogue and also a large readership. … I believe the permeability between memoirs and blogging — and also practices such as “facebooking” — will, if anything, feed the memoir phenomenon: these sites are further popularizing autobiography; increasingly eroding the boundaries between the personal and the public; and extending the practices of personal narrative by combining it with political commentary and analysis. Rather than replace the memoir market or the desire to write autobiographically, then, I think the habitual public sharing of private life — and the increased blurring between the personal and the public, the political, and the professional — will, if anything, stimulate memoir writing and probably also influence its shape. An example: I have a friend who blogs, and then links his blogging to his Facebook site. The blogs, accounts of concerts he has attended, combine personal narrative, analysis of the dynamics of race and class and region in the U.S., and commentary on music. He is amassing a significant body of writing that is losing its extracurricular feel, and his readers have started petitioning him in their comments to write a memoir based on these writings.

Having suggested earlier in the interview that memoirs are more popular them ever, Franklin makes two important points here:

  1. The storytelling that many people do in blogs in indeed a sort of a memoir in progress, certainly rough notes that could become a memoir. I immediately thought of a blogger, Jared (pictured at left), who wrote to me recently about his blog (Moon Over Martinborough): “I’m now getting 1,800 pageviews a month, and I’ve got 80 fans on
    Facebook and 273 followers on Twitter. Not bad for a blog that’s only 5
    months old and is mostly about chickens and olives!” The blog is pure storytelling about “an expat American city boy lands on 20 acres and an olive grove in New Zealand.” Jared could easily turn the blog into a fascinating memoir. The blog as memoir-on-the-go also has the advantage of offering the memoirist feedback and support.
  2. The “storytelling” folks do in social-media venues is also memoir fodder. People who probably had not the slightest notion of ever writing a memoir are probably more inclined to do so because they have become more comfortable with publicly telling their stories. Now, I’ve been chewing on this idea of social-media as storytelling for along time now and asking the opinions of many others. Perhaps the best we can say about social-media storytelling is that it is a crude, fragmented, incomplete sort of storytelling; yet there is much storytelling in social media that transcends that characterization and is truly memoir-worthy. And, as Jared’s experience shows, social-media and blogging also cross-pollinate each other.

I for one am heartened by these cultural influences that turn more of us into storytellers.