Family history, a strong interest of mine, is a rich source for stories.

I don’t have to go far back in my family tree, for example, to uncover the story of my maternal great-grandfather’s mysterious disappearance or my great-grandmother’s many years in an insane asylum.

Yesterday, I polished my coin-silver tea set in preparation for packing it for our upcoming move (coin silver was the standard before sterling). My father handed down the tea set to me on his 70th birthday (he must have somehow known that he was near the end of his life because he died a few months later). My dad expressed his wish that I would pass the tea set down to my eldest child someday (I plan to do it on my 70th birthday). Before my father had the tea set, it had sat on the buffet of his parents’ dining room and had been passed down through the family via his mother’s lineage.

One piece in the set that tells of its origins is a chalice. Now, I can’t tell you why a chalice is part of a tea set. Inscribed on the chalice are the initials ECH and the following:
In memory of her sister, Mary A. Hartt
Died July 21, 1845
Aged 15 years, 7 months
(You can see a detail of the chalice inscription in the photo.)

So, the tea set came down to my grandmother through this Hartt clan. Just one problem … Extensive genealogical research has revealed no Hartts in our family tree. The story of the tea set is veiled in mystery:

• How am I related to Mary A. Hartt?
• If I’m not related to Mary A. Hartt, how did my family come into possession of the tea set?
• Who was ECH? H was obviously Hartt. If we consider popular 19th-century names, we might conclude that E was for Elizabeth or Emily.
• Was it customary in 1845 for people to be given tea sets or other keepsakes in memory of dead siblings?
• What was the story of Mary A. Hartt and her brief 15 years of life? How did she die?
• Why is a chalice part of a tea set?

I’ve conducted some research on Mary A. Hartt on Ancestry.com and have come up empty.

Given that stories are how we make sense of the world, it’s not surprising that my mind wants to spin stories in response to the tea set’s mysteries.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The portion of the Finer Minds Web site that promotes Chris Cade’s free downloadable workbook, “Using the Power of Stories to Attract Your Ideal Relationship” notes that folks can “attract and experience their most loving and empowering relationship through the simple and fun art of storytelling.”

Cade’s workbook and the approach it represents were new discoveries for me, but his approach reminds me of that of Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life), which helped me at a difficult moment of my life. Both focus on the notion that when people hurt us, it’s not really their fault because they’ve been hurt, too. As Hay puts it, “We are all victims of victims.” Both also provide exercises that involve visualization and repetition of affirmations.

Cade’s approach also reminds me of the “change the story, change your life” approach in that it involves composing future stories that enable you to visualize what the story would like like in your life.

Cade says that “after you finish [the] 2 short exercises in this downloadable workbook, you will:

• Discover who your perfect partner is and if you’re already in a relationship, whether or not you are in a healthy one.
• Pinpoint and break the limiting beliefs that may have held you back from experiencing the full spectrum of a beautiful and empowering relationship.
• Experience a creative visualization process that uses the core principles of the Law of Attraction, imagination, and storytelling to bring you one step closer to your ideal relationship.”

Cade hopes you’ll buy materials for his larger Inscribe Your Life program. The Web site for the program is one of those that reminds me of a text-heavy old-school direct-mail piece with bold, brash headlines in color and copy that seems to go on forever (it seems old-school but I still see these kinds of direct-mail pieces all the time). If you try to close the page, you get a couple of messages to the effect of “Are you sure?” I always have a hard time believing this marketing technique works, but given its prominence, I guess it must.

Does Cade’s storytelling approach work? Well, you can’t beat a free download to check it out and see what you think.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Came across an interesting juxtaposition of two interests of mine. In an article title How to Write One’s Life Story in which author Christina Hamlett writes:

Fill out self-assessment quizzes and introspective writing exercises. In addition to personality tests you can find in consumer magazines and on the Internet, books such as Barbara Ann Kipfer’s 4,000 Questions For Getting To Know Anyone and Everyone, Margaret Tiberio’s The Book of Self-Acquaintance and Dr. Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions will get you thinking about what really makes you tick.

I’ve studied assessments (that measure skills, aptitudes, interests, personality, values, etc.) for a couple of graduate courses, and every couple of years, I update an Assessment Review Chart of free and inexpensive Internet-based assessments on A Storied Career’s parent site, Quintessential Careers (it’s currently in need of updating). I also keep a large 3-ring binder with all my assessment results.

I can certainly see that some of the consistent patterns that always show up when I take these assessments — my creativity, intuition, and introversion, for example — could provide food for thought for life-story writing. Did I always have these characteristics? Are they the product of nature or nurture? Do my parents share these traits? My sisters? What stories from my life best illustrate these aspects of my personality? In what ways have these traits helped me in my life? In what ways have they presented obstacles?

While assessments get you thinking about consistent patterns in your core being, the kinds of question books and sites Hamlett recommends are terrific for stimulating your thinking about all kinds of aspects of your life. These questions generally help you get at more specific bits of your existence.

I did a quick Google search using the terms “life story prompts” and saw promising sets of questions at sites like:

• Family History Products
• Memoirs By Me
• A book: 545 Life Story Prompts
• Sample 100 writing ideas taken from a list of 1,000 that sells for $13.95 (geared to students but can work for others).

What assessments or sets of prompts/questions have you found useful for life-story writing?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Two notable back-to-back story events coming up:

Jill Golick is organizing a Social Media Week Story Project, Social Media Week being Feb. 1-5. Golick wants to “use the social media to tell some stories about how social media are affecting relationships” and is recruiting writers, actors, designers and other interested collaborators to “put together a story room … to turn … data into story arcs.” Then, Golick wants to “have each writer create a character on the web using social media tools like blogs, social bookmarking, FriendFeed and Twitter. They can cast actors to ‘play’ their character in profile pictures, photo albums and other media they may develop.”

“During Social Media Week,” Golick says, participants can “play out the stories of our characters through their social networking activities.” She invites interested folks to e-mail her.

Then, on Feb. 6, Noa Baum (pictured), whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2009 Golden Fleece Conference last April, is holding an all-day seminar called “Your Life’s Story and the Legacy You Leave” under the auspices of the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program.

Some snippets from the seminar description:

Noa Baum shows how to shape memories into a personal narrative and how to reveal underlying universal themes.

The morning session provides an introduction to the oral tradition of storytelling as the oldest tool for transmitting wisdom and values from one generation to the next. After lunch, participants learn techniques for deepening and expanding the images within their stories, exploring the connections between personal narratives and universal archetypes. They also explore the role of the listener in shaping a story and learn how to interact with their listeners to gain insight into how stories become legacies.

Go here to reserve a spot in the seminar, which is held in Washington DC, at the S. Dillon Ripley Center of the Smithsonian.

Thanks to Thaler Pekar for alerting me to this one.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of my departures into stories of my own life …

I don’t drink (in fact today is the 27th anniversary of my sobriety) and don’t much enjoy raucous parties of the New Year’s Eve ilk. But a number of years ago, I sought a way to not feel like a loser who doesn’t get invited to anything on New Year’s Eve.

I hit upon the idea of a New Year’s Eve movie marathon and conducted my first one in 1996. In the early years, the marathon was an opportunity to catch up on movies I hadn’t seen in the past year. As the days of DVDs, and especially Netflix, dawned, it became harder and harder to find movies I hadn’t already seen throughout the year.

So, sometime in this current aught decade, I started focusing the marathon around various themes — documentaries, dance movies, indie films. The year Katharine Hepburn died, her films were the theme. This year is the second I’ve dedicated to a specific actor, and this year’s theme spring from a remark I made to my husband that Robert Downey Jr. is one of those actors whose films I will almost always want to see.

I’ve had marathons with eight or more films, but this year’s will be a more manageable four.

I like having fun munchie food during the marathon.

It’s a safe, enjoyable, non-loser way to celebrate the new year.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

With just a week to go before Christmas, it’s probably too late this year to implement the storied Advent project I saw on the blog My Photo Video. But file it away for next year as a nice idea for telling the story of family holiday preparations.

The blog’s editor (who goes by “Editor”) writes:

Here’s the challenge. Each day take a photo and/or video footage. In the end we’ll create a video storybook of our holiday preparations.

Here are some possible targets of your creative bug:

• video of Christmas tree shopping
• a tight close-up photo of the first ornament you unwrap to hang
• video of hanging the lights
• a wide-angle shot of the stockings hung with care
• video of the kids opening gifts
• a super tall photo of the Christmas tree taken from the floor

The blogger has been going on to present an entry on the blog for each day of advent. Here’s today’s entry.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Another of my occasional forays into stories of my own life …

As regular readers know, my husband and I plan to move from DeLand, FL, to Kettle Falls, WA, in April. We are downsizing to the smaller house we are building in Kettle Falls, so we knew we wanted to purge a lot of our stuff. Our neighborhood was planning a big yard sale this weekend, so we decided to join in. Now, I have the world’s worst yard-sale karma; I have never been successful at staging them. But I figured if Randall took the lead, I couldn’t jinx it too much (I also thought that I would jinx the Florida Gators if I watched their SEC championship game against Alabama — so I didn’t — but apparently I got that backwards).

We literally worked on this yard sale just about every waking hour for nine days straight. The second my mother left Thanksgiving dinner, we started dismantling the lovely and tasteful home (if I do say so myself) we’ve been remodeling for 17 years. Here are five lessons I learned from the experience:

1. Possessions can create a kind of prison: When I wondered on Twitter why we had saved all the stuff we had, a friend made the tongue-in-cheek observation that a new season of the A&E show “Hoarders” is starting. Well, we don’t quite reach hoarder status, but Randall and I are both packrats. We have accumulated an enormous amount of STUFF in 25 years of marriage, plus our single lives before that. One of the biggest reasons I felt we would be bicoastal and maintain homes in both Florida and Washington was that I felt it would be just way too overwhelming to deal with all our crap. Once we realized that Kettle Falls was our future, it seemed insane to be beholden to our possessions. And the more we started to purge, the more free I began to feel. It feels so fantastic to simplify. There’s also a sense of wanting a fresh start. Decorative items and furniture that we still love aren’t hard to part with because we want things to be fresh and new in our new life in the great West. I also began to acutely realize the utter mindlessness with which I acquired possessions. So many things I bought simply because I could. I failed to question whether I really needed something, whether it would give me pleasure, whether it had lasting value. This mindlessness was especially true of gifts. While I pride myself on clever, creative, and thoughtful gift-giving, another dimension for me has been wretched excess — giving gifts just for the sake of giving them without really thinking about what the gift would contribute to the recipient’s life.
2. Circumstances can change your relationship with things. Twice in my 20s, my residence was burglarized, and prized possessions were stolen. From those experiences, I learned not to place as much importance on possessions as I once had. Apparently that lesson didn’t stick. But I had my next epiphany while spending the summer in Kettle Falls living in our RV while we build our house. As I wrote here, I found I really didn’t miss any of my myriad possessions back in Florida. I had all I needed. A year ago, purging the many (many, many, many) possessions we put up for sale in the yard sale would have been unthinkable. We filled 40 cartons of books to sell, probably 80 percent of the books we own. I’m an inveterate book collector, but I had read only a small percentage of them. My fantasy was that I would read every book in retirement (or I would go to prison where I’d have little to do but read). It doesn’t seem worthwhile, however, to schlep 40 cartons of books to the West Coast for a scenario that may never happen (especially the prison scenario). I had a large two-drawer lateral file cabinet filled with my notes from college — and would you believe high school. Realizing that I had never once referred to these notes since filing them, I purged them so I could sell the filing cabinet. I collect teapots and had amassed quite a few. I held onto some favorites but was able to part with others. And then there were my “soap-opera boxes.” Have you ever noticed that on soap operas — and many other TV shows — when a gift is given, the recipient doesn’t tear into the wrapping paper but simply lifts a wrapped box top off a wrapped box bottom? About a decade ago, I had the idea to create my own collection of soap-opera boxes. They would be eco-friendly because they could be reused, and they would make gift-wrapping easier (for years, I had had conducted all-night wrapping marathons a couple of days before Christmas). I had a whole closet filled with these boxes, and I stuffed nine large garbage bags of boxes to sell at the yard sale.
3. Yard sales are very much susceptible to Murphy’s Law. Since we got back to Florida on Nov. 1, we’ve had rain maybe once. But a few days before the sale, we learned that rain was predicted for the exact days of the sale. Weather forecasting is, of course, an inexact science anywhere, but especially in changeable Florida; naturally however, this forecast was dead on. The rain started about an hour into the first day of the sale and just got more and more torrential, bringing cold (for Florida) temperatures and lasting well into the second day of the sale. We rain-proofed as well as well could; sales areas were either covered or inside the house. Surprisingly, we still had a good first day of the sale and made the bulk of our sales then. The second day, however, brought just a trickle of nickel-and-dime customers. We also learned at the end of the second day that the rest of the neighborhood had bailed on their part of the yard sale and taken down their signs. Despite many forces working against us for this sale, we did pretty well.
4. Yard sales are stressful and a test of relationships. I didn’t agree with Randall’s pricing strategy. I was resentful that I was the one stationed outside on the first wet, cold day of the sale. Randall resented the fact that he had been the only collecting boxes during the prep (especially since the produce guy seemed to be coming on to him). I was also unnerved by the chaos of the preparations. Our adult children could have been more helpful with the preparations. So, we all had some issues to work out by the end of the sale — but fences seem to be mended.
5. Leftovers are pretty easy to deal with. Even if we hadn’t had miserable rain, I knew we’d still have a lot of stuff leftover — simply because we put so much stuff on sale — three full rooms of sales space plus several outdoor venues. I estimate it was about two-thirds of our possessions. So, I planned a strategy for dealing with the leftovers. Greyhound Pets of America, a greyhound rescue organization, is a favorite charity dating back to the two wonderful greyhounds we had in the 1990s. They hold a couple of fundraising yard sales every year, so we offered our stuff to the group. They picked up the bulk of it right after the sale and are picking up more today. In many cities (including both DeLand and Kettle Falls), Habitat for Humanity runs a thrift store; the DeLand store will get our furniture leftovers. For the few types of items that neither organization wanted — like the famed soap-opera boxes — The Freecycle Network, a nonprofit organization and a movement of people interested in keeping good stuff out of landfills, provides a way to offer the stuff for free to folks who will come pick it up. I think the only item, that, alas, may end up in a landfill is a bunch of old VHS tapes.

So, bottom line, I’m glad we did the yard sale even though it was flawed. I’m grateful to be one step closer to purging the bulk of our possessions and moving. I also hope to be a much more mindful consumer in the future and really think about each future purchase to consider whether I truly need it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The day after Thanksgiving is the day that StoryCorps has set aside to ask folks to spend one hour recording a conversation with someone important to them. You can interview anyone you choose: an older relative, a friend, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood, StoryCorps suggests.

For this National Day of Listening, StoryCorps offers a free Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide. The organization also has a question list and a question generator for compiling questions to ask your your interviewee.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Results are in for the “Six Words on the Digital Life” challenge sponsored by SMITH Magazine and FRONTLINE/Digital Nation after 850+ entries.

Here are the three winning memoirs:

• “Introverted autistic son blossoms on internet.” —Claire Luna-Pinsker
• Sexting is saving our relationship. —Dana Newsome
• Husband won’t confirm my relationship status. — Dana Calvo

Meanwhile, SMITH has announced a new six-word challenge based on the online project Significant Objects started by Joshua Glenn and NYT “Consumed” columnist Rob Walker, in which writers craft significance for items purchased on the cheap at thrift stores. They then sell story and object as a pair on eBay to determine whether a great story can make a random object valuable. T

SMITH’s newest Six-Word Challenge: Can you create Significance for the Object at left in just six words? The winning response will be published on the Significant Objects site, and more to the point, on its eBay store. Proceeds from that auction go to the author of the winning submission.

So what about this object, a lighter in the shape of small pool ball? What’s its story? You tell us. Leave your six-word story in the comments area below. The contest is open until Friday, November 6, 8 pm EST.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Another one of my occasional forays into my own story:

Those who follow this blog know that after almost 17 years in Central Florida, I have been in Kettle Falls, WA, since early May. Randall and I bought land here last fall and have been building a house here.

The plan was to be bicoastal; we would live in Florida in the winter and Kettle Falls in the summer. But we weren’t in the beautiful, magical Kettle Falls for long before we realized we really didn’t miss much about Florida.

I miss my hair stylist, my yoga teacher, nighttime space-shuttle launches (which we can see from our front yard), and the fact that Florida humidity keeps my skin from getting dry. That’s it. I decided I could easily live without any of those things.

In fact, I was amazed at what I found I could live without. We have a whole house just full of stuff back in Florida, but I can function just fine without any of it. This realization gives me pause about all the material possessions I’ve accumulated that I thought I simply had to have.

So we decided we want to live in Washington year-round. There’s still a possibility our winter residence will be in a warmer part of Washington, as winters are brutal here. We love to bicycle, which is difficult in a harsh winter climate (though we’re thinking of taking up snowshoeing).

To make our year-round Washington dream happen, we have to return to Florida to close out our life there — sell two properties and get rid of all but a few of those material possessions. We’ll return to Kettle Falls in April.

Eastern Washington offers astonishing beauty, a relaxed lifestyle (Randall calls it “Kettle Cool”), and transcendence. Being here has been truly transformative, helping us to shed complexities, a hectic pace, and painful memories.

We leave the day after tomorrow. I planned an interesting route back to soften the blow of leaving. We’ll first head west before we veer east — so we can check out a possible winter residence in western Washington. We’ll bicycle in three new states — Oregon, Kansas, and Indiana. And a former student has offered us a tour of Churchill Downs, where she works.

Still, closing this chapter — even knowing we’ll be back before long — is almost unbearable.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.