I came across the utterly charming and uplifting site Tera’s Wish, subtitled “a free informational resource about Creativity.”

The Tera’s Wish web site, the site says, “is about exploring the energy within each of us that fulfills and makes us most happy.”

There are a heck of lot tools on this site for exploring that energy.

The story of site founder Tera Leigh is inspiring in itself.

She offers many articles in her articles section.

For those into journaling, lifestory writing, blogging, and storytelling, the most resource-rich section is “The Workshop,” offering material on journaling prompts, illustrated journaling, starting a creative mentoring group, idea catcher, visual goal journals, goal journaling, life map collages, shine time journaling, writing your life story, and many more topics.

Tera also lists creativity-related websites and her own books and products.

The August issue of O magazine offers "O's Memoir Feast," eight "riveting true stories" introduced with these words:

Tell me a story. Tell me your story. ... Okay, talk to me, tell me who you really are. This is what we feel when we sit down to read a memoir. We have a craving for connection, an urge to share a confidence. We want an insider's glimpse of someone else's life. ... some contemporary memoirists such as Kathryn Harrison, Geoffrey Wolff, and Augusten Burroughs have bared startling family secrets, but a memoir can as often be a story carved from a quiet, ordinary life: a personal history reconstructed from memory and infused with meaning...

1. Write two pages of something you can't deny.
2. Write two pages of what got left behind.
3. Write two pages of something you wrote or did that you no longer understand.
4. Write two pages of apologizing for something you didn't do.
5. Write two pages about a physical characteristic you are proud to have inherited or passed on.
6. Write two pages of what you had to have.
7. Write two pages of humiliating exposure.
8. Write two pages about a time when you felt compassion unexpectedly.
9. Write two pages of what you have too much of.
10. Write two pages of when you knew you were in trouble.

With the exception of a period in junior high, I’ve never really kept a journal (I think I may have anticipated the Internet because I wrote my journal back then as though it would be read by the public.)

But beginning in early March 1993 when we first got on the Internet, my cousin/best friend and I have maintained an intensive e-mail correspondence that is tantamount to journaling. We’ve shared our stories and told each other just about everything over these 15+ years. We used to share this stuff by phone; I can now recall only two phone conversations we’ve had in 15 years. She just told me a poignant story about failing to connect with her husband at the airport.

We’ve tapered off some in recent years. The novelty has worn off, and we’re both busy.

But I’ve noticed a new phenomenon recently. We’re both fairly avid Twitter users, and we now seem to be letting the micro-blogging of Twitter stand in for the intensive e-mail journaling of old. If we forget to to tell each other something, we’ll often catch up through Twitter Tweets. She’ll often ask me to elaborate on something I’ve posted on Twitter.

After she returned from the same trip where she feared her husband hadn’t arrived at the airport to pick her up, she detailed her travels to me, as we usually do.

But I found myself lazily responding: “Anything that’s new in my life, you can probably find on Twitter.”

I think I’m sad about losing my journaling outlet even though I like the shorthand of Twitter.

My new friend Sharon Lippincott of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing has joined with Jerry Waxler to start a Yahoo-based discussion group for those interested in lifestory writing. Although my interest in that area is embryonic at best, I've joined the group and am impressed with the warm and generous spirit its founders and members convey.

You can join here, and in the extended portion of this entry, I have also borrowed (stolen) QUITE liberally from Sharon's site to further explain the group. Here's the first part of Sharon's invitation:

Calling All Life Writers
There is good news for anyone who would like to hang out with other people who write life stories, memoir, journals, personal essays, or other forms of recording their lives in writing. Whatever your reason for writing about your life, the newly formed Life Writers Forum is a great place to ask questions, share thoughts, post short stories or excerpts from longer works, and generally shoot the breeze about writing.

In a recent newsletter, Terrence Gargiulio offered some great "trigger questions" for eliciting stories about parents and siblings:

• What stories do you know about your parents' childhood?
• What things did you do with your parents?
• Do you have any memories of shopping for food or clothing with your parents?
• Were you ever jealous of your siblings? Were they ever jealous of you?
• What things do you admire most about your parents?
• What aspects of your relationship with your parents were difficult?
• While you were growing up, were there any major events in your parents' lives?
• Did you ever see your parents frightened?
• How did your parents relate to one another?
• Who were your parents' friends?
• What hobbies or interests did your parents have?
• What things upset your parents?
• Did your parents give you chores?
• Did you have an allowance?
• How did your parents express affection?
• How did your parents express anger?
• Were you spoiled in any way?
• Did you or any of your siblings receive special treatment?
• Were your parents strict?
• What sort of rules did you have while growing up?
• Were your parents involved in the community?
• What did your friends say and think about your parents?
• Did your parents ever apologize to you?
• In what ways did you try to please your parents?
• What were some of the most memorable gifts your parents gave you?
• How did your parents express disappointment?
• What do you cherish most about your parents?

What a concept ... I actually found a cool new resource through the Google ads here on A Storied Career. It's Were You There? which is in beta. I'd consider this another convergence between social media.

Here's what the founder, Jonathan Hull, says about the site:

Our mission is simple: to create a comprehensive and easy-to-use archive where the memories that shape our lives – and history – can not only be preserved but shared, creating a conversation about the moments in life that mattered.

The concept grew out of my own passion for storytelling both as a former TIME magazine bureau chief in Jerusalem and Chicago and a bestselling novelist. Over the years I’ve received many letters from readers who were moved to share some of the unforgettable moments in their own lives, hopeful that someone might listen. Because what are stories without an audience? At heart, we are all storytellers, telling and retelling our stories to give structure and meaning to our lives. The more letters I read, the more I realized that we all have stories that deserve to be told and remembered. But when I looked online for a place where these memories might come together in a meaningful way, whether from years ago or something that happened last week, I couldn't find one.

So I created WereYouThere.

Hull invites "select a category and follow your memory back." He says that if you can't can’t find what you’re looking for (for example, I didn't see the Kent State shootings or the Challenger or Columbia tragedies), "simply add a new topic yourself."

Hull notes that you can also join a Community or start your own.

Hull's examples of things you can do at WereYouThere:

• Share stories, photos and videos of growing up in your hometown, your old hangouts, high school or college.


• Remember the March from Selma, Woodstock or what it was like to live through Katrina.


• Reunite with others who served in your combat unit at Omaha Beach, Chosin Reservoir, Da Nang or Takrit.


• Relive the sites and sounds of the Summer of Love, your favorite travel spot or the Whisky a Go Go when The Doors took stage.


• Share a passion for ‘56 Chevys, Elvis or Coltrane.


• Recall the everyday scenes of a time gone by, from the fads and fashion to the cars, the music and the dreams that defined your generation.

People really are starting to share stories in this venue.

Extended entry lists other categories on Were You There?

As an avid cyclist, I was delighted to learn of the site crazyguyonabike.com that enables touring cyclists to journal about their bike tours. These folks are much more ambitious than my partner and I have been so far; we biked in about 12 states last summer but traveled between them in an RV. I've noticed that many touring cyclists are quite mature, so I hope to have some good tales to tell on crazyguyonabike.com at some point in my life.

Update: Above are the books that have come out of Joni Cole's Day Diary project. I submitted an entry on March 27, 2007, my birthday, and Joni was kind enough to send me a birthday greeting. The book from the 2007 project is The Watercooler Diaries (my submission wasn't chosen), while the other is from a similar project in Jun 2003.

The makers of Lady Speed Stick® 24/7 and author Joni Cole of the series This Day in the Life: Diaries from Women across America are partnering on the first National Day Diary Project. Joni Cole was having a bad day when she conceived the idea for the This Day in the Life book series. Trying to deal with a serious illness in her family, job woes and a child who refused to wear socks in the winter, she wondered if anyone else was feeling so low. What were other women doing and feeling and thinking on the very same day? And so This Day in the Life was born out of self-pity, curiosity and a need to connect.

Submissions for the March 27 diary date can be entered online from March 27-April 6, 2007, to qualify for a chance at publication.

I submitted a diary entry on March 27 because it happens to be my birthday!

You can read more about the diary project here

I'm not sure if gifts that prompt storytelling have always been available, or if I have just noticed them more since I've been interested in storytelling.

This year, for example, I've seen an "ingenious journal" that "jumpstarts the storyteller in everyone, sold by Norm Thompson and probably many others. "More than 100 'story starters' ask compelling questions and provide inspiration," the catalog description touts. At Solutions.com, we find Your Story: A Guided Interview Through Your Personal and Family History, which has 179 questions "that help to put together important details. And Femail Creations offers a game, Life Stories. "A fun game of telling tales and sharing smiles with family and friends will open a pathway to each other's hearts and souls," says the catalog copy.

I didn't purchase any of these for Christmas this year, but I did order other similar items.

Sometimes we need help telling our personal stories. I can see stories coming out of these products that would even be useful for the purpose I tout -- career advancement. It would be interesting to possess a passel of these products and compare their usefulness.

In his blog, A Jolly, Socratic Science, Avi Solomon suggests storyboarding your life, writing:

A storyboard is a sequence of images and words drawn together on a page to form a plausible narrative. ... A storyboard is an apt metaphor for how we make sense of our own life history. Storyboarding can be used to sense emergent patterns in our own life story and to envision the life experiences that we wish to welcome into our future.