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.