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"Shields (echoing Alice Marshall) is disappointed in James Frey not because he lied in his book, but because when he appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show he didn’t say: “Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be.” After all, just because the novel is food for worms doesn’t mean that fiction has ceased. Only an artificial dualism would treat every non-novel as if it were reportage or court testimony, and only a fear of the slipperiness of life could perpetuate the cult of the back story. 'Anything processed by memory is fiction,' as is any memory shaped into literature."
~ Luc Sante, in The Fiction of Memory, a review of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by Charles Shields "Every time an old person dies, it's like a library burning down."
~ Alex Haley
I came to see that our memories aren't really patchy; they're patchworks, oddly and randomly retrieved bits and scraps that we weave together into something we believe to be a more integrated, seamless fabric than it really is....Do I -- do we -- remember only those scenes that fit neatly into the central narrative in which we're most invested, the one that dovetails most cleanly and neatly with the sense of self that we've chosen or that's been imposed on us by the people around us?
Do we in fact have other, equally interesting life stories that we're unaware of and unable to tell, simply because their building blocks are the memories that fell by the wayside? Possibly. And while those memoirs might undermine the ones we've written, they also might just improve on them.
~ Frank Bruni, Memoirs and Memory (by the author of Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History "Ms. Karr has described how she sent the manuscript of 'The Liar’s Club' to all the major characters, to fact check her memory, but emphasized that no honest writer — or reader — expected a memoir to reflect anything other than the author’s inevitably slanted view on the truth.
'There’s a kind of recursive loop in memoir, she said.
'Imagination informs memory, and memory informs imagination. People are concerned that the events are fabricated, when what’s most lethal is the slant you put on it.' "
~Jennifer Schuessler, in Frank McCourt and the American Memoir (Week in Review, New York Times, 7-25-09) "Family and personal history have always figured prominently in [Alice] Munro’s reckonings, but The View from Castle Rock makes some of the sources of her earlier stories much clearer....
"Whether they are the literal truth is beyond irrelevant. The point of storytelling, as Munro practices it, is to rescue the literal facts from banality, from oblivion, and to preserve — to create — some sense of continuity in the hectic ebb and flow of experience. 'We can’t resist this rifling around in the past,' she writes in an epilogue, 'sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.' "
~ A.O. Scott, NY Times Book Review"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
~ Maya Angelou
"Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.
~ Harlan Ellison, in Paladin of the Lost Hour (1985)
How short can a story be and still be effective? Consider Hemingway's offering:
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
See Smith College's Six-Word Memoirs "How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!...If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out."
~ Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Fanny Price speaking?)
"People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that."
~Anthony Powell
“It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time”
~ Barbara Kingsolver
"I'll be eighty this month. Age, if nothing else, entitles me to set the record straight before I dissolve. I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book."
~ Gloria Swanson
“A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, because all life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
~ George Orwell
"Memoirs are the backstairs of history."
~George Meredith
"In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels."
~Gerald Clarke
"When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs."
~humorist Will Rogers
“Time and again one sees the young exhilarated and restored by the revelation that someone understands them, feels as they do, has gone through it and survived, can articulate it and give it form.
~Peter Marin and Allan Cohen, Understanding Drug Use
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
"Your firm's history is a secret weapon that's especially useful in hard times....During a recession, customers want assurance that your organization has a strong track record and will be there for them. Employees want that assurance, too. If your firm has lasted a respectable amount of time, no doubt you have survived downturns and emerged stronger. The trick is to tap into that institutional knowledge and share it. Your history is a stranded asset until you put it to work. It's a potent, cost-effective tool for marketing, community relations, and worker morale."
~ Marian Calabro, "History as competitive edge," CorporateHistory.net
“Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.”
~ Barbara Kingsolver
"If you don't know history, you don't know anything. You're a leaf that doesn't know it's part of a tree."
~ Michael Crichton, in Timeline
"...social historians themselves are beginning increasingly to discover how much can be learnt about an entire society, a wider historical moment, through following with close attention the trajectory of a single life, a single family, a small group of individuals whose lives, though seemingly unusual, are also in some sense exemplary."
~ Ian Donaldson, in "The Return of Biography"
"Don't start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don't try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember. You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first but kind of think of it when you aren't doing it. Don't think back over what you have done. Don't think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the matter of detail — cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling."
~ John Steinbeck
“The best stories are the ones we're the most thoroughly ashamed of.”
~ William Faulkner
"Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs."
~David Ben-Gurion
"Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth. People do it all the time: they destroy papers; they leave instructions in their wills for letters to be burned. In the novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell writes, 'Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.'"
~ Alec Wilkinson, Remember This? in The New Yorker
“They say the loss of your mother will cause you to sing the old songs.”
~Jill Ker Conway, Written by Herself
"The first 25 years of my life are something I would rather forget, but the contrary has taken place. The older I get the more alive those years have become."
~ Harry Bernstein, 96 when his memoir The Invisible Wall was accepted for publication
“Every man has within himself the entire human condition.”
~ Michel de Montaigne
"Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography."
~ Oscar Wilde
“Memories are stories, just waiting to be told.”
~ Marcia Orland, Afterglow Media
"Never doubt that you can change history. You already have."
~ Marge Piercy
"History will be kind to me, because I will write it."
~ Winston Churchill
"Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs."
~ Rebecca West
"There are two classes of authors; the one writes the history of their times, the other their biography."
~ Thoreau, Journal |
Writers on Writing (complete archive of the NY Times series, writers exploring literary themes)
E-mail Pat (pat at patmcnees dot com)
Letters of Note (fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos--that you were never expected to see)
Aha Moments (from the brilliant Mutual of Omaha campaign to record people's stories about moments of clarity, defining moments when they gained the wisdom to change their life)
TED: Ideas worth sharing Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world
Freelance National Anthem (Bill Dyszel, 4 minutes)
KeepMeOut (addicted to a website? bookmark this page and it will remind you to get back to work!)
Today's Front Pages (check out Newseum's U.S. map -- move your cursor across the map and see the front pages change)
Online Education Database150 resources to help you write better, faster, or more persuasively
Help a reporter out (HARO)(useful for reporters and for sources)
Paris Review "Writers at Work" Interviews (selections from 1953 on, a gift to the world, and with a single click you can view a manuscript page with the writer's edits)
The Onion (if the news is making you sick, try this approach)
Truth-o-meter (St. Petersburg Times, www.politifact.com)(St. Pete Times on whether, and how much, various notable people are telling the truth)
Fact Check (Annenberg sorts political truths from half-truths)
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In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Steve Weinberg (author of Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller) recommends that students of biography read The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell. "Churchwell compares every biography ever written of the dead actress. She shows persuasively, and with flair, that not every biography of Monroe can be true in all the details, because they contradict each other profoundly. Her book will burn into students' minds the lesson that biographical truth should never be taken for granted."
LINKS TO USEFUL SITES AND RESOURCES
Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg. "Annie's Ghosts is perhaps the most honest, and one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. It is an exploration into a family's past, a relentless hunt that unearths buried secrets with multiple layers and the uncertain motives of their keepers, and one son's attempt to fully understand the details and meaning of what has been hidden . . . From mental institutions to the Holocaust, from mothers and fathers to children and childhood, with its mysteries, sadness and joy--this book is one emotional ride."
~~ Bob Woodward, author of The War Within and State of Denial
But Enough About Me What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves? Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History (New Yorker,1-25-2010)
Sanford Dody's own memoir was Giving Up the Ghost (1980).
How to Write a Memoir: Be yourself, speak freely, and think small, writes William Zinsser (American Scholar, Spring 2006)
Make History: The 9/11 Museum (add your story to the collective telling of the events of September 11). Here's Steve Rosenbaum, with I've Got My 9/11 Story. What's Yours? (his account of the filmed records he collected and donated)
Plot Twist: Philip Carlo, true crime writer with Lou Gehrig's disease, is working on his memoir. His deadline: his own death.
Scanning old photos? Find useful info here on how to make a digital file of an old photograph: Scanning Basics 101 (Wayne Fulton's useful site), which includes useful pages such as this Scanning and Printing Resolution Calculator. Scanning old photos properly is essential in a personal history that includes photos (and they're SO nice when there are lots of photos!).
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead , David Shields' excellent autobiography of his body, is a fascinating little book about life and death and about what's happening to your body enroute from one to the other. Don't read it if you don't want to hear the bad news, but it does help explain things like why you have to make more trips to the bathroom as you age.
What's Your Platform? Another Way of Asking, Who's Going to Read Your Book? Kendra Bonnett, on Telling Her Stories (Story Circle Network). Read also Building a Memoir Writing Platform: What Is Your Message? Part 1 and Part 2 (Kendra Bonnett, 2-28-10, on Women's Memoirs). What's your message is part of figuring out who is your audience, which means who will buy your books! A very helpful discussion.
Women's Memoirs (Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnet's terrific site, with a blog, book reviews, and tips for writing memoirs--a site developed to support their seminar on writing women's memoirs)
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
~ Attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC
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WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MEMOIR (OR MEMOIRS) AND AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY?
I am often asked, ‘What is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?’ As Marc Pachter, leader of the Washington Biography Group, puts it, an autobiography is a complete life—often but not always moving in a line from birth to fame—which may or may not be the author's inward journey. Publishers increasingly call autobiographies memoirs (plural).
A memoir (singular) is not the larger story of a life (from birth to fame), but may be a slice of that life, the shaping of a single piece of experience, a crystallized version of “I remember.” In the view of William Zinsser, “memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The writer of a memoir takes us back to a corner of his or her life that was unusually vivid or intense—childhood, for instance—or that was framed by unique events. By narrowing the lens, the writer achieves a focus that isn’t possible in autobiography.”
The nature of the memoir, says Pachter, is to be more outward than inward: “myself among others,” “myself in the world,” “my view of my public self.” Pachter doesn't think it’s about a “corner” of a life only.
In many ways a memoir resembles a piece of fiction, in being a single story, often using techniques from fiction.
Peter Petre, in a symposium on collaboration sponsored by the Authors Guild, said, "It’s one thing to represent something as a memoir, where the rules are somewhat looser, than to say this is going to be a full-blown autobiography that will stand as an historical document and therefore has to meet the rules of history."
A confession, says Marc Pachter, is an account of one’s personal, totally inward progression (or regression). An early example: the Confessions of St. Augustine. Here is a quotation from someone who has written a modern version of the confession, Sue William Silverman:
“The lessons learned in memoir aren’t as evident in autobiography. In autobiography the author may no longer be president of the United States or a box-office attraction, yet emotionally, he or she hasn’t necessarily changed—at least on the page. With rare exceptions, autobiography isn’t about exploring the subject’s psyche. Memoir is. Autobiography isn’t about turning a life into art. Memoir is. The autobiographer justifies “mistakes.” The memoirist explores them. The autobiographer focuses on success while the memoirist tries to decipher how or why life events often go wrong. Memoir, therefore, is not a simple narcissistic examination of self—as some critics claim. By employing many of the same techniques as fiction, poetry, and belle lettres, memoir achieves universality.
“Also unlike autobiography, memoir relies almost solely on memory. Memoirists may research old letters, conduct interviews with family members, examine family documents and photographs, but the reliance on one’s subjective perceptions of the past is at the heart of memoir. Whereas autobiography tells the story of “what happened” based on historical facts, memoir examines why it happened, what the story means.”
~ Sue William Silverman, in "The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction" (which you can read on her website or in her book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir. She is also the author of Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, a memoir of incest.
Here's an interesting passage from an excellent interview with Patricia Hampl, published in River Teeth: "I think that the reason memoir is a dynamic form today is not because we happen to be a tell-all society...
What I think really has given torque to the genre, has made universities suddenly make room for this genre has to do with...this thing called a
story, a narrative that has got that “Then what?” and “Oh that’s an nteresting character.” It’s got all that stuff we connect with fiction, which is then interrupted or connected to a need to talk about the material. The big fiction advice is “Show, don’t tell,” but this is not what memoirists are embroidering on their pillows and sleeping on. It’s instead “Show and Tell .“ It’s the idea that you can~ tell unless you can show, but you don’t just show. You have to talk about it. You have to somehow reflect upon it. You have to track or respond to it, this thing that’s happening. And in the intersection of these two things is the excitement we feel about this genre. Too much show and “Why aren’t you writing fiction?” Too much tell and “I’m not going to listen to you because you’re boring.” The narration is the thing that lets you do the other."
~ excerpt from “We Were Such a Generation”—Memoir, Truthfulness, and History: An Interview with Patricia Hampl (interviewers Shelle Barton, Sheyene Foster Heller, and Jennifer Henderson), published in River Teeth Spring 2004: 129-142. Click here for a PDF file, which I found online here:
http://www.k-state.edu/english/touchstone/Interviews/2001%20Interview%20Patricia%20Hampl.pdf
Because I teach life story writing, and help people write their memoirs (and organizations write their histories), there is a long section on life story writing on my personal website. Click here on on link above, to Saving lives, one story at a time (the motto of APH) to get to that page. Click here to get to one of two pages I've posted on writing ethical wills, or legacy letters — the stories and sentiments you want to leave behind in writing or on audio or video, to tell your survivors about what you have loved, valued, and especially remember about your life and the people in it.
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BOOKS TO HELP YOU GET STARTED WRITING
OUR OWN OR SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE STORY
I've listed these roughly in order of how highly I would recommend them.
· Rainer, Tristine. Your Life as Story: Discovering the "New Autobiography" and Writing Memoir as Literature. An excellent guide to memoir writing that probes well below “First I did this and then I did this,” asking you to think about your life. Some object to her de-emphasis on historical accuracy.
· Franco, Carol and Kent Lineback. The Legacy Guide: Capturing the Facts, Memories,and Meaning of Your Life. Moving from facts to memories to meaning, this guide takes you through the seven stages of life, to recall forgotten moments and discover their significance. Good examples.
· Baldwin, Christina. Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story. Says Baldwin, “Our life story is our constant companion,the litany that guides our every move and thought. So we need to make our lives a story we can live with, because we live the life our story makes possible.”
· Thurston, Dawn and Morris. Breathe Life into Your Life Story: How to Write a Story People Will Want to Read. Advice and examples on “showing” rather than "telling"; creating credible interesting characters and settings; writing from the gut; alternating scene and narrative; generating suspense, etc.
· Goldberg, Natalie. Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir. Motivates and provides lots of writing prompts, ways to get into writing about your life through a "side door," an approach Abigail Thomas also uses
· Norton, Lisa Dale Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (about finding "memory pictures," finding your voice and the heart of your story, transforming experience on the page)
· Mary Borg. Writing Your Life: An Easy-to-Follow Guide to Writing an Autobiography. Questions to tease out a life story, writing tips, and excerpts from real autobiographies.
· Duane Elgin, Colleen Ledrew. Living Legacies: How to Write, Illustrate, and Share Your Life Stories. How to write your stories and illustrate them with photographs, memorabilia, and other images (including digital format).
· Hampl, Patricia. I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (explores the act of memoir-making, the tension between memory and forgetting (inventiveness as part of the search for emotional truth), the art of storytelling, and the value of the first draft, as a mystery dropping clues about the narrator's feelings (to borrow from reviewers’ comments)
· Birkerts, Sven. The Art of Time in Memoir (Then, Again). Learned of this book from one of my students: shows how the great memoirists break the rules, especially about mixing present and past tense. “Apart from whatever painful or disturbing events they recount, their deeper ulterior purpose is to discover the nonsequential connections that allow those experiences to make larger sense; they are about circumstance becoming meaningful when seen from a certain remove.”
· Zinsser, William. Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past. Using his own story as an example, the author of excellent books on writing well shows how to be selective in choosing the stories to tell and the details to use.
· Thomas, Abigail. Thinking About Memoir. (a tiny volume with slim content, good writing prompts -- many of them available through her piece in AARP
· Larson, Thomas. The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (reflections on memory, honesty, assumptions, values, and self-concept)
· Zinsser, William, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Very good talks by Russell Baker, Annie Dillard, Alfred Kazin, Toni Morrison, and Lewis Thomas.
· Zinsser, William, ed. Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography. Thoughtful talks (and biography shop talk) by Robert A. Caro, David McCullough, Paul C. Nagel, Richard B. Sewall, Ronald Steel, and Jean Strouse.
· Kotre, John. White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory. Interesting insights.
· Hamilton, Nigel. How To Do Biography: A Primer (a brief interpretive history of life stories, or at one reviewer called it, "a zesty romp through millennia of biographical portraits")
· McDonnell, Jane Taylor. Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir. With a special emphasis on writing "crisis memoirs," finding "our own meaningfulness, even in the midst of sadness and disappointment." (This book may be hard to find.)
· Spence, Linda. Legacy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Personal History. Useful memory prompts.
· Rosenbluth, Vera. Keeping Family Stories Alive: Discovering and Recording the Stories and Reflections of a Lifetime. Good on interviewing and recording techniques.
· Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art.
· Kempthorne, Charley. For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History. An encouraging guide.
· Ledoux, Denis. Turning Memories into Memoirs: A Handbook for Writing Lifestories. Workshop in a book.
· Johnson, Marilyn. The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. A delightful account of how those final stories get told.
Of peripheral interest:
• Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda
• Biography: A User's Guide, by Carl Rollyson
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THREE ANTHOLOGIES OF PERSONAL HISTORY
Three new anthologies are filled with examples of reminiscence and personal history:
• My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History edited by Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees. Foreword by Rick Bragg. (Personal History Press, Association of Personal Historians, $19.95) Go here to purchase a copy.
• Listening Is an Act of Love, edited by Dave Isay (stories about home and family, work and dedication, journeys, history and struggle, and 9/11), from the StoryCorps Project
• Born Before Plastic: Stories from Boston’s Most Enduring Neighborhoods (Vol. 1: North End, Roxbury, and South Boston) and My Legacy Is Simply This (Vol. 2: Charlestown, Chinatown, East Boston, and Mattapan), from Grub Street’s Memoir Project (giving seniors a chance to turn their memories into published narratives).
New from Personal History Press:
My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History ,
ed. Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg ($19.95).
Read excerpts here.
Read a review here.
"At last, a collection that shows the "why, what, and how" behind memoir as legacy. Spanning more than a century, these intriguing reflections of personal as well as global social and political history are told in the unique voice and viewpoint of each storyteller."
~ Susan Wittig Albert, author, Writing from Life, founder, Story Circle Network
“This anthology sings with Walt Whitman’s spirit of democracy, a celebration of our diversity. Each selection is a song of self; some have perfect pitch, some the waver of authenticity. All demonstrate the power of the word to salvage from the onrush of life, nuggets worth saving.”
~ Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story and Writing the New Autobiography
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BOOKS TO HELP LEAD LIFE STORY WRITING OR REMINISCENCE GROUPS
Reminiscence and life review, especially guided by someone who knows how to make the most of the experience, is an important developmental phase, in which we older adults take stock of our lives and, with luck, begin to see both pleasant and unpleasant memories as part of what shaped our identity. With aging, retirement, divorce, widowhood, and separation from our children, we lose roles we once played and may experience less sense of identity and self-worth. Life review, however done, can be therapeutic, and in groups, under a masterful leader, can also be enormous fun. Good groups bond. Creative juices flow. Hearing each other's stories brings back our own often forgotten memories, good and bad, which in the presence of sympathetic others can be healing.
Two books I have found particularly useful and interesting in terms of how to run such a group (including how to deal with disruptive, self-absorbed, or shy participants):
· Kaminsky, Marc, ed. The Uses of Reminiscence: New Ways of Working with Older Adults. Interesting reading even if you don't plan to lead a reminiscence group for elders, and useful if you do.
· Birren, James E. and Donna E. Deutchman, Guiding Autobiography Groups for Older Adults: Exploring the Fabric of Life. Provides questions to provoke discussions on different themes, transitions: On the major branching points in your life, on family, on major life work and career, on the role of money in one's life, on health and body image, on sex roles and sexual experiences, on experiences with and ideas about death, on loves and hates, on the meaning of life (aspirations and goals), on the role of music, art, or literature in your life, and on your experiences with stress.
Here are some others you may find useful:
Telling the Stories of Life Through Guided Autobiography Groups by James E. Birren and Kathryn R. Cochran
Writing Alone and With Others, by Pat Schneider (an update of The Writer as an Artist, by the founder of the Amherst Writers and Artists Press and workshop method in Amherst, Massachusetts)
Carol Franco's book, The Legacy Guide: Capturing the Facts, Memories,and Meaning of Your Life, is also useful in leading groups.
Transformational Reminiscence: Life Story Work, by John A. Kunz, Florence Gray Soltys, and others, provides professional insight into the process of helping older adults with reminiscence and life review.
Here's a new book that I found less than useful for my purposes (teaching life story writing) but it may be useful to academics who want their students to analyze life writing:
Teaching Life Writing Texts, ed. Miriam Fuchs, Craig Howes
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The Self We Tell Ourselves We Are Influences Our Decisions
"I have learned from autobiography that humans are adaptable and it is quite likely that more attention will be given to integration of information from the viewpoints of science, society, and individuals. Autobiography represents a 'soft area' for research, one that would not have been very respected in past years when the behavioral and social sciences were trying to emulate the advances in physics and chemistry. More recently, however, there is growing opinion that our interpretations of our lives influence the decisions we make. The self we tell ourselves we are, the narrative self, appears to influence what decisions we make in life. I had the opportunity to interview a leading psychoanalyst in Los Angeles when he turned 75. I asked him about his psychoanalytic theory and how it related to individuals. He said, 'That is my theory, you have to realize that every person has a theory about his or her own life.' This seems to me a very integrative statement for my approach to autobiography; autobiography reveals the individual's theory about himself or herself, how they explain their life. It leads to the idea that one's self, the self we tell ourselves, is in a sense a personal theory, a theory that provides direction for decisions and actions in everyday life. Here lies a possible connection between the autobiographical stories of life and the decisions that individuals have made and the directions their lives have taken."
~ James E. Birren, How Do I Think I Got Here? ( The LLI Review, Fall 2006)
Birren is a pioneer in life story and reminiscence groups.
Read his life story here.
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"Writing about [events in my life] has been a way of processing them. Not only tragedies like the deaths of my sons, but other things like learning of my adoption as an adult and my search for my birthmother. These are life-altering experiences and writing about something is a good way to figure out what to make of it.
"Patients, of course, are an endless source of inspiration and stories. Psychiatry is a performance art. We talk with people; they tell us their secrets and their pain. They benefit from the conversations or not. But it’s all words in the air; our case notes are sealed and unless we write something down, the experiences are lost except to our memories. But we’re changed by these stories just as our patients are and the truths they lead us to are worth preserving. Writing down what we have learned also constitutes a kind of “ethical will,” something to convey to succeeding generations in the same way that we distribute our property. I think that we have some obligation before we die to enunciate whatever we think we’ve learned about life. So that was also a motivation to write these books, because I thought that whether anybody buys them or not, my children and their children will have this gift from me."
~ Gordon Livingston, MD, author of Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now and And Never Stop Dancing, interviewed by Bruce Hershfield for Maryland Psychiatrist
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Awards, grants, fellowships
Plus contests and other sources of funding
Corporate and technical communications
Copywriting, speechwriting, marketing, training, and the like
Fiction writing
Literary and commercial (including genre)
Mastering art and craft
Writing, reporting, multimedia, equipment, software
Media pros and other allied professionals
Translators, indexers, designers, photographers, artists, illustrators, animators, cartoonists, image professionals, composers
Specialty and niche writing
Groups for writers who specialize in animals, children's books, food, gardens, family history, resumes, sports, travel, Webwriting, and wine (etc.)
ETHICS, RIGHTS, AND OTHER ISSUES
EDITORS AND EDITING
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