Writers and Editors

Pandemic is a wake-up call for me to jot down keepsake ‘letters’ for my kids (Bob Brody, Washington Post, 8-16-2020) And I quote:  "Back in January 2008, when our two children were young adults, I started to keep a handwritten journal, one for our son, Michael, and the other for our daughter, Caroline. Every weekend, I jotted down a few hundred words based on a specific memory about our lives together and mine before they were born." And so it began. "I took these actions, mind you, even though in perfect health. I had asked myself the questions so many parents might now be asking themselves amid the coronavirus outbreak. What should I tell my children about the lives we’ve all lived? What do they need to know about me and themselves and our wider family? The journals would ultimately serve as a keepsake, an inheritance that could be read in decades to come."

 

      For years I've (Pat) given a workshop at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland (and in local libraries), called My Life, One Story at a Time. It's a fairly popular workshop, one that some people repeat -- probably because it motivates them to write the stories for their kids and family and friends that somehow they just can't bring themselves to do on their own. Partly it's because they're writing and sharing their stories in a small group (which they tend almost instantly to bond with, however briefly, sometimes forming long-term relationships). More than once participants have said they are sharing stories with this group that they haven't told their friends.

 

     I don't know what the secret is, but one thing has disappointed me: I have a heck of a time getting any of my students (all adults, mind you) to write stories about their children!  "When you die," I tell them, "and you have written all these stories about your life, don't you think your kids are going to wonder why there aren't any stories about them?"  And they agree, but they still have trouble taking the bait (with a few exceptions--lately, especially--is the pandemic a sign that all could be over without even a chance to say goodbye?). I suspect they are afraid they will seem to favor one child over another. Maybe, like me, you've wondered if it isn't up to our children to write their own stories--why would they want us to write stories about them?  Or maybe you've thought, as I have, that would be invading their space. But what if they would love it? What if they would love it especially long after we are gone--but maybe even now?

 

       I hope this gets you all writing about your kids (or your nieces and nephews, or your grandkids, your friends --whatever, whoever):  Memories and stories about your kids that you can write now now and they can enjoy forever.  As inspiration, here are links to a series of wonderful posts from and about Bob Brody's letters-to-his-kids project.

• Letters to My Kids (Bob Brody's blog, with links to all the posts)
• To Michael: Labor Trouble (Bob Brody, 6-24-10) "You took your time coming out. I think Mom was in labor for 36 hours."
• To Caroline: Your Opening Act (Bob Brody, 6-24-10) "You I worried about from the start, even before you were born. The doctor told us you were in there in an unusual position. Transverse breach, she called it."
• Archives: Letters to My Kids by Bob Brody
• Letters to My Kids 101: Invest In Your Past Bob Brody, on the process.
• Letters to My Kids (Lisa Belkin, Motherlode column, NY Times, 6-23-2010) On Father’s Day, he took the journals virtual. He is transferring all 60,000 words onto a Web site, Letters to My Kids, one entry per week. That wasn’t his plan when he started the journals of letters, he says.
• Spending Thanksgiving thanking our kids (Janice D'Arcy, WaPo, 11-23-11) The man behind the Letters to My Kids Web site is urging parents and grandparents to use Thanksgiving as an excuse to write a letter — long or short, simple or complex — to our children.
• You can find photos, etc., on Bob's Facebook page. Thanks, Bob. I'll let you know if this inspires my writing groups!

Feel free to post reactions here (or go to Bob's site and post them there!).

Art Begins with a Story: Pat McNees, brief video of me talking about how looking at photos can help remember what went on in your life, which is handy when you are involved in memoir writing (plus, it helps you figure out where  Read More 

Guest post by Lisa Smith-Youngs

I look across the table at the steely blue eyes of the 80-year-old man (from NASA) with a gorgeous, full shock of white hair and I see the little boy who grew up under the boughs of hemlocks and redwoods in the San Francisco Presidio, where he salvaged kapok vests and dynamite from Baker Beach and China Beach -- “playthings” that fell off the Navy ships bound to sea. That little boy who lost his father to lung disease at a tender age and would one day deliver papers on wet and windy Sunset district streets to help his mother pay the bills. He would go on to be a steward on the merchant marine ships and eventually find his way to aerospace projects in the dreamy Camelot of an America that can’t imagine its comeuppance is nigh.

And I know that I love him and respect him…but no more or less than the woman beside him who worked 40 years of hard labor as a waitress in a diner. And it hurts me, how she now has trouble breathing if anyone wears perfume to class because she was serving meals most her life to people who smoked hard cigarettes while they ate and drank the endless cups of coffee she poured for them before she rode the bus home to do it all over again for her unkindly husband and two boys . . . I know there should have been a girl, but she never got that babe that she wished for all her life.

I look at the row of these people whose lives I’ve been privileged to witness building a kind of scaffold on the other side of the table from me, and my mind starts waxing picturesque -- my own personal magic begins to conjure a vision. And I see the scaffold of people become a spine and I realize these tremendous, amazing, average, everyday people make up the backbone of my country. They ARE my country, and it needs no borders. The spine bends on itself, it whirls and spins and becomes the mythic melting pot of a New World, and I see the stories of their lives condense and blend into this golden elixir that fills the pot and glows with the reverence that I feel for the body of their collective experience.

And then my stories are one with their stories and we are bound to each other in a way that can never be broken, belittled or denied. And I am made more than I am . . . their stories, and mine together . . .the stories make me WHOLE. The stories make me BETTER than I once was.
---Lisa Smith-Youngs

Director at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Davis
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FURTHER READING:

Guided Autobiography (The Birren Center for Autobiography and Life Review)
    Guided autobiography (GAB) groups (James Birrens' brainchild) are structured memoir writing groups, in which participants write and read aloud two pages at a time. Lisa and I got instructor training online together (through Cheryl Svensson and Anita Reyes), and we learned that friendships may indeed be forged over the Internet.
• The Examined Life with Guided Autobiography (audio, Dr. Bonnie Bernel‪l‬ on SuperPsyched with Dr. Adam Dorsay) Listen starting at minute 8 for an excellent explanation and story of how the guided autobiography approach works. Participants are asked to write a two- or three-page story in response to a writing prompt and bring it to the next meeting to read aloud.

    In one writing group, in response to the prompt "treasures that matter (an experience, a person, or a thing)," she describes how a participant told the story of a valued pair of old shoes that brought tears to the listeners. In an accepting group, he got supportive feedback (with an emphasis on support, no critiques and challenges, which shut some people down). The group as a whole "is its own source of energy... because it's set up as a place to be safe." You are not going to be criticized; you are going to get support. It is not group therapy, in which you are going to be challenged. Good prompts are important -- they stimulate the brain and help elicit memories and stories. 

 
• A ‘Life Review’ Can Be Powerful, at Any Age (Emily Laber-Warren, NY Times, 8-29-24) Reflecting on the past, through writing or conversation, can help us better appreciate where we are — and where we’re going.

    "One of the most popular forms of life review is guided autobiography, whereby weekly sessions are organized thematically rather than chronologically — things like family, money, work, health. Each week, the facilitator preps participants for the following week’s theme with questions such as: “How did you get into your major life’s work?” or “Do you regard yourself as generous or stingy?” Participants pen brief autobiographical vignettes between sessions and read them aloud to one another.
   "Writing your story and having people hear it can be powerful, said Cheryl Svensson, the director of the Birren Center for Autobiographical Studies. Some guided autobiography groups continue meeting on their own for years."

• Telling Their Life Stories, Older Adults Find Peace in Looking Back (PDF, Susan Garland, NY Times, 12-9-16)

• How Do I Think I Got Here? (James E. Birren, the LII Review, Fall 2006)
• Where To Go From Here ed. by James Birren and Linda M. Feldman Questions such as "Where have I been, How did I get here, Toward what am I headed ?" lead to the ultimate question: "How would you live your life if you were truly free ?"
• Guided Autobiography: Stimulate Your Brain, Enhance Well-Being, Develop Community, and Create a Legacy (Cheryl M. Svensson & Bonnie L. Bernell, California Psychologist, Nov./Dec/2013, Volume 46, No. 6, pp 15-18).
• A Guided Tour of the Past (Paula Span, New Old Age, The New York Times, 7-18-11)
• Telling the Stories of Life Through Guided Autobiography Groups by James E. Birren and Kathryn N. Cochran
• The Birren Guided Autobiography Method
• Telling Your Story, hundreds of useful links to information about resources for capturing your life story or someone else's.
• Books to help you get started writing your own or someone else's life story
• Books to help lead life writing or reminiscence groups

 

Informal GAB anthologies:
• Landed: Transformative Stories of Canadian Immigrant Women, ed. by Gayathri Shukla and Elena Esina
• Onward!: True Life Stories of Challenges, Choices & Change ed. by Emma Fulenwider
• Uncovering Treasures That Matter: A Therapist’s Guide to Asking the Right Questions ed. by Bonnie Bernell and Cheryl Svensson. "GAB is a theme-based writing method to help your clients grow. A therapist can use this evidence-based protocol to help clients discover insights and new meanings in their self-discovery process."

Read Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford (2005) to get a sense of what drove him. To quote him: "Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect Read More