Tag Archives: Memoirs for Life

Will the Stories of Christmases Past Visit You This Year?

For most of us, being in the middle of the Christmas season of today has a way of also triggering memories of Christmas of yesterday. If those stories of Christmases past are swirling around in your mind, invite them out for a visit. They can point you toward many enlivening accounts that can become a vital part of writing your life story.

The invitation can be as simple as paying attention to the stories about Christmas that you and other loved ones may feel drawn to recounting while you are gathered this weekend. Take some notes about what was shared.

You also can encourage Christmas memories to come forward with directed Story Sparks. Here are some you might try:

“The Christmas present that meant the most to me as a child was…”

“In choosing what to give or make for my parents on Christmas I would often…”

“What I wish were still true about Christmas today is…”

“What Christmas meant to me when I was 7 was…”

“One Christmas celebration that really moved me was…”

“When I was young I’d start really thinking about Christmas by about…”

I’m sure you can think of several other launching points to tell those stories of Christmas past. Invite them all at once, as Scrooge requested of his three Christmas spirits, or space them carefully around your Christmas time this year. Enjoy their merriment and their messages. And see where they take you.

– Kevin Quirk, Founder of Life Is a Book, Member of the Association of Personal Historians, and author of the new book “Your Life Is a Book – And It’s Time to Write It: An A-to-Z Guide to Help Anyone Write Their Life Story”

For a New Thanksgiving Experience, Interview a Loved One to Record Part of Their Life Story

Are you looking for a fresh approach to your family’s Thanksgiving gathering? As a personal historian, I’ve got an idea to consider.

Instead of simply enjoying Grandma’s turkey and fixings, cook up some questions to ask her about her life and record her answers. Invite your father and his brother to step away from the football game for a personal highlights show in which they tell you stories of their shared escapades when they were boys. Gather your siblings together and start up a conversation about your all-time favorite movies. Urge everyone seated at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner table to tell a story about their favorite Thanksgiving of the past. Expand the discussion to stories about family vacations or trips that no one will ever forget.

Discussions like these often spontaneously begin when families get together over Thanksgiving weekend. Remembering and honoring the past is part of what keeps us connected. What I’m suggesting is that you seek to capture some of those stories on a tape recorder, or on DVD, or just by writing down notes. Then, after the feast and the family chats, consider taking your notes home with you and using it as the starting point for writing your life story. Or maybe you’d like to begin telling the life story of that parent or grandparent you interviewed. Or maybe you could volunteer to launch a family life story project, with you as the point person.

There’s something about Thanksgiving that gets us all in a reflective, story-telling mode.  This year, you can choose to go with the flow and use it to start something that will last well beyond Thanksgiving weekend, well past Christmas, to a life story book that you and your family will cherish for years and years to come.

Bon appetit!

– Kevin Quirk, author of the new book “Your Life Is a Book – And It’s Time to Write It: An A-to-Z Guide to Help Anyone Write Their Life Story” and a member of the Association of Personal Historians

Life Story Writers Can Teach and Inspire with Their Accounts of Courage and Perseverance

I was doing some research into book publishing options this morning when I came across a memoir with a jaw-dropping story. Randy Burt, in his new book Fifth Commandment Atrocity, details his upbringing in a family that he describes as operating more like a cult. I can’t begin to describe everything the author endured while growing up, but I can say that his parents were convicted of various charges of extortion, racketeering, and sexual ssault. http://www2.turnto10.com/news/news/2010/nov/01/nbc-10-interview-randy-burt-00952-vi-21461/ The family story was dramatized in the made-for-TV movie “Family Sins” some years ago. His memoir asserts that he is now claiming his own life, surrounded by a love he never knew as a child.

Randy Burt’s story was a powerful reminder to me about what I so often see in teaching my Writing Your Life Story and Autobiographical Writing classes, and assisting clients all over the country in my role as personal historian. That is, those who have risen above painful and difficult times have a tremendous opportunity to teach and inspire others.

We’ve all faced challenges and hardships. Often they have been painful, and sometimes we have wondered if the struggle would ever end. But somehow we have persevered, usually with a greater sense of our own courage, strength, and value. How did we make it through? What new understanding did we emerge with, and what positive directions did we steer toward after the challenge was met? That’s what we can tell our readers about in our memoir or autobiography. That’s how our life story can serve to inspire others, especially those who are younger and most in need of encouragement or a model for making it.

Do you have a story of perseverance? Your situation may not be so extreme, but if it is an experience that has stuck with you over the years, chances are that you have something important and beneficial to say about it. That’s one of the many gifts we can offer when we commit to writing our life story.

– Kevin Quirk, Author of the new book “Your Life Is a Book – And It’s Time to Write It: An A-to-Z Guide to Help Anyone Write Their Life Story” amnd a member of the Association of Personal Historians

When Chronicling Your Career Path in Your Life Story Book, It's OK to Include the Zigs and Zags

As you plan your life story book, you’re most likely going to include some account of your work or career path, or your spouse’s career history. You’re going to tell your readers something about the jobs you have performed or positions you have held, and you’ll probably tell some stories to shed light on some of your achievments, setbacks, rewards, frustrations, and characters you met along the way.

I’d like to offer a new twist you may want to try as you set about capturing that work life in your personal history.

Draw a line that symbolizes your history, or your spouse’s history, in the realm of work and career. You get to choose whether it’s a horizontal or vertical line, how long the line goes, and what color to draw it in.

Notice what your line looks like. Is it a straight trajectory, representing a smooth and consistent profession? Does it point up and up, but then slip back down, maybe way down, before leveling out again as a symbol of your successes and failures? Is it more of a curved line? Or does it seem to be full of zigs and zags, going every which way, with no clear center point on the horizon?

It’s always fun when my students in my Writing Your Life Story and Autobiographical Writing classes try this exercise. We discover all sorts of variations in our career lines. I’ve seen some straight lines, with accompanying stories of a long and steady career as a teacher, a sales rep or manager, an attorney, a nurse, a military officer, an engineer, and even a Broadway actress. Many students express a great deal of grtaitude for the opportunity to have identified, pursued and fulfilled a career in their chosen field.

For many other students, though, the line is anything but straight. Students explain their path of working in three, four, five or more arenas, and often they’re still adding to their list. I recently had one student who was celebrating his 70th birthday and, after nearing retirement from his fourth profession, he was wondering out loud, “I wonder what career is next?”

Many women reflect back on a journey where they transitioned from a stay-at-home Mom to a teacher, or from an attorney to a stay-at-home Mom.  And it’s alwasy moving to hear a woman proudly proclaim that her one career was to raise her children, and we all get a laugh when we see that the line she drew to capture that endeavor is not close to being straight anyway!

I’ve certainly had my share of zigs and zags. I started out as a sportswriter, reporting on the fortunes of college basketball titans North Craolina and Duke. When I left journalism after 12 years, I worked on the support staff of a non-profit, then pursued a couple of Masters degrees that led me to part-time counseling, teaching composition to college freshmen, and then  moving into the world of books as author, gostwriter, edior, and book coach. Along the way I found the role that often stirs the most passion: teaching classes on writing your life story. That’s the short-form version. My complete line, though, would also need to weave in assorted work that included a stint at a homeless shelter in San Francisco, substitute teaching in inner-city schools in Oakland, and conducting telephone political surveys. I could tell you a lot of memorable experiences about those three work ventures!

At some checkpoint of my stops and starts I remember reading a term thar resonated with my experience: “the crooked-line path.” Heath Frost, a colleague who counseled women and men on finding their right livelihood, used it to reassure us that it’s actually quite natural to move along on a work and life path that may not look very straight to others, or to ourselves. Of course, the “crooked” here by no means refers to being dishonest or unethical. It just means we may often find ourselvs changing directions and changing our minds as our work and career needs and wants dictate.

So, do you have a few work and career zigs and zags to share with the readers of your life story book? Did you or your spouse re-align your career route once, twice, several times? Do you have some very unusual zigs and zags on your road? Have you worked at some jobs that you’d rather not recall, but if you did you might find some funny or even zany stories waiting to be recalled?

As you unearth the raw material for your autiopbiography, memoir, or personal history, I invite you to spend some time exploring or just playing with not only the career line-drawing but the story-telling of the many parts of your life story that involve the work you have done. During today’s troubled economic times, your examples may help inspire or just reassure younger people who are very quickly coming to grips with a growing reality: the straight-line path of work and career that may have the norm long ago is simply not available for many people today. But, you can remind them, following a path of zigs and zags can still turn out to be fun, rewarding – or just something they will love telling others about someday!

– Kevin Quirk, Founder of Life Is a Book (formerly Memoirs for Life), Member of the Association of Personal Historians

The Bridge on the River Kwai Was My First Movie – Do You Remember Yours?

I’m not a big fan of YouTube, but the other day it proved very handy when I was seeking to respond to my 8 year old son’s persistent request. Many months ago he had asked me the name of the first movie I remember watching as a boy, and I recalled that it was “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” He wanted to see the DVD, of course, but we try to steer clear of violent war movies so I declined. “But Dad, can’t you just let me see a little bit of the movie?” he kept asking.

Ironically, while “The Bridge on the River Kwai” had a real impact on me when I saw it with my whole family at a drive-in theater in the late 1950s, I never saw it again. Not on video, not on DVD, not on a  rerun on some TV movie channel. I did remember the basic plot line, though: those British soldiers being ordered to build the bridge by their Japanese captors and the sustained drama over whether it would or would not be blown up in the grand finale. I especially remembered that whistling tune that once you hear it a few times you doubt you’ll ever get it out of your mind. So, I figured, maybe I could find a clip with just that whistling and no bloodshed.

Sure enough, YouTube delivered. My son and I watched on my computer as the British soldiers marched in whistling that song in perfect harmony. After thanking me for finally sharing this snippet of my first movie, he turned to me an hour later and said, “Dad, I can’t get that whistling tune out of my head.” I smiled. An event in my early life experience had come full circle. I was even moved to do some research about “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, and that tune. I learned that the song’s title was “Colonel Bogey March” and that it did have words to it. In fact, during World War II, the British had changed the lyrics to fill it with disparaging remarks about Hitler. I haven’t told my son that part yet.

This experience reminded me that most of us who are devoted to telling our life story have an engaging story to tell about the first movie we remember seeing or that had any impact on us. The story might be all about when we first saw it, or it might focus on a follow-up experience from more recent times, as it did for me.

So give this a try as an entry for your life story book. Begin with the following phrase and write for five minutes on:

“The first movie I remember watching (or that had an impact one me) was…”

Tell me what this spark triggers for your life story book.

– Kevin Quirk, Founder of Life Is a Book (formerly Memoirs for Life), Member of the Association of Personal Historians