While wallpapering my daughter’s bedroom years ago, I unscrewed the wall plate protecting the light switch and noticed a small square of folded paper wedged amid the electrical wires. I unfolded the paper and discovered it was a note written by the son of the former owners of our home. I remembered the Lewis boy. He had walked with a slight limp and had other limitations that set him apart. His note explained that he was 12 years old and that this bedroom had once been his room.
The incident gave me pause and, as you see, I’ve never forgotten it. I could feel the anguish that prompted that note. That room had probably been his private space for as long he could remember, a place where he’d spent hours playing and sleeping. Now other children would inhabit it, seemingly erasing all that it had meant to him. In writing that note he was expressing an emotion we all feel when we carve our initials in a tree trunk, press our handprints in wet cement…or write a personal history: I was here. I lived. My life matters.
We all have a deep human need to be remembered. I feel it in my bones, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a personal historian. We who help others memorialize their lives know that we are helping people on the most elemental level, bringing them the peace of mind that comes from feeling they’ve been heard and understood, that their lives have meant something, that future generations will know they lived.
When I tell people I’m a personal historian, I generally follow with, “I love what I do.” I do. I teach students how to write their life stories, and it’s hard to describe the satisfaction I feel when I help them discover that their lives have been interesting and meaningful and will not be forgotten.
Besides helping students commit their stories to paper, I also teach them writing skills to make their narratives more compelling, so their stories are as interesting as the lives they’ve led. I love watching my students, armed with new writing tools, transform what was once an ordinary story into something memorable.
My husband and I collaborated on a book that explores these techniques, Breathe Life into Your Life Story , published in 2007 by Signature Books. I’m delighted to be able to teach these concepts at a pre-conference seminar at this year’s APH conference in St. Louis, titled “Boot Camp for Personal History Writers: Kick Your Writing to the Next Level.”
It’s not often I have the opportunity to work with a group of people for six hours! What a luxury. We’ll have the time to explore a variety of writing skills that can help you improve the quality of the stories you prepare for your clients, and maybe your own stories as well. Sometimes the narratives that come from the mouths of our interview subjects can be deadly dull. I will show you how to draw more out of your clients and will explore in depth with you how techniques such as dialogue, detail, tension, and pacing can bring your stories to life.
Students sharing their work in one of Dawn’s Southern California classes.
This is the kind of seminar I love, because I know I’ll send you away brimming with ideas that will help you become better writers and the confidence to put your ideas into practice. You can get a head start on my seminar by visiting my website and blog, where you’ll find snippets of the kind of thing you’ll learn in more detail in St. Louis.
Everyone wants to be remembered, and every life matters. We all need to tell our stories, so why not learn to tell them well?
About today’s contributor: Dawn Thurston, whose company is Memoir Mentor, has taught life story writing at universities in California and Utah for the last sixteen years and is a frequent speaker at national conferences, including previous APH conferences. She belongs to the Genealogy Speakers Guild, the International Association of Family History Writers & Editors, and serves on the APH Board. Dawn has a BA in English and an MA in communications from UCLA.
Photos provided by Dawn Thurston.
Love the image of that note in the light switch, Dawn. Your photo shows someone reading aloud, presumably to a rather large group. In my experience, the reading aloud is an important part of the process. When you have that large a group, does each person read to the whole room, or to a smaller group (as is the practice in Guided Autobiography groups). In my writing classes I have them read to the whole group, because although it takes some time, I like for the whole group to bond together. And I like hearing all the stories. I am curious how other writing teachers do it, too.
I encourage my students to share with the whole group, but only what they are comfortable reading or sometimes just an excerpt if they have been busy writers! I find that one person’s story often triggers a similar memory in someone else.
I teach two three-hour classes a week. Each class is identical. They are large classes, with 31 in one and 35 in the other. I dedicate nearly half of the three-hour block to the reading of student stories. We generally have time for six stories and the students sign up in advance for the weeks they will read. I limit them to three pages (1.5 line spacing), so we have enough time for everyone. Those who read bring copies for the other students so they can follow along. (See photo above.) We have a critique session afterward. My students have become good critiquers, and their suggestions are always framed in a positive way. This is definitely the best part of my classes. We all learn so much from each other. Over time, I’ve developed an atmosphere of trust, so students feel comfortable reading the most sensitive of stories, often revealing information they’ve never told their families. As I said in my blog, I love what I do. It’s such an honor to help facilitate this process.
Thanks for this blog, Dawn, which encompasses the work we do as personal historians. Like you, each time I teach a class of people how to start gathering and preserving their life stories, I am astounded by some of the stories that are shared within the class members. Critiquing each other’s work builds confidence within the students who discover that their life stories have relevence.
Thanks for the underscoring of how important sharing is!! A class I’ll begin to teach next week will follow the model you suggest. We can facilitate a process and supply examples and resources for improving writing, but only READERS and listeners can emphasize how very important life writing can be to the human spirit.