Leslie Lang | Talk Story Press

Why we take the time and make the effort to record people’s stories, their personal histories.

“America Writes Home” is a website with a wonderful collection of some existing pre-1920s letters, giving a flavor of that time before iPhones and email.

“The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living … when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani, the dead.”

The most interesting reaction was that of his grandchildren who sat fascinated. They had heard some of his tales over the years but for the first time they were able to get a true picture of just what an incredibly resilient and fascinating person their grandfather is.

Read this article and you’ll understand why I’m interested in gathering and writing personal histories.

Wow. I am a huge believer in reading and writing and the power of it all — but have a look or listen to this woman from Nepal, who was a child bride and didn’t learn to read until she was 21.
The story she tells — her story — is enormous and beautiful. Now that is somehow who has learned to appreciate the power of the alphabet. Wow.

It’s another This I Believe story from over at NPR. What an amazing collection of essays they are gathering, saving, sharing.  People have …

I mentioned that I’ve become a member of the Association of Personal Historians, and I just listened to an interesting “This I Believe” audio story by Stefani Twyford, one of its members, on Houston Public Radio. She talks about family stories and working as a personal historian. From her essay:
Each time I coax a story out of a client, I am excited at the richness of each person’s experience. When the son or daughter of a subject says, “I’ve never heard that! How did you get that story out of her?” I …

It’s one of my new writing interests, and something I’ve almost always been fascinated by (my uncle once told me I was born a genealogist) — I’m planning to start writing personal and family histories for people, in order to help preserve some of the great stories people carry around with them.

Recently I joined the Association of Personal Historians, which has just launched an anthology of 49 true stories out into the world. From the My Words Are Gonna Linger press release:
New anthology captures stories from real life, told in the …