These are our stories

Three weeks ago, I led a Life Stories session at the history center of an adjacent county. It was our sixth of eight sessions, the time I...

At the end of our lives, we become only memories. If we're lucky, someone is passing those down. — Plum Johnson, "They Left Us Everything"

I spent Monday afternoons this past fall leading Life Stories classes for religious sisters in a nearby town. Three of the sisters in the...

I do book folding. Despite the name, it’s actually the pages of books that get folded. I fold old books — one page at a time, two folds...

One of my first Life Stories clients, Mary, died last month. She was 94. Her father had been a sharecropper in Kentucky, and soon after I...

Alice and Edwin participated in my most recent Life Stories class. Alice had a career as a beautician. In her beauty shop, she had a Coke...

Six weeks before Judy was born, her father died in a car accident. So Judy and her mother moved in with her mother’s parents, Judy’s...

His days of making and flying kites with the neighborhood boys took place more than 70 years ago, but to hear Paul describe it during a...

"Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no...

This past Saturday I ran into a client whose life stories I completed writing early last year. Bernice, who became a widow during the...

Mary was 7 when her mother died. Don was 8 when his died. Wilma was 12. Katharine was 17 when her mom died of lung cancer and leukemia...

Lou died last week. I am still in disbelief. After I wrote about her in a blog on Oct. 16 and linked it to my Facebook page, she...

In February, a woman from a neighboring town learned about my Life Stories classes and immediately expressed a strong interest in taking...

I am gearing up for fall Life Stories classes. This means I have times and locations set, and now I go through my list of prospective...

“Your heartache is someone else’s hope. If you make it through, somebody else is going to make it through. Tell your story.” — Kim...

In early spring I committed to working on writing the life stories of an 89-year-old Indianapolis man. His relatives who were hiring...

— This is the presentation I gave at tonight's Celebrate Today dinner, Memorial Hospital's quarterly celebration for cancer survivors —...

My “Remember When…?” discussion group at a local nursing home wanted to talk about moonshine last month. Bootlegging in the middle of the...

In 2015 I spent this week of March in an Indianapolis hospital, where I underwent a biopsy that revealed I had non-Hodgkin lymphoma....

“Like a friend said, it feels like a library burns down every time an elder dies.” — Jim Northrup, “Anishinaabe Syndicated” #writing