Tag Archives: To-do

history, memoirs

Talking about Angela without saying anything

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Telling my mother’s story has never been easy. I had almost no conversations with her ever, and unlike my Dad, she wasn’t a big storyteller, so I learned nothing from her by way of oral history.

So, it is difficult to write about her except of in terms of how her actions, inactions, presence, or lack thereof affected me personally. All I seem to have is my memories and personal point of view.

But actually, my eyes are not the only lenses through which I can view her life. Her father, Ernest Huntley Clarke, documented his daughter enthusiastically on still and moving film, right from her babyhood in 1931, through to her mid-life around 1974. Put together chronologically, all those photos and film clips could make a pretty rich silent movie of the life of Angela Huntley Clarke.

She never really spoke for herself.

If I do compile some movies to present the photos, I’ll may still provide a little narration, hoping that my own voice could be an adequate proxy for her missing one.

memoirs, stories

Writing with sound

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For months, I’ve helped my brother-in-law compose his life story into a blog. For him, due to accessbility and mobility issues, audio recording is the best way to capture his stories. It’s easier for him, but also it’s more personal. His words, his voice, are ringing in my ears – nobody else’s. It’s one-to-one.

As I’ve helped him edit his stories, I’ve thought a lot about the effectiveness of speech and sound. I used to enjoy listening to rebroadcasts of old-time radio dramas late at night, and I’ve gotten drawn into podcasts like “Serial”. It’s the atmosphere that’s created by the slightlest of ambient background noises or sound effects. It doesn’t take much to draw me into a moment.

So, I’ve been thinking of building little audio narrative pieces into the stories in my True Life project. It could use a soundtrack, some spaciousness, some emotion and personality. I’ll add what I can…

genealogy, memoirs, research, stories

51 stories down. [Infinity Symbol] to go…

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I have finally added in the last of the first fifty-one stories from my old True Life site.

I started writing True Life back in 1998 as a hand-rolled web memorial to my past family, events, and themes. It was then, and remains today, my personal mirror and cathartic echo chamber, and a place where I can polish my stories, refine my memories, and find patterns and meaning.

I stopped adding to the original site sometime around 2005 – maybe I just got burned-out, or bored with the way the site looked. It had just stopped exciting me, so I let it be for what it was. Not long after, my personal Linux server started to die, so I took it offline, and True Life (which was hosted on that server) went down entirely.

Strangely, I didn’t feel much loss from “de-publishing” the True Life project – maybe I even felt liberated. I didn’t have to carry that self-imposed burden of a shrine on my back, if I didn’t want to. I began resenting Mum and Dad for all their failings as parents, and then moved their little framed photographs off the top of my dresser, and down to a low corner of a bookshelf, where I wouldn’t be reminded of them so often. I decided that it’s okay to not want to see them, and to feel sick of them and of the one-sided story I’d been telling about them for almost 10 years. I decided that we were a failed family, and they were failed parents to my sister and I. Kids can’t choose their parents, but as an adult, I could sure as hell scorn mine, post-mortem.

I have noticed that I tend to obsess over people who are no longer in my life. If there’s nothing to be learned from conversing with ghosts, I really ought to let them go unanswered.

However, I eventually came back to my family background, as I always have. Reminders of past joys, sorrows, abuses and achievements kept entering my mind. Writing my memoir as “True Life” may be a compulsion now – a deep part of my identity. As they say, I might be done with the past, but the past ain’t done with me.

So, I’ll boot up Scrivener, or get my pad and pen, and start sketching out snippets of a path that will take me from 1976 towards the early eighties, when things got much, much worse.

It’s time to bite off more than I chew again, and choke down what I can of all those random scraps of daily life, and digest it all into some kind of coherent narrative. I will stick my head out, and see where the process takes me.

Should only take a few hundred more stories to get True Life up to the year 2000. At this rate, it may never get done, but I think the process is the important piece.

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