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Posts Tagged ‘Wyoming’

  1. Seeking Story in Tradition

    November 21, 2012 by admin

    Tradition.

    It’s an idea we all find ourselves coming back to this time of year. Be it falling into the comfort and warmth of old traditions or seeking joy in starting new ones, we all crave the same thing: something to celebrate.

    I find it intriguing the way years come and go, how some holidays are busy and exuberant and bouncing with life while, in other years, they are quiet and mellow, low-key. One only has to map the ups and downs of life through a single holiday to see how time works: how people come and go, how places transform, how we, ourselves, grow up.

    My strongest Thanksgiving memories will always center around my Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Wyoming, the place where, for so long, Thanksgiving took place with no questions asked. I write about it in Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood, this way:

    “Thanksgiving has happened at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s every year for as long as I can remember. The tradition runs so long and deep that no one questions it, even with the family tensions that ripple quietly just beneath the surface: Grandpa’s reckless ways and Grandma’s bitterness – driven, I think, by loneliness – the way he and she seem to like each other less every year, the fact that neither one of them has ever shown up for a school play or a band concert.

    Grandma and Grandpa sit at opposite ends of the table, paying no attention to one another, while my parents and I and my great uncle John fill the spaces between them. I scoop up big helpings of my mom’s turkey and her Swedish corn pudding. I pass on Grandma’s mashed potatoes and gravy because the gravy is an awful brown, and like every other year, I fear she has salted it with a rabbit carcass. She served fried rabbit on the first Thanksgiving my mom spent with them – no turkey. Mom, a wholesome girl from the Midwest, cried.”

    The memories are rich, but so, too, is the story.

    This is a story of tradition. What is yours?

    Later on in this piece, I share what still hangs on as one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories:

    “A cozy quiet hangs in the Thanksgiving afternoon: the ancient dishwasher hums through its cycle, the coffee percolator brews weak Folgers coffee for my mom. Soon, my grandmother will call for a game of hearts and we will gather around the Formica table, pie in hand, for a long game of steering clear of the Old Biddy.”

    I want people to see themselves here. I want them to resonate: with the tension, with the details of tradition, with the desire to bring the familiar to life.

    This Thanksgiving, we will celebrate in a new way, with a family that is not ours in a state where our roots are only temporary. It will be my oldest son’s fourth Thanksgiving, my youngest son’s first. Still, I will make Mom’s Swedish corn pudding in the CorningWare dish. I will bring it to the house we have visited only a few times, an act of both sharing an old tradition with new friends and hanging on to something familiar for the holiday. Will we eat cranberries out of the can? Will there be sweet potatoes? A card game after the meal?

    I don’t know. But I do know there is plenty to celebrate, from the warm memories of the past and the people who are no longer with us to the new friends we’ve made, the new life we’ve created and the new traditions that will blossom from it.

    This holiday season, I encourage you to seek the story in tradition, whatever that means for you.

     

    Category Family, Family History, Feel-Good Stories, Home, Inspiration, Life, Life Stories, Place, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,, | 1 Comment

  2. Beacons

    October 17, 2012 by admin

    There is something beautiful about a power plant lit up at night. A fixture so strong and sure. We fly past the Long Beach plant – solid stacks straddling a canal that leads to the ocean. Yellow light glows from high up, like halos overlooking the city.

    So much about this place feels foreign to me, I have thought time and again in the 15 months that we have lived in California. The coast and the sandy beaches. The lack of seasons. Freeways that never sleep. That feeling of foreignness is heightened now, having returned from a two-week stay in my Wyoming Rockies. That age-old question arises like a deep yawn: What is home? And where?

    But then there are moments like this: pure, raw beauty that tussles us up, reminds us to treasure the present even as we wait on God to direct our future. We know we don’t want to be in California forever. But what gifts are here that we can live in and enjoy while we do call this place home?

    That beckoning light glows. The waves crash against the shore, and I ask a friend who lives on the beach if he sleeps with his windows open at night.

    “You bet,” he says, and I can only imagine.

    When I pull my three-year-old son out of the car at the end of the day, we turn west to a flaming pink sky. “Look at the pretty sun,” I say, and he agrees: it is pretty.

    A new baby and a changed-up work schedule on my husband’s part means we have lost our rhythm for a while. A schedule of any sort is hard to come by, and in the listlessness I have to remind myself of what truly matters: happy and healthy kids, a happy and healthy family. That rhythm will return. This is only a season.

    I watch those sure lights glowing high in the air. It is a beacon of sorts, a landmark by which to stay grounded, oriented. And in my prayers I ask for a beacon for myself, a guiding light to keep me pressing on: as mom, as wife, as writer.

    Like that light, I want to glow, too, strong and sure and unwavering.

    Category Creativity, Inspiration, Life, Motherhood, Place, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,, | No Comments

  3. Why Conversation is the Bread and Butter

    October 3, 2012 by admin

    Tough. It’s a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as I find myself in conversation after conversation with wonderful, inspiring people over what it means to be tough.

    Wyoming leaves, Copyright 2012 Kate Meadows.

    The past two weeks in Wyoming have been an awesome hurricane of readings, book selling, interviews and writing workshops. Coming up against those Sublette County mountains – my mountains, I am proud to claim – is nothing short of spectacular. Experiencing a Wyoming fall in all its glory was a blessing unmatched – it’s only fair to say I get homesick when the quivering leaves of a yellowing quaking aspen put tears in my eyes.

    Selling a book, this piece of art that has been so close to me for the past four years, is a tremendous and rewarding feeling, it is. But the best part? The best part has been being in conversation with people, real people with dynamic lives and hearts tuned into what really matters. Real people with lives much different than mine. Real people with unique perspectives of what it means to be tough.

    I think of Ashta, the 69-year-old woman from West Virginia who I met in a Jackson Hole bookstore. One day away from her 70th birthday, she told me how she planned to celebrate her special day in the Tetons, her sister and son by her side. She likened “tough” to “strong,” thinking on the term from the perspective of a woman, a mother. That we draw strength from the most unexpected places sometimes.

    And there’s Paul, who walks with a cane now and recalled his days driving cattle with my grandfather before sunrise on an old local ranch. He’s lived in Sublette County his whole life, save for one month, the month he was born so many decades ago.

    And there are the two women I met at the Rock Springs library who own property up near Sublette County’s Warren Bridge. One of them was taking her grandson bowling the afternoon I gave a reading. Still, she made time to stop in and buy a book. The slight woman who has lived in Rock Springs since 1946 and loves to collect as much information, hear as many stories as she can about the region where Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood takes place.

    These people, these conversations, are the bread and butter of what I do. I write, yes, but writing would be meaningless without people to share it with.

    At its base, writing is about communication. My reward for writing is the communication that gets returned, those individuals who stick around long enough to go a bit deeper, who take the time to share with me their own perspectives.

    Part of life’s beauty is the way we meet each other at our various points along life’s path, the opportunities to share our unique views with one another.

    The book sales have been outstanding. Exciting, rewarding, completely worth smiling about. But those conversations? They are the real icing on the cake.

    So? What’s your perspective? How has the concept of “tough” played out in your life?

    Category Books, Creativity, Feel-Good Stories, Home, Life, Life Stories, Place, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,,,,, | No Comments

  4. Disorder: The Beauty of Chaos

    July 12, 2012 by katemeadows

    Joshua Tree National Park, Copyright 2011, Kate Meadows.

    It is through his work as a snowmobile repairman that my dad learned an important life metaphor: Sometimes, in order to get something to work right, to bring it back to top-notch condition, you have to take it completely apart.

    It’s the idea that beauty is so often born out of chaos, that having complete order sometimes first requires complete disorder.

    If a snowmobile is not working properly, my dad knows to take the entire thing apart, to splay out all of the pieces in parts in a mess around him and, little by little, put the thing back together. It is a messy process. But in the end, he always succeeds in discovering what fix is needed, which part or piece is not working.

    In the end, he never fails to get that machine back to its top-notch condition.

    It’s probably because I am the daughter of this snowmobile dealer that this metaphor works so well for me. Here is how it plays out on the personal front:

    Right now, I feel like my life is splayed out before me in pieces and parts. Mother. Writer. Wyoming native. City dweller. And here I stand in the middle of the chaos, a place with lots of questions, trying to figure out how all these parts fit and function together.

    These roles and identities have worked together before. I have been a mother for almost three years now, a writer for my entire life. My husband and I – and now our entire little family – have bumped around from place to place across the country, as my husband’s job demands we go where the current engineering project is.

    With each move, I question my identity, how a place shapes and defines me, us. With each transition, I question how these roles shift and move to make room for what’s most important.

    But here I am again, at a place of uncertainty. In California for barely a year, rootless and far away from family. Soon to be a mother of two, with the need to write still fierce and alive. Homesick, but for what? The Rockies where I grew up? The Midwest, where I have spent the last 10 years? I don’t know. Perhaps simply a place with roots.

    What I do know is that out of chaos beauty can and does come. Out of disorder, order can blossom and thrive. How is it that our two-and-a-half-year-old son, who was once a messy cluster of cells within me, is now walking and running and playing, hugging and loving and saying things like, “I am happy?” How is it that we have managed to meet such compassionate, loving people no matter what community or region we find ourselves in? How is it that words manage to come together, to flow in avenues of conversation no matter how tired or uninspired or anxious about the future I am?

    Omaha, NE. Copyright 2010, Kate Meadows.

    Sometimes, we have to take a thing completely apart and closely examine all of the pieces before putting it back together to get it into a thrumming order. I am here, in this messy place. Tools at my side, I am chiseling away. The baby will come, any day now, and we will grope around to find a new normal, a “normal” where the roles of parent and writer function beautifully, hand-in-hand. Like my dad and his disassembled snowmobile, I will put these pieces back together, fire up the machine, and see how it runs.

    Category Family, Home, Life, Life Stories, Motherhood, Parenting, Place, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,,,,,, | 4 Comments

  5. Memorial Day: Sparkling Memories of Cold and Color

    May 24, 2012 by katemeadows

    Memorial Day. I remember camp trips and snow. I remember pulling out the tents and mattresses, dusty, dirt-covered belongings that had hibernated in the garage for many long months, soon to make their debut seasonal appearance on a weekend that we in Wyoming always willed to be warm but that rarely was.

    Copyright 2009, Kate Meadows, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

    I remember Mom planting flaming orange and yellow magnolias in the flower boxes near the house. Then, I remember her saying a prayer that those sunshiney plants would survive any remaining cold nights.

    I remember talk of frost – when would it finally go away to give reign to true summer? I remember staying glued to television weather reports, trying hard to discern whether to attempt a weekend camp trip or forego it.

    I remember treating the long weekend as wild adventure, loading up the camp gear and heading for the low mountains, packing plenty of wool socks and long underwear. I remember pitching tents in snow flurries. I remember the pure goodness of hot meals over the weekend – goulash in the Dutch oven, Bear Creek brand soup.

    We slept in snow storms. On cold Sunday mornings, we rose and brushed the feathery white snow off the firewood, the cooler (why did we stock it with ice, again?), the bed of the truck. Then, we would assess: Do we stay in this wilderness another two days, or do we go home to hot chocolate and  movies?

    Sometimes we stayed. Sometimes we returned home (though never without a good story to tell).

    I remember the painting I created in art class, Karly Konicek and I roasting marshmallows around a bright orange campfire with neon blue mountains spiking up in the background. The picture came out of a Memorial Day weekend memory. It is still propped up against an aspen bookshelf in my dad’s study.

    This Memorial Day weekend, we look out at the hazy mountains of western California. A trip to San Francisco with a toddler and another baby on the way was in the works. But it got too hard, too expensive.

    Now, we are revising our plan. Still creating an adventure – just one that won’t require quite so much walking for me at seven months pregnant, won’t include a boxy hotel room with just one double bed (a Priceline flounder), one that will allow more freedom and ease on our pocketbooks.

    The weather looks grey and borderline chilly – in the ‘60s. (I smile at that, thinking of ‘60s as “chilly” coming from such long Wyoming winters that so often extended into May.) We still look toward adventure. It’s just an adventure of a different sort.

    This morning, as I drove our son to daycare, I noticed city workers mounting American flags to light poles. Red, white and blue. It is because of our hard-fought freedom, the selfless acts of so many servicemen and women, that we even have the opportunity to consider such adventure in the first place.

    Flag image credit: www.us-flag.net

    Let us not take that for granted as the long weekend opens up before us, whatever adventure (or non-adventure) is headed our way.

    Find me back here next Thursday, with the adventure report. In the meantime, tell me what adventures you and yours are up to in the coming days.

    Category Family, Home, Life Stories, Nature, Outdoors, Place, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,, | 5 Comments

  6. Hard-Earned Lessons about Hard Decisions

    May 21, 2012 by katemeadows

    Recently, I made a hard decision.

    I opted to push back self-publication of the small business history, Bucky’s: Stories and Recollections from 50 Years in Business, by three months. Now, instead of coming out in June, the book will make its debut in September.

    I agonized over this decision for many months. I lost sleep over it. If I am painfully honest, I cried over it. Part of me felt like I wouldn’t be sticking to my word if I botched a deadline. Part of me felt like a failure for not meeting the initial deadline.

    Copyright 2010, Kate Meadows, Omaha, NE

    Until I realized something: the deadline was a date I had set, a deadline I had been feverishly working toward, a deadline I hadn’t even concretely communicated to many people who had pre-ordered the book.

    All of the pressure to get this project done by a certain time was self-imposed. Who but me would challenge my integrity if I pushed back the project? Who but me would think I was a failure?

    Then, another realization struck me. I could have the book finished by June, if I really wanted to.

    It would just be a mediocre book. I would have to cut corners, strike content, fly through the photo layout and just hope I put images in the right place and that they looked okay.

    Where then, I asked myself, would be the integrity?

    What’s more, the entire reason for pushing the project back rested on this reality: I had received so much content for the book – so many memories and stories, photos and newspaper clippings – from people who wanted to contribute that I simply couldn’t keep up with it all as it poured in.

    This is to say that, when I set out to piece together 50 years of stories and recollections of a small-town business and reached out to the business’ customers and people in the local community for help, the response was overwhelming. The project itself morphed into something more monumental and wonderful than I ever could have anticipated.

    Turns out, when you ask for stories and recollections about Bucky’s Outdoors in Pinedale, Wyoming, people have a lot to say.

    Failure? No. Simply a remarkable story in the making.

    C Hope Clark, writer and editor of the newsletter www.fundsforwriters.com, recently shared this knock-out quote by William James: “When once a decision is reached, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.”

    In other words, make a decision and move on, going forward confidently in the path you have chosen without looking back or second-guessing.

    When I finally made the decision to push back the book’s publication, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. My work felt lighter and freer, more manageable and more joyful. I haven’t looked back since, because I know that by pursuing my work in this lighter spirit, the outcome will be knock-out beautiful – a product that, I hope, will bowl readers over.

    For more on this project, visit www.buckysstory.com.

    Have you agonized over any difficult decisions lately? What was the outcome? If you haven’t yet reached an outcome, what can you do to be proactive about moving forward?

    Category Books, Life Stories, Quotes, Self Publishing, Self-doubt, Small Business History, Writing, Writing Process | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,, | 12 Comments

  7. The Shocking Truth About Customer Service

    May 10, 2012 by katemeadows

    As I wrap up work on a full length small business history, Bucky’s: Stories and Recollections from 50 Years in Business, which chronicles the life of a small engine repair and retail shop in western Wyoming, one truth keeps coming back to me:

    It’s about how this small business was founded and staked its success on customer service.

    Customer service.

    Blah, blah. Do you, like me, roll your eyes when you see that term? It has become so cliched, so overused, in today’s corporate society.

    But when I hear “customer service” in relation to Bucky’s, I understand it differently, because I have so often seen it in action.

    The 11 p.m. snowmobile delivery to a private residence on Christmas Eve.

    Opening the back shop during off hours so a team of snowmobilers can have access to parts and a workspace to fix a broken-down machine.

    Mid-morning coffee breaks that are open to people in the community.

    This is the kind of customer service that is always focused on giving more than getting.

    And you know what? In the case of Bucky’s, it has reaped rewards a thousand-fold.

    People keep coming back to this little store on Lincoln Street in Pinedale, WY, because they know there is always something good in store for them. They know the people there think outside of themselves, think beyond making a buck or two.

    They know the people who work at Bucky’s are truly in tune with what a customer needs.

    Small business owner (or entrepreneur) or not, your life can be like that. It’s about turning the focus outward, rather than keeping it inward. It’s about putting yourself in other people’s shoes, anticipating their needs, asking (even if not directly), “How can I serve you today?”

    If you read the history, Bucky’s: Stories and Recollections from 50 Years in Business, you might get tired of hearing about customer service, the countless ways employees at that shop have stepped up to treat someone like more than just a customer.

    But it’s all in there because these are the memories and stories straight from the customers’ own experiences.

    Turns out when someone serves you and truly meets your needs, you want to shout it from a mountaintop. Turns out that in this crazed world wrought with a “what’s-in-it-for-me” attitude, there are still people who care about you.

    *In what way have you been touched recently by an act of service?

    Category Feel-Good Stories, Life Stories, Place, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,, | 2 Comments

  8. In Bloom.

    May 3, 2012 by katemeadows

    In Wyoming, where I’m from originally, spring is blooming. “Bursting” may be more like it. Just the other day, my dad described the way the color is starting to creep into the lower country, bright blues and greens that glimmer with the sheen of run-off water, while up high, the peaks are still capped in white.

    Copyright 2009, Kate Meadows, Sublette County, WY.

    One thing I am missing so much about the Rockies right now is spring time – how everything just bursts open with color after such a long and cold winter season. It’s like the world is waking up again after a blistering cold hibernation, and all who live there get to be witnesses. You feel like you’ve “earned it” somehow, having experienced that long hibernation yourself. When the world opens itself up again, there you are to breathe it in.

    I remember this time of year when I was growing up, how it was always such a season of renewal. I broke out my journal for a new list of goals. I was ready to pull on running shorts and start running outside in the mornings, no matter how cold it was because, hey, summer was just around the corner. I remember the totally unique and striking contrast of getting into a snowball fight high up in the mountains and then seeking the strong, warm sun to warm up again.

    In Wyoming this time of year, beauty happens. And it’s easy to see.

    Spring happens in southern California – just a lot more subtly. You have to intentionally look for it: the trees greening up a bit, some flowers restoring a more vibrant color, a more intense rainy season. Maybe the birds sing a bit more intensely, with a renewed fervor.

    But here there is no feeling of reward, no feeling of having earned a warm, bright season because, really, the sun shines here all the time. After all, this is the golden state.

    Copyright 2009, Kate Meadows, Yellowstone National Park, WY.

    What are your “best moments” of spring? What memories does springtime evoke for you?

    Here today, the sun is hiding. We are in what California folk call “May Gray.” (This is to be followed by “June Gloom.” Boo hoo.) I miss that clear view of the blue-grey mountains waking up to the warmer months. I am homesick, but so happy to have those crisp memories to which I cling so tightly.

    Category Home, Nature, Outdoors, Place, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,, | 2 Comments

  9. Signature Scent (A Story of the Family Business)

    April 12, 2012 by katemeadows

    With the small business history, Bucky’s: Stories and Recollections from 50 Years in Business soon to be published, I share today one of the knock-out stories that will appear in the book. This memory is shared by my dad, who reluctantly joined the family business full time after graduating college in 1975, seeing no other choice. The business, Bucky’s Repair, operated a hide and fur business on the side as a way of diversifying business and adding income. Here, a glimpse into my grandfather’s crazy notions as a self-taught wildlife expert and businessman, and just how far one family would go to earn a buck.

    “Coyote prices had gone way up, and Dad had perfected what he thought was the all-time best coyote scent. It took him a year to get it just right: a potion of rotten fish, ground up beaver glands and other juices. He buried this stuff for one year to let it age, and age it did. When we dug up the scent and opened it, we could not stand to be within a block of the stuff.

    Dad used eye droppers to divide the potion into small vials, dispensing one drop at a time. In the fall, he set out a large coyote trap line. He was very excited to go for the first follow-up run to see how the potion worked.

    Well, it worked extremely well: His traps were full of badgers. It seemed his potion was exactly what badgers craved. Dad had a dilemma. How could he catch coyotes if badgers kept getting into his traps?

    Being ever so creative Dad thought he would trap badgers that fall, to get them out of circulation. But it would be silly to just trap them and kill them, since badger fur could net him some money. The problem was that badgers don’t get prime until March. He had to figure out a way to keep them until March, when their fur would be prime and worth a sale. His solution was to trap beaver and use the beaver carcasses for badger food. Doing this, he figured he could keep the badgers alive until they grew prime.

    That fall, thanks to his signature coyote scent, we ended up with 29 badgers in three pens out behind the shop. Dad made the pens himself, with wire and hog rings and two-by-four legs and frames. The badgers fought like crazy, day and night. They were very snarly, with deep-throated growls, very vicious sounding. We had never given a thought to the possibility of their fighting, until we put them in the cages together. With all of the fighting going on, we knew we had to call the local vet; now we were dealing with a bunch of badger wounds. Once a week, the local veterinarian, Glenn Millard, came to the shop to doctor the wounded animals. Dr. Millard would apply antibiotics from a distance with a swab on a stick.

    Once, the chief of police, Win Farnsworth, came by to inspect the place. He was a former FBI agent from Texas who had come to Sublette County and hired us to take him on a bear hunt. He had fallen in love with the country, gave up his FBI job and moved to Pinedale. Now as Chief of Police, he had received reports that cock fights were taking place behind Bucky’s. When we showed him what we had, he was relieved we weren’t having cock fights. He said he would be happy to report there were no cock fight going on at Bucky’s. That was that.

    By mid-January, the beaver meat ran out. We had no choice but to shoot the badgers, skin them, and work the fur up to be sold. They brought an average price of $10.00 each, which was very low. A good, prime pelt in March would have brought us $30-$35.  But the price of beaver had gone way up, so Dad made out good, anyway. He didn’t use the potion any more. He didn’t need it. We were all beyond glad, as none of us could stand to ride in Dad’s truck that fall.

    For more about the project, or to pre-order a book, visit www.buckysstory.com.

     

    Category Family, Life Stories, Outdoors, Place, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,,, | No Comments

  10. Why Preserving Life Stories is Important – Now

    March 15, 2012 by katemeadows

    On Monday, I wrote about mining some less than glamorous memories of my grandparents.

    But there is another side to the story.

    waterfall, Sublette County, Wyoming. Copyright Kate Meadows 2009.

    Aside from hidden cigarette butts, a lack of love for each other and an ugly divorce after 51 years of marriage, my grandparents were a wealth of information about the town and county in which I grew up. This place happens to be – or at least used to be – the least populated county in the least populated state of the nation.

    My Grandma and Grandpa were raised just over the hill from each other. Their parents’ generation had homesteaded in Sublette County, Wyoming, chiseling out roots and lives in a land so sparse and barren that hardly anything grew. My grandparents learned to work this land, to own it rather than fear it. They started a family, launched business ventures in town (which included live-trapping and raising and breeding wild bobcats) and got to know people whose own families had similar stories of trial and triumph when it came to making life work in western Wyoming.

    In short, my grandparents were sources of stories – stories that painted a history so rich it would be a crying shame to see that history dissolve with their deaths.

    Winter leaves in Missouri. Copyright Kate Meadows, 2009.

    I knew this. I knew they were a wealth of information about my home. I knew they each had valuable knowledge that could preserve the value of this place for generations and generations to come. How often had I heard them spit out those wild and unbelievable tales of old-timers working in the moonshine business, or tricks guys played on each other in the old tie-hack camps as they prepared to float logs down waterways for the country’s major railroad construction?

    I knew they would gladly tease out these stories and memories, if only someone took the time to listen to their stories and, somehow, save them.

    My grandpa died too young, of suicide in 2003. I was knee-deep in an English degree at Gustavus Adolphus College two states away. Fortunately, he recorded some of his own hair-raising stories and memories via a weekly column in the local newspaper.

    Grandma lasted longer. I was planning in the spring of 2010 to fly to Wyoming with a tape recorder and a notebook, and put in some long hours with her, hearing her stories of growing up and learning the history that she knew.

    She died on Feb. 7 of that year. Super Bowl Sunday. My plans were a couple of months to late.

    Why am I telling you this? Because it is my testimony of why your own life stories are important to preserve now. NOW. We all think we have a lot of time left. We can always do x, y and z tomorrow.

    But what if we can’t?

    So many of us have ambitions to get down and do that hard work – to sit with a relative and probe them about their lives, to sit with ourselves and journal a myriad thoughts about our experiences, to take the time to get to know a place or a person in a deep and distinct way and to preserve that knowledge for others.

    Dry winter forest, Danbury, CT. Copyright Kate Meadows 2009.

    But life – our own – gets in the way.

    To preserve the life stories that are important to us, we need to make it a priority. We have to recognize the urgency in listening and taking action. If researching the history of a special place or of someone’s memory is important to you, you need to make it priority.

    I can help.

    In the coming months, I will be hosting a series of Life Stories workshops to help people launch projects that are important to them. As someone who has been hired to write full length biographies and scores of personal profiles, I know what it takes to invest in people, get information, and turn it into a format that is cohesive and worth preserving. I can help you sort through questions and insecurities about tackling such a project. I can help you write – or, on another level, write for you. I can help you forever save those stories and memories that are important to you.

    If you’re interested or you want to know more, get in touch or leave me a comment. If you’re interested in attending a workshop, or want to host my workshop at your place of work, your church, community center, etc., I am happy to discuss details.

    I am here, and hoping that you recognize the importance of preserving those life histories that are important to you, before it’s too late.

     

    Category Home, Ideas, Inspiration, Life Stories, Place, Writing Process | Tags: ,,,,,,,,, | 2 Comments

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