StoryWorth Week by Week

A year ago, my four adult children gifted me a subscription to StoryWorth, “a service that helps you create a personalized keepsake book with your loved ones’ stories.” Each week for a year I received a prompt in my email feed and wrote a response during the following week.

StoryWorth provided a database of hundreds of prompts and my children chose one each week to send to me, or made up their own.  Some of the questions seemed simple, like “What was your first pet?” or “How did you acquire your first car?” but the pet prompt had me crying into my laptop as I remembered that my parents had given Rusty, a pomeranian/spaniel cross who slept with me every night, to the people who bought our house when we moved to Australia, and didn’t feel they could ask for him back when we returned three months later.

The prompt about my first car led me to think about my first job and the boyfriend who drove my lovely new car into a tree. Some prompts made me laugh; others haunted me for days and took me to places and events I had stored away and didn’t really want to remember.

Memories, Memories, Memories

Some weeks it was easy; the words flowed, and I enjoyed the process. Other weeks the prompt didn’t resonate with me, or it elicited difficult feelings, and I postponed writing until later. Eventually we reached the end of the year and I had written 52 personal essays, ranging from 300 to 1200 words each. I had inserted a few photos into the stories, but my children wanted more, so I spent most of November and December pouring over family albums, scanning and editing photos, and finding just the right place to put them.

Finally, I arranged the stories in approximate chronological order, so they would make sense to the readers, my children and grandchildren.

As you might imagine, this process evoked many forgotten memories, and I spent days and weeks thinking about times past, wondering what they all meant and whether I had made the right decisions, said the right things.

What Does It All Mean?

Child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson famously gave us a coherent theory of the psychosocial development of human beings, which I taught to my child development students for many years. Each stage of development is presented as a crisis in which the individual balances their individual psychological needs against the needs of society. Trust vs Mistrust, for example, for infants, and Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt for toddlers and preschoolers.

Erikson’s eighth stage of development is old age, Integrity vs Despair, in which the individual assesses and makes sense of their whole life and the meaning of contributions they have made during it. Successfully negotiating this crisis, he believed, results in what we have come to call Wisdom. It also, I discovered, helps you face the inevitable end of life.

Writing and then reading these stories has given me a better understanding of my life’s journey, and reassured me that I negotiated all eight stages of development with some modicum of success. When I finished illustrating the stories and putting them in chronological order, I had also finished reviewing my life and reassuring myself that I have lived a rich and meaningful life. And still am doing so.

Using StoryWorth to Write a Memoir

Writing memoir is a powerful experience.  If you have been thinking about collecting memories for your own family, I highly recommend this process to get started.  You can ask your children to select the prompt questions, or you select them yourself. You will end up with pieces of the puzzle still missing, but with many of them in place, which is a great start.

However, be forewarned; you will end up re-living parts of your life that you had completely forgotten, and that may be painful. However, I will vouch for the process. As I discovered when writing my memoir of the years my family spent off the grid, Back to the Land in Silicon Valley, writing through the memories is a powerful tool for understanding what they mean and coming to terms with your decisions and actions.

“The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.”

Erik Erikson

Marlene Anne Bumgarner writes primarily about food, family, and traditions. Her 2020 memoir, Back to the Land in Silicon Valley, is about raising children, animals, and vegetables on a rural plot of land in the 1970s.   Organic Cooking for (not-so-organic) Families will be out soon, and she’s now working on an update to The Book of Whole Grains while also crafting a cozy mystery, Death on a Sunny Afternoon – a Harriet Palmer Mystery.