Decades of You
A conversational recipe for helping a senior you love to tell the stories of their life.
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Several years ago I worked on a stage adaptation of Maurice Shadbolt’s book Voices of Gallipoli.
It’s an oral history of several World War I veterans. Shadbolt interviewed them when they were in their seventies. He sat them down with a voice recorder and let them talk. Individual stories are only only a few pages long. They bubble with visceral detail. I thought it must have been a heavy lift for him to edit, and that his skill as a writer was on full display in the act of condensing the conversations so powerfully. I wondered if he might have omitted some details that modern audiences would find interesting. So I went to the National Archive of New Zealand to review the full transcripts. It was astonishing. Shadbolt had scratched out the umms and ahs, crossed out his own short questions and minor interjections, and then effectively published the rest verbatim. Shadbolt’s skill on this project was to prompt the old diggers in ways that led them to spit out literary gold.
It’s no surprise that participating in one of history’s bloodiest battles would stick in the memory. But lots of vivid details in Voices of Gallipoli are insights into people’s lives before and after the war. It’s been 5 years since I read the book and my go-to memory is a veteran’s description of being a forestry worker in Gisborne. It’s my hypothesis - and experience - that anyone and everyone is capable of giving an extraordinary account of their world at specific places and times - they just need to be asked the right question in the right way. So that’s what we’re going to try to do here.
I’m lucky to come from a family of great storytellers. Sagas are related and re-related at regular gatherings. I never want to hear them for the last time. But when it comes to one grandmother, I feel like I never made time to hear her speak about who she was, and how she lived her life. I have wonderful excuses for my inaction, of course. Early on, I was too young. Later, she spent so long in the grip of such advanced dementia that it simply wasn’t possible for her to give an account of herself. So now I’m left clutching at scraps. Many of them absolutely fascinating.
I think I’ve wrighted a play to address this. I’m going to perform it with some seniors I love over the next wee while, but rather than make you wait to experience the results, I’m going to share my recipe with you, in case you can use it with loved ones in your life, so it won’t be too late.
The Challenge
We’re going to take your beloved senior for some gentle strolls down memory lane. I’m wrighting to make it easy for you, and easy for them. If it’s hard for you, you’ll put it off. If it’s hard for them, it could be too stressful. Ideally, you’ll do it in person, but I’m trying to make it simple enough to do remote too.
Ingredients
The voice recorder on your phone
I use the Voice Memo app on my iPhone. All phones have a free one that works just fine. This is the highest quality, least invasive way to have a normal conversation. That’s what we want. The moment you point a camera in their face, or make a big to-do about it, they’ll change the way they talk to you.
A series of photographs in which they feature, each from a different decade of their life
For some decades, this may be impossible. That’s OK. For others there might be a glut. Choose one. Don’t think too hard about it. These photos are just memory prompts. They’re designed to launch your conversation in strange and wonderful ways. Back and forth in time.
The photos are memory prompts, so it’s nice if they can touch them and they’re big enough to be seen in detail. But as always, whatever helps you make this actually happen - rather than be postponed - is the ideal.
Substitutions: Photographs are ideal, and if you have them they’ll be useful at a later stage of the project. But it’s not always practical or possible. To spark the kind of conversations we want to have, we’re trying to guide their memory towards who they were with, and where they were, at specific moments of their life. In lieu of photographs it may be easier to choose a single prompt per decade based on things like:
Objects they own e.g. a teapot, a hat - something they can feel and hold and look at.
Security question-style prompts e.g. first pet name, mother’s maiden name, best friend at school, the name of the street they lived in the year they got married, a car, a holiday destination, an employer…
Where they were when they learned of a major news/cultural event e.g. moon landing
Time
Get ready to be flexible. Deep talk can quickly become tiring. You might be lucky to get through one photo per conversation, and that conversation may only last 15 minutes - or you may find an entire morning flies by. I think that the oral histories Shadbolt took from those septuagenarian veterans only took half an hour or so. It was more than enough.
Method
Make it a bit of an occasion, but a relaxed one. Tell her what you're doing. Sit together somewhere comfortable, where you can place your phone within 3 feet or so. We’re not aiming for broadcast-quality sound. The most important things are that the voice recorder is 1) recording and 2) unobtrusive, so you both forget it's there.
Maybe you might like to start with the most recent photo. Maybe with the oldest. Maybe somewhere in the middle. The order doesn’t matter. We’ll rearrange them chronologically later.
Start recording. Hand her the first photo. Invite her to look at it for a moment before you ask her questions. She may start talking unprompted. That’s cool. From there, just follow your interests as a listener. It will likely go forwards and backwards in time.
When I’m asking questions to prompt memory, I find the most effective gateway is through people, then place, then action.
People - who's in this photo with you?
Place - where are you?
Action - what's going on?
Note that I haven’t mentioned time. This is because you may know the time very well, after all, it’s one of the decades. But the other reason is that time is a real judderbar for memory. Where was I in March 2003? I’ll get there, but the gears have to grind hard, right? I would give you a much better answer much faster - and ultimately get to the same place - if you asked me who I flatted with at University.
When the conversation from a photo has run its course, stop the recording and give it a title so you know it’s saved.
Don't push yourself to do them all - just feel it out to see what she can handle and what she finds engaging.
Processing the memories.
Get the audio auto-transcribed online: I use a service called Temi1
It’s incredibly accurate. You’ll still have to spend time editing, but to me, that’s the rewarding bit.
Then you’ll have the text, and options ranging from preservation to publication.
I think the loveliest thing to do is create a book. You can do that fairly easily using Google Docs or Microsoft Word - just google how to set up the document. I’d recommend you get it as far as you can, then hire someone to tidy it up if you need to. You can do that via a platform like Upwork. The great thing about the photos is that they can become chapter headings and cover images. Self publishing is the work of a few clicks now. Limited runs are very reasonably priced - I’ve published a dozen or so copies of a book for ~$30 each. If you publish more than 50 copies, the cost per unit starts to plunge.
Take a bow. You’ve just starred in a beautiful play.
www.temi.com