Lives Stitched Together by Choices and Chance: Making Strange and Wondrous Connections Through Family History Work

This post is the fifth in a series-in-progress by company president Megan St. Marie about heirlooms and objects related to her family history that she keeps in her office to inform and inspire her work at Modern Memoirs.

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The Henri and Maria Laroche family in 1941, ten years after Henri’s release from prison on bootlegging charges. (Front row, L–R) Laurent (seated), Leonidas, Henri, RoseAnna, Maria, Marie-Ange, and Leonard. (Back row, L–R) Clement, Gertrude, Therese, Florence, Lucienne, Yvonne, Alice, and Jean-Marie

Megan St. Marie’s baby quilt hanging in her Modern Memoirs office, made by her paternal grandmother Lucienne Marie Laroche Lambert

Several quilts decorate my office at Modern Memoirs, all passed down from different family members and restored by my aunt Rita Lambert Lavallee. One is a pink quilt made by my paternal grandmother, Lucienne Marie Laroche (1912‒1986), which hangs on the back of my office door. It was a gift for me at my birth, the firstborn child of her firstborn, my dad, Raymond A. Lambert. For many years this quilt covered my childhood bed, and at some point it was marred by ink stains leaked from a pen I carelessly laid down, likely after scribbling away on some homework assignment. When Aunt Rita mended the quilt as a wedding gift to me, she used new fabric to repair the frayed edges, but she couldn’t totally remove the stains. As I sat down to write this piece about my baby quilt, not quite sure what I wanted to say, noticing the presence of these small blots of ink led me through a chain of associations going all the way back to a Prohibition-era family secret.

First, the recollection of sitting on my bed with this quilt while doing my homework made me remember that the grandmother who made it for me never completed her schooling. Like my father and me, she was the eldest child in her family. She loved school and did well in her classes, but difficult circumstances befell the family when her father, Henri Edouard Laroche (1893‒1966), was arrested for bootlegging—or being a “rum-runner”—during the latter years of the Prohibition era. She left school for good at that point to help her mother, Maria Gagne Laroche (1898‒1976), care for their farm and for her younger siblings, a decision my father has said was a heartbreak for her.

Close-up of ink stains on Megan St. Marie’s baby quilt

There was no other choice. By that point, Henri and Maria had nine surviving children, including my grandmother, and Maria was pregnant with their tenth. It’s not difficult to surmise that the responsibility of providing for their large brood prompted my great-grandfather to risk smuggling 102 bottles of champagne from his native Québec across the border into Vermont in November 1929. That autumn when he was planning the run had been calamitous for the American economy, after all, with the stock market finally crashing in October. I can imagine that tensions and anxieties were high, even in the small, quiet border town in the northwestern corner of Vermont where the Laroches made their living on a dairy farm.

Newspaper clipping from the Burlington Free Press, documenting the arrest of Henri Laroche

Newspaper clipping documenting the sentencing of Henri Laroche for transporting liquor, 1929

Law officials apprehended Henri just south of Winooski, Vermont on November 1, 1929. They confiscated the champagne from the trunk of his car, and later that month he was sentenced to a year and a day in the federal prison near Atlanta, Georgia, over a thousand miles away. The sentence must have been quite an ordeal for my great-grandfather. For one thing, French was his first language, and he spoke little English. I’m also sure he worried terribly about his family in Vermont, and it must’ve been a sadness to miss the birth of his new son, Clement, in 1930. On a lighter note, while the fiddle was a mainstay of the soirées or kitchen parties he and his Franco American community regularly enjoyed, Henri reportedly returned home from Georgia with a deep distaste for banjo music, which he had heard every day during his incarceration.

Henri and Maria’s children knew about their father’s prison term, but shame made them keep it a secret from their own offspring for many years. The French word for shame is “honte,” which to my anglophone ear sounds an awful lot like “haunt.” Indeed, shame can exert a spectral presence across generations, haunting people with a painful compulsion to maintain silence, and inhibiting healing. My father never learned of the story until one of his aunts blurted it out in an unrestrained moment at a family reunion, years after Henri had died.

I don’t see my great-grandfather’s imprisonment as a stain on the family, like ink spilled on the fabric of the baby quilt his daughter would go on to make for me. If there’s any shame in the story today, I think it belongs to the disastrous prohibition experiment, which ultimately came to an end in 1933 with the ratification of the 21st Amendment, just a few years after my great-grandfather completed his sentence. A review in the online journal Seven Days about a book from an oral history project in Vermont offers the following commentary, which might as well be about Henri Laroche:

John Rainville, in his account of his family’s French-Canadian agricultural heritage, manages to touch on this subject as well. As a bystander, his recollections of the rum-runners tend to be more objective. He mentions that some local men were caught and sent to federal prison in Atlanta. “These guys, you know, they were poor,” he says. “They were trying to make a dollar…it’s almost like drugs today.”[1]

I’d go a step further than Mr. Rainville to say it’s exactly “like drugs today” in terms of how the draconian War on Drugs has led to a crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, with some 2 million people jailed and imprisoned, a 500% increase in the past 40 years. (See The Sentencing Project’s data[2] for more information on this sad reality of our nation and its disproportionate impact on BIPOC populations.) The tragedy doesn’t stop with those who are imprisoned, but ripples out into families and communities.

That ripple effect was apparent in the 1920s in Henri Laroche’s family. I wonder, for example, how my grandmother’s life might have been enriched and changed for the better by continuing her schooling. Such speculation may seem fruitless in its inability to change the past, and if my great-grandfather hadn’t been arrested, and my grandmother had continued her schooling, I would not exist. History had to happen just as it did for my father, and then me, to come into being.

Put another way, everything is connected, with lives stitched together by choices and chance like the threads that bind the pieces of a quilt. Rediscovering this simple, profound truth time and again is one of the great rewards of family history work. I didn’t know I was going to write about her father’s imprisonment when I decided to write about the quilt my grandmother made for me when I was born. Reflecting on my writing process in real time brings to mind lines from Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting,[3] a favorite book I read as a child (perhaps while sitting on that same ink-stained quilt): “No connection, you would agree. But things can come together in strange ways.”

I’ll add wondrous to that phrase—family history work can help us see connections between people and stories and themes in strange and wondrous ways. That seeing, in turn, can prompt empathy, healing, and maybe even the dissolution of the specter of shame. To paraphrase neuroscientist Daniela Scholler,[4] the stories we tell about the past aren’t about the past; they are about how we perceive the past in our present moment. It follows that if we can change our perception, we can change our lives, and maybe the lives of our ancestors, too.

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[1] Quoted in Cathy Resmer’s review of Bootleggers, Brothels and Border Patrols: Conversations with Vermonters, Volume 7, a project of the Vermont Folklife Center, December 19, 2001. See the full review at Bootleggers, Brothels and Border Patrols: Conversations with Vermonters, Volume 7 | Books | Seven Days | Vermont's Independent Voice (sevendaysvt.com) 

[2] Criminal Justice Facts, https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/

[3]  Babbitt, Natalie. Tuck Everlasting. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

[4] Specter, Michael. “Partial Recall: Can Neuroscience Helps Us Rewrite Our Most Traumatic Memories?” The New Yorker, May 12, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/partial-recall

Reflections from Modern Memoirs Founder Kitty Axelson-Berry, Part 2

Kitty Axelson-Berry founded Modern Memoirs in 1994 and published her memoir, The Hill: Letting Go of It, in 2018. The following year, she retired and sold the company to the current owners, Megan and Sean St. Marie. In this two-part blog series, we asked Axelson-Berry to reflect first on her personal experience with writing a memoir and, second, on her experience launching and growing a successful memoir publishing company. Part 2 appears below; click here for last month’s Part 1.

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1. What inspired you to start a company for people to self-publish their personal histories?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: Simply? I wanted to leave my then-current job as the editor of an investigative news-and-arts weekly because it was changing direction and focus in a way I didn't find satisfying. So I asked myself, “What would I do if I could do anything I wanted to right now, and didn’t have to work?” Wandering the world wasn’t an option due to family circumstances. I decided I’d interview my mother about her life and transform it into book form so that it would be well thought-out, user-friendly, and long-lasting. Having been the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, I had developed a feel for what people, or people not unlike me, were interested in, so I was confident that other baby boomers would want to know their parents’ back stories, too, and would want to be able to hand those stories down to the next generation. My mother’s generation had gone through a lot of changes, and their adult children were often distracted by the advent of television and other diversions—not listening to their stories time and time again. Modern Memoirs clients of this generation seemed a little embarrassed to focus on themselves so much but still welcomed being supported through the process of reminiscence and life review, loved having a tangible legacy to pass around, and some even found themselves re-storying aspects of their lives.

“An entire memoir can be considered a sensitive letter to the future.”

The newspaper background had given me most of the skills I’d need—interviewing, writing, editing, managing people and projects, and working in editorial, design/formatting, graphics, and production. I’d negotiated a fair amount with our advertising department, which gave me a sense of marketing and public relations. What I didn’t have was experience in selling, including closing the deal, bookkeeping, business planning, finance, and computers and technology. Also, I just wasn’t driven to think big or make a lot of money. I was more interested in providing a wonderful service that would help individuals and families.

So, personality and experience were prodded by necessity to create inspiration. It wasn’t that the inspiration came first. The necessity came first.

2. What was the greatest challenge you faced in that career?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: At first, I had to hire a friend who role-modeled marketing and sales for me (kicking me under the table when I tried to do it myself and did it badly). I had to switch from being an employee to being an entrepreneur. This type of work was new in the U.S., where the present and the future were emphasized, and the past was pretty much relegated to the dust bin. (Europeans laughed at the concept of a professional personal historian because, they asked, who doesn't know their family history inside and out with no help from anyone?) Becoming an entrepreneur was the greatest challenge, followed by keeping up with constantly changing technologies.

Kitty Axelson-Berry and Ali de Groot at Modern Memoirs’ first location on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts

3. What was the greatest gift you gained?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: Perhaps the friendships I made, which means Ali, who became a close personal friend, several former clients from all parts of the country, and colleagues in the Association of Personal Historians, which no longer exists as an entity. There were also “inconsequential strangers,” people with whom we worked well for years and with whom we produced beautiful, authentic, meaningful works of art.

4. In your memoir, you describe how you “rebelled against words” in your sophomore year of college, writing a paper “denouncing the misuse of words in college classes, in the media, and so on, and proclaimed it to be my last paper, which it was.” What brought you back to words, which became central to your subsequent careers in journalism and publishing?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: Wow, Liz, I don't recall this trajectory ever, thanks. It wasn’t words themselves that were offensive. It was how they could be used in ways that are misleading, deplorable, dangerous. Kellyanne Conway took spin to the max when she described untruths as “alternative facts.” What brought me back to writing, perhaps, was the awakening and activism of the early 1970s. The alternative press had a key role, I like to think, in growing the movements toward social justice, anti-racism, sustainability, environmentalism, organic farms, local businesses, co-operation, and corporate responsibility that’s more than greenwashing or “color washing.” Maybe we could help make the world a better place—or at least slow the pace of it becoming worse. (We had no idea how bad it was.) It was natural for me to move from documenting these movements to focusing on the stories of individuals, themselves, about themselves. In the history of the company, I think Modern Memoirs clients have been remarkably honest and reflective.

5. When you wrote your own memoir, you made it a collaborative process: One of your daughters transcribed your initial audio recordings and inserted comments into the text as she did so, and you invited family and friends to add observations and stories. You also hired several editors to work on it at different times. Why was it important to you to undertake memoir-writing with the support or assistance of others?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: I would have liked to do much more of that but didn’t take the time to—I didn’t have Modern Memoirs pushing me along and doing some of the work that gets tiresome. How many times can you yourself go through your own life story? How can you have an accurate sense of what you’re communicating to someone who reads it, sees the photos you chose? Having a sensitive but strict editor in my opinion is essential to a good outcome, no exceptions. Does a chef ask someone to look at, smell, and taste their new creation? A perfumer to sniff their new scent? A bride to get a first-glance response to the clothes they’re trying on? When you’re writing a sensitive email or letter, do you ever ask a trusted friend or family member to read it before you send it out, maybe even make some changes? An entire memoir can be considered a sensitive letter to the future.

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Reflections from Modern Memoirs Founder Kitty Axelson-Berry, Part 1

Kitty Axelson-Berry, who founded Modern Memoirs in 1994, also published her own memoir entitled The Hill: Letting Go of It in 2018. The following year, she retired and sold the company to the current owners, Megan and Sean St. Marie. In this two-part blog series, we asked Axelson-Berry to reflect first on her personal experience with writing a memoir and, second, on her experience launching and growing a successful memoir publishing company. Part 1 appears below; look for Part 2 next month.

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 1. Your memoir focuses on your “back to the land” years, which began in the 1970s. Though you initially pushed away from society (“disengaging from the rich, powerful, complicated entanglements with the military-industrial world”), you ended up being drawn to and forming a relationship with the land itself. How did this connection to the place help shape your memoir?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: I’ve toned down my rhetoric since 1971, but I still push back against accepting the status quo! I went to last week’s protest against the Supreme Court’s draft decision to prevent so many women from having control over their bodies.

How could I NOT have formed a relationship with the land, I ask you? Our gutsy determination and mix of cynicism and optimism carried us through at great personal cost. I struggled on the land every day to get to a road, to dig down between tree stumps and boulders for water, to cut and haul wood, to fail at growing our food, to be thirsty, to be frustrated with the weather, the darkness, the freezing rain.... It was a love-hate relationship. The shape of the memoir probably attests to that love-hate relationship on many pages, but what really shaped it is the same thing that inspired me to write it: I wanted to let go of my deep connection with the land, put it to rest. So the memoir was a bereavement ballad from start to finish, although I never got around to the ballad part.

2.   You discuss the tension between “privacy versus what I consider information-sharing and networking” as a theme in your life. Many memoirists struggle with what to include in their books and what to leave out. How did you decide?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: That is one of a thousand themes in my life, and the context was about my cross-cultural marriage, actually. My family of origin was more expressive and free-flowing; my ex-husband’s was more reserved and very private. In my family, we swapped information and it wasn’t considered a “sin.” In memoirs, decisions about whether to include or leave something or someone out are difficult, and although my instinct at the beginning was that of a news reporter, I modified it after reading Family Secrets: How Telling and Not Telling Affect Our Children, Our Relationships, and Our Lives by Harriet Webster. (It’s listed as a resource on the Modern Memoirs website.) My recollection is that Webster’s analysis is wide-ranging and insightful. So for our clients, I learned to be somewhat circumspect. But for myself, I probably erred on the side of sharing too much.

3.   In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, author Jill Ker Conway points out, “Traditionally there has only been one female autobiography for every eight written by a male.” Did this fact help motivate you to write yours, or influence what you wrote about?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: Not at all! But I’ve kept aware of research and ideas about why more women don’t write memoirs. To some extent, it seems to be much harder to write about daily life that doesn't have major ups and downs and doesn’t have big, public successes (or failures). Instead, many hours are traditionally spent doing household chores, perhaps practicing fortitude and patience, events (non-events) which certainly don’t write themselves. Another interesting thing is that women, even highly accomplished or successful women, have had a tendency in the past to attribute their successes to something other than their own agency, usually luck. This includes Jane Addams (her autobiography is discussed in the Zinsser book), who in 1931 became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and never took credit for her successes. She attributed her work to being lucky—she just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But I think this is changing, thankfully. Greta Thunberg and other women activists, Nancy Pelosi and other women politicians claim their own agency.

4.   In your book, you describe the “torture” of writing a memoir. Why was it so difficult?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: Writing is difficult, period. It’s difficult for nearly everyone I know of, so it’s a matter of degree. And writing a memoir is personal, with too much material to select from and too many people (living and dead) to consider. I think it’s better for people to be authentic in their memoirs and not try to be someone else. I don’t know if you still encounter this, but we used to have a fair number of potential clients who wanted to hire us to turn their dry memoirs into something funny and heroic, but we aren’t ghostwriters. I wrote my memoir for myself alone, and it was like an exorcism in a sense. I hoped no one else would ever read it, but apparently you read it. Hopefully you opened it up randomly and skipped around.

 I was being loose, colloquial when I wrote about writing being “torture,” by the way. It isn’t torture and I hope that isn’t a trigger for anyone.

5.   In the end, what was the reward? What did you gain from writing your book?

Kitty Axelson-Berry: It has been astonishingly helpful on an emotional and mental level. I’ve read so much about memoirs and seen so much of clients’ joy, but this feat is over the top and long-lasting, and I am experiencing it personally. My goal of putting the land and those three decades to rest was met. I love being free to appreciate that land and those years, in their glory and despair, from a distance. And I want to add that it’s a relief to have certain photos and data about what happened when, and what so-and-so’s birthday is, in a single accessible place.

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Piecing Together Family Histories with Timelines

Consider the axiom, “You can’t see the forest for the trees,” or the parable about the blind men and the elephant. They both convey how difficult it is to gain an understanding of the whole when we become lost in the details. The same is true in genealogical research: Evidence is discovered in random order, and a disorganized pile of facts may turn into what genealogists call a “brick wall.”

I’ve found that the best way to clean up the pile and get the project back on track is to create a timeline for each family group. This standard tool of data visualization is a relatively easy one to employ, as it distills and structures details into an accessible, readable order.

First things first: A family group, or marriage unit, is a three-person cluster consisting of two parents and the key child who continues the study’s ancestral line. Documentation for each family group typically begins with the couple’s marriage and ends with the death of the last surviving spouse. It also includes information on the key child, but only until the date he or she marries or becomes an unmarried parent. For the key child’s marriage or parenthood and all subsequent events in his or her life, a separate file is started for his or her own family group.

To create a timeline for each family group, I start by making a chronological list of the date and location for each documented event that I have found. And—most importantly—I cite the source for each piece of information.

It’s even more efficient to organize genealogical findings in chronological order as I gather them. I therefore begin research projects by creating a blank “document links” file for each family group. As I discover sources with information related to their lives, I note the date and location of each life event and follow it with a note or link to the source’s location. Each time I add an event and source to the timeline, I place it in sequential order.

Not only does a story begin to unfold before my eyes, but gaps in research are revealed. For example, I might see that I’ve estimated a couple’s marriage year by the number of years they were listed as married in the 1900 U.S. census, but I have not actually located their marriage record yet. Or I might see that I know where the family group lived in 1850 and 1870, but I haven’t yet found them in the 1860 census. Then my task is to follow up on those gaps and try to fill them so that a client’s project meets the Genealogical Proof Standard.

Organizing information in a timeline really does help make sense of it. For one client’s project at Modern Memoirs, I recently researched three generations of a family that moved back and forth between two states in the 1800s. I discovered two information-rich sources that each contained extensive details about the family’s activities in one of the states and made only general references to the other state. Simply highlighting the key information in each source left me confused. But as soon as I placed the key information from each source into a timeline and spliced the two timelines together, it all became clear. The events suddenly fit together like pieces in a puzzle, and a whole picture came into view, telling a single, though complex, story. The sequence of events allowed me to grasp the motivations behind the family’s moves and to understand the roots of intergenerational financial difficulties and successes.

In addition to giving shape to information, a timeline illuminates the contextual backdrop of our ancestors’ lives. Comparing each family group’s timeline to a timeline of local, state, U.S., and world history helps flesh out a family’s story and may suggest leads on additional topics to research in order to gain a fuller understanding of their lives. In a recent talk my brother-in-law gave to a writing group, I was surprised to hear that he uses the same approach in his work. He is an investigative journalist and author, and each time he tackles a research project he creates what he calls “the chron,” or chronology, to match the events he is studying with the context of the time, whether it’s broad historical trends or details about the weather on a particular day long ago.

Sometimes clients choose to include personal or contextual timelines in their memoirs. An excerpt of one client’s political timeline is shown here to demonstrate how behind-the-scenes tools like timelines can also be used in the final presentation of a book.

Regardless of what we call it or whether it appears in print, a timeline is a key tool in the genealogist’s toolbox, and I encourage clients to use it in their own work, too.

Papa, Sasa, and Zamani: Remembering My WWII Veteran Grandfather

This post is the fourth in a series-in-progress by company president Megan St. Marie about heirlooms and objects related to her family history that she keeps in her office to inform and inspire her work at Modern Memoirs.

Megan St. Marie as a child (at right) with her brother, Sean Paul Lambert (at left), and their maternal grandfather, Paul Edward Dowd, 1980

As an undergraduate at Smith College, I took a fascinating course on African religions. Nearly thirty years later, in my work at Modern Memoirs, I often recall a reading assignment from John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy[1] that introduced the Swahili terms “Sasa” and “Zamani.” These words describe concepts of time that hold deep relevance for work on family history and genealogy.

Loosely defined, Sasa refers to the present, or to those memories held by people who are alive today. Sasa is forever receding into the deep past of Zamani, or that which predates any living memory. With regard to ancestors, those people who are deceased but still recalled by the living exist in the realm of Sasa. In other words, although they are dead, they remain in the (remembered) world of the living. Then, when the last person who holds a living memory of a deceased person also dies, the ancestor moves into the realm of Zamani.

The notion that the dead we remember are not fully lost to the past but exist in current (Sasa) memory holds potential solace for the living. Thinking of people I love who have died as existing in Sasa transcends mere sentimentality or nostalgia to awaken feelings of both comfort and the sacred in me. Comfort arises because the losses seem somehow eased, and the sacred because of a sense of responsibility to remember.

As he neared the end of his life, my maternal grandfather (whom I called Papa) said to my mother, “I just don’t want to be forgotten.” Born to an Irish immigrant mother and her Irish American husband in Boston nearly 100 years ago, it’s safe to say that my grandfather, Paul Edward Dowd (1925‒2014), was unfamiliar with the Swahili terms and concepts of Sasa and Zamani. Though he was an avid reader, he never went to college to study African religions or any other subject—something he once told me he regretted. But even if he didn’t use the word “Sasa,” my grandfather’s desire to be remembered evokes his awareness of different planes of existence in the present. By stating what he did not want after his death (to be forgotten and thus relegated to the past in which he lived), he asked for what he did want (to be remembered in the present after his death).

And so, I remember my Papa. I remember times we spent together. I remember the particularities of personality and presence that made him the man he was. I remember stories he told me about his life.

Prints depicting Boston landmarks displayed in Megan St. Marie’s Modern Memoirs office

I’ve written before about how heirlooms and objects related to family history can help spark such memories, but although I’ve filled my Modern Memoirs office with many such items and have others at home, most are from my father’s side of the family. I do, however, own a set of prints depicting famous landmarks in Boston that sits atop my office bookshelves in honor of my Papa. He didn’t give me the prints (they were a gift from my father-in-law), but because he was born and raised in Boston, I associate those street scenes with him. These were places he grew up knowing—Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, the Boston Common, the gold-domed State House and the Old State House, Boylston Street, Copley Square, Louisburg Square, and the Old T-Wharf.

Close-up of a print depicting the Old T-Wharf in Boston

USS ARD-17, the ARD-12-class floating drydock on which Megan St. Marie’s grandfather Paul Edward Dowd served during WWII

Paul Edward Dowd (front row, center) stationed with other Navy servicemen in the Pacific during WWII, cir. 1945

Though he didn’t work at the Old T-Wharf, this waterfront scene brings to mind how my grandfather did work in the Boston shipyards as a young man. This experience led him to join the Navy at the age of 19, and he served in the Pacific Theater during WWII aboard USS ARD-17, an ARD-12-class floating drydock. On November 30, 1944, ARD-17 was damaged by a near miss from a Japanese bomber while anchored at Kossol Roads, Palau. I believe this was the incident my grandfather told our family about when he found himself near one of the ship’s guns on the deck during an attack. As a shipfitter, he hadn’t been trained to use that weaponry and it was unmanned. Another higher-ranking sailor saw him in the chaos of the attack and shouted, “Shoot it, Paul! Shoot it!”

“I didn’t know what the hell to do,” Papa would say when telling this story. “So I just held onto the thing without ever firing it, and I yelled ‘BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!’”

Though he always laughed when telling this story, he admitted to being scared. The first time I heard him tell it, I remember feeling something akin to fright when I realized that if the attack had gone differently, killing my Papa at age 19, he never would’ve come home from the war, and I would not exist.

A maple syrup jar from Megan St. Marie’s maternal grandparents’ 60th anniversary party

But he did come home. After the war, my Papa returned to Boston and married my grandmother in 1950. They raised seven children together and celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary before his death in 2014. I sadly missed their 60th anniversary celebration, but I have a glass maple syrup jar they gave out as a party favor in honor of the decades they spent living in my home state of Vermont. The syrup is long gone, but the empty jar remains in my office as a memento of the life they built together as part of what Tom Brokaw famously called “The Greatest Generation.”[2]

Today, my grandparents and many others of their era exist only in living memory, or Sasa. The National World War II Museum notes:

Every day, memories of World War II—its sights and sounds, its terrors and triumphs—disappear. Yielding to the inalterable process of aging, the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their 90s or older. They are dying quickly—according to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 240,329 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are alive in 2021.[3]

 This museum is working to make sure that the memories of WWII do not disappear entirely, and on a smaller scale, I think we do the same kind of work at Modern Memoirs. My grandfather’s service is well-documented in public records, but his personal stories exist only in the memories of those of us who heard him tell them. Like the harrowing but humorous story I relate above, most of his stories were funny. He was not a fan of “mushy stuff,” and it suffices to say that my sentimental streak is not something I inherited from him, though I did get so much more. That truth is what compels me to write about my Papa today, and many Modern Memoirs clients come to us for similar reasons. They, too, feel the comfort and responsibility of loving their relatives and ancestors in the Sasa realm and wish to preserve their memory in writing. As Sasa gives way to Zamani, the books we help our clients create can serve as individual museums, curating and preserving the stories, voices, and individuality of those who came before us for generations to come.

[1] Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Oxford: Heinemann, 1990.

[2] Brokaw, Tom. The Greatest Generation. New York: Random House, Paw Prints (imprint of Baker & Taylor Books), 2010.

[3] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/wwii-veteran-statistics

Reflections from Modern Memoirs Client Anna Markus

Most of the books Modern Memoirs publishes are memoirs or family histories, but we’ve also helped clients publish essay collections, art books, fiction, and poetry collections. Anna Markus published her book entitled Delicious Air: Haiku with Modern Memoirs in 2020 to give to friends and family as she marked her 75th birthday. This collection of poetry took three and a half months from the day she first contacted us to the day books arrived on her doorstep. In honor of National Poetry Month this April, we asked Markus to reflect on what the publication process was like for her and what it’s meant to share her book with others. (Be sure to click on the video links at the end of this post to see the letterpress process in action for this beautiful, handmade book.)

Don’t touch my plumtree!

Said my friend…and saying so

Broke the branch for me.

Japanese papers on display at the printer’s shop

Choosing the letter “O” from a particular font case at the printer

Fresh lead plates of 3 lines of haiku

1.     In the introduction to your book, you define haiku as a poem of three lines with seventeen or fewer syllables. You say that you fell in love with this poetic form as a teenager and have read and collected haiku books ever since. How did you learn about it, and why did it have such appeal to you?

Anna Markus: I first learned about haiku from my brother, who had them posted all over his room. They sparked something poetic and spiritual in me right away. At that point I had no background in it at all. I began to write my own verses over the years, jotting down words in notebooks and on scraps of paper to capture moments when the familiar becomes somehow new and wondrous.

2.     What is one of your favorite haikus written by another poet?

Anna Markus: My favorite haiku was written by the Japanese poet Tan Taigi:

Don’t touch my plumtree!

Said my friend…and saying so

Broke the branch for me.

3.    Some people might find it confining to follow a strict writing formula. Why is it the opposite for you?

Anna Markus: It’s not the opposite, but I love the challenge of saying so much in such little space. What sets this spare, poetic form apart as the one I most enjoy is its elegant, deceptive simplicity. At its best, haiku holds great spiritual depth as it helps writer and reader alike to see beauty where many would not see it.

4.     You were very involved in the design process of your book, including the selection of materials. How do the aesthetics of your book complement the text?

Anna Markus: I wanted the book to have a Japanese feel in terms of paper, binding, and size, based on samples from my own collection. We were selecting materials at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, which made it impossible for me to visit Modern Memoirs in person. Megan St. Marie went to the printer’s shop and we face-timed so she could show me paper and thread choices. The result was a beautiful, seven-inch-by-four-inch volume with a Japanese paper cover, letterpress text, and hand-stitched, stab binding.

5.     In her poem “Sometimes,” Mary Oliver writes,

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

What makes poetry, or haiku in particular, such a powerful way to “tell about it”?

Anna Markus: Haiku challenges the reader to do just what Mary Oliver suggests. A good haiku startles, makes you see and pay attention, puzzle about the levels of meaning. It should have a number of levels of meaning, and the reader should fill in the rest.

Cabinets with cases or drawers of fonts, letters (upper case, lower case!)