A life story writing guide unique in targeting women and detailing a national support program in cooperation with the National Museum of Women's History.
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About the Author
Deborah graduated from Augustana College with a major in English and completed her graduate course work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. After a 15 year career in public relations, she served as executive director of the Arizona Center for the Book, an affiliate of the National Center for the Book at the Library of Congress. Deborah created the Cameo Life Stories program to accelerate the pace of progress for women through the sharing of women's histories. Response from women at the many workshops Deborah has led convinced her to write Cameo Life Stories Writing Guide for Everywoman: Penning Your Portrait in Words. In addition, Deborah established the nonprofit STORIES Center to carry forward the task of collecting and preserving the record of individual contributions to society.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life in Your Words,
By A Customer
This review is from: Cameo Life Stories Writing Guide for Everywoman: Penning Your Portrait in Words (Paperback)
Any modern woman probably has a photograph of herself. Think of the one you have. Are there at least 1,000 words behind it? Of course! There are one thousand and more if you would just write them! Everyone contributes something to history, and this book helps to celebrate that fact by encouraging women to write about what they have lived. In addition, this book tells how you can have your life story put into a collection kept in conjunction with the National Museum of Women's History in Washington, D.C. Every life story is as different as the woman who lived it, and every life story written and submitted to the project is as unique. You may choose to use the guide to give short answers to questions relating to your life, or you may choose to give elaborate answers to as many or as few of the questions as you wish to record. You may even wish to submit your life story anonymously to the museum. This book will be very useful to the reader who wishes to leave a legacy of words about her life. There are tips on working with your memories, writing descriptively, and even setting up a group to meet regularly as writers of life stories. The best part of the book are excerpts from life stories written by women who have used the questionnaire.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Women's stories, women's history,
This review is from: Cameo Life Stories Writing Guide for Everywoman: Penning Your Portrait in Words (Paperback)
Cameo Life Stories was written, Deborah Linzer tells us, "to encourage women everywhere to value their lives as important contributions to human history, to make human history more complete and more accurate by including women's life stories, and to share women's stories as invaluable sources of inspiration."
This is an important and ambitious mission statement, but Cameo Life Stories certainly lives up to it. While most "write-your-life-story" texts focus on the how-to of telling your story, or encourage women to write about their lives because writing is a healing act, Deborah Linzer urges us to write our life stories because "every woman makes history, no matter who she is or what she does." We are all history-makers, she reminds us, and every choice we make is an "exercise in making history." When we begin thinking of ourselves as history-makers, it becomes a little easier to write our life stories. We see that we have been shaping our personal histories, and the histories of those around us, every day, in both positive and negative ways. Some days, making history may be as simple as catching up with the laundry... Other days, making history may be as momentous as sending a large check to a worthy charity...starting graduate school, staying sober for one more day, leaving an abusive husband...or beginning to write down the story of your history-making life. This is important enough, and as the central message of the book, is repeated clearly, often, and compellingly throughout. But Deborah Linzer does more. She also helps us to see that when we write our stories, we are contributing to the new and expanding scholarship in women's history, where scholars are now beginning to incorporate the lives of women into the human record. What we write about our lives, she says, will be important not only to our families and friends, but to historians in the future. There are several aspects of women's history, she reminds us, that need the help of every woman: collecting stories from women "with knowledge of a vanishing way of life"; collecting stories about the ways individual women have transformed society; and collecting stories about the ways individual women have transformed themselves. To guide women in the writing of their stories, Linzer offers several chapters on writing life stories, a questionnaire, and examples. The chapters give helpful advice on collecting and working with memories, while the questionnaire is a useful prompt for recalling details that might otherwise be forgotten, and the examples are strong and interesting. Additional chapters sketch out a plan for archiving women's stories, although it is not quite clear how these stories will be stored or how access to them will be provided in the future. The idea of archiving is a valuable one, and reinforces Linzer's most important message: that women's stories are not just our own personal affair, they illuminate our contribution to our families and our communities, and hence belong not just to us, but to the world. They must be shared, they must find some sort of permanent form (as in print or oral recording), and they should be archived in a safe place that makes them accessible to those who have a reason to read them. It's a tall order. But Linzer's book gives us a useful road map. by Susan Wittig Albert for www.storycirclebookreviews.org reviewing books by, for, and about women
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deborah Hansen Linzer,
By Judy Joyce (Pikesville, Maryland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Cameo Life Stories Writing Guide for Everywoman: Penning Your Portrait in Words (Paperback)
Two years ago while living in Phoenix, Arizona I met Deborah Hansen Linzer through a favorite aunt of mine by the name of Kathryn who is living in Masa, Arizona. Kathryn took me to a lecture given by Deborah Hansen Linzer telling us about her book: "Cameo Life Stories Writing Guide for Everywoman: Penning Your Portrait in Words."I joined eight other women and began writing and answering the ninty some questions on my life. The process was very rewarding and will never be forgotten. It took me two years to write this life story down. It now has been printed and is ready to be given as a gift to my daughter Brigit in time and has been sent to the National Museum of Women's History in Washington, D.C. In time research and an analysis will be done of my life time of 1942 to 2082. I highly recommend that you read this book and do it. Judy Joyce, Pikesville, Maryland
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