Making an intergenerational interview and writing a short biography

Overview

The training will provide the participant with methods and skills in collecting private or family histories into a short biography. Working through a semi-open interview will help the work go along and will result in an outcome that can be printed out.

Objectives

Intergenerational memory-work can offer emotional support and facing problematic memories together. Dismantling over-generational emotional barriers. Understanding of experiences from an evacuee’s trail or other challenges in one’s life history will grow. The memories from the older generation will be passed on as new knowledge and new skills.

Materials needed

Well-known biographical novels for reading excerpts, as models for captive impressions and descriptions:

• The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank
• Fabio Geda’s In the Sea There are Crocodiles, from 2011

Stickers to write descriptive words on the wall

Paper and pens to sketch an idea pie or an idea tree

(Complementary material for the workshop facilitator: Shute, Sarah 2002. Anne Frank: diary of a young girl. Cambridge: ProQuest.)

Group size

From 2 to 24 persons (divided in pairs)

Instructions (for trainers)

The first workshop starts with a short teaching session. Led by the facilitator, the group will reflect on biography as a text: what are the typical features of a biographical text? The facilitator reads aloud excerpts from the books given beforehand. Pupils draw up mind maps of typical features of the text type, paying special attention to descriptive words and ways to create an atmosphere. The pupils are then divided into pairs groups and each pair discusses one of the biographical texts. They tell each other ideas what narrative features they might use in their writing.

The second workshop starts again by reading aloud excerpts from the example biographies. After discussing, what kind of timeline or lifeline might be the best in their case and what themes might come up, they start to sketch, using tools to help to plan and write a biography:

1. Timeline. Where does the mother’s story begin and where does it end? How does his life fit into the timeline? What to choose for your own text, what to leave out of the timeline?
2. Idea pie: practise telling one topic at a time: in the idea pie, you choose topics that are central to your life and collect key words from these topics to fill the pie.
3. Idea tree: the idea tree can be used in the same way as the idea pie: on the branches of the tree, you collect the themes you want to address in your text.
4. Notepads: descriptive narrative is difficult for some writers: many of them are brief and descriptive, and the text never really takes off. An idea bank can be helpful: collecting descriptive words on slips of paper to stick on the wall.

Tips for trainers

Capturing embodied (memory) information by means of sensory ethnography, by showing sensitivity to silences and/or by participating in walks in places associated with memories.

A possible outcome of remembering and creating a genuine atmosphere is a digistory:

• Reminiscing with personal objects, photoes and archival material, a story told by a 71-year old woman from Espoo, who was 3 years during her family’s evacuation trip from Karelian straight to eastern central Finland. See the digistory at https://youtu.be/gZdfWZmd0qI.
• Vlog “Lotta ja pappa” by a 3rd generation young woman who interviews her grandfather and sings with him songs of her Karelian grandpa’s youth: https://youtu.be/qCip9ond6dA

Challenges that might occur:

The writers/ creators may feel threatened by their environment if it resembles too much the wartime or after war mockery.

Remark:

Create a group of peers. Start with cultural program. Provide some decoration of pedagogical objects that can function as identity symbols.