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At the University of Wisconsin-Superior, psychotherapist John Kunz directs the International Society for Reminiscence and Life Review, working with older people to put their oral histories on tape. He finds that "as baby boomers age, they say, 'Gee, we want people to value what we've done with our lives.'" Since 1988, Denis Ledoux, an author who lives in Lisbon Falls, Me., has led workshops around the country, helping thousands of people get started on their memoirs. He argues that a sense of continuity between generations has been lost, geographically and emotionally, and that the oral tradition of story-telling has diminished. As an alternative, if children and grandchildren are out of reach, says Ledoux, "you can write out your story."
Allen Greenstone, 75, of Hollywood, Fla., wanted to put his story on paper so that his daughter Adrienne, 50, would know him as more than just her father. The retired Navy fighter pilot was on a training mission in 1943 and watched his wingman's plane go into a tailspin and crash. For half a century, he carried a poem in his head that he had composed about the tragedy: "Spinning, twisting, hurtling down./ Faster, faster, towards the ground./ Wires screaming,/ standing taut./ Metal groaning, anguish wrought./ ...Victim trapped in metal womb/ resisting, wrapped within his tomb." After joining a weekly workshop at a local community center, he finished the poem and began writing the stories that eventually turned into 40 chapters of memoirs. Each week one of the nine students in the workshop reads aloud from a work in progress, and the others comment. Says Greenstone: "We determined early on that we're all grownups. We're critical in a positive way."
A group's encouragement and feedback often spur people on. Since the late 1980s, Joe Hausner, 72, has been part of a memoir-writing group at Northwestern University's Institute for Learning in Retirement in Evanston, Ill. His first writings were an act of exorcism based on terrible events within terrible events. At 17 he was sent to Kaufering, a Nazi labor camp west of Munich. Days before the war ended, guards were herding prisoners onto a train when Allied planes suddenly appeared overhead and strafed it. As he later wrote in his memoirs, "I wanted to get up and shout, 'Stop shooting, you fools! We are not enemies. We are all waiting for you, our liberators!" Slightly injured, he fled into the woods and, along with a hundred other escapees, made his way to freedom.