Thanks for visiting Your Life Is Your Story and I hope you come back often in 2011.

Thanks for visiting Your Life Is Your Story and I hope you come back often in 2011. Steve Miller sings

in "Fly Like An Eagle", Time keeps on slipping...into the future, and there's plenty of truth in that.

There's more ahead in our lives, but much to be learned by looking back and processing "in the now".

BG: Well, it complicates them in a related sense: “The Tremulant,” and the

whole book in which it eventually appeared (What He’s Poised to Do)

looked at letters and letter-writing as very vexed forms of personal

advertisement/articulation. How do you speak to people you care about?

Do you tell them the truth? Do you work around it? Do you disclose the

things that are truly in your heart, or is that too much exposure? Can

you bear the risk of ridicule? Those kinds of questions. In “The

Tremulant,” one of the narrator’s strategies is to write not to his

lover, but to her letters. There’s an intertextuality that creates

texture and acts as a form of armor. Celebrities, by their very

nature, operate this way as well. When you see the name “Lindsay

Lohan,” how much are you thinking of the human versus the incidents

and apparatus surrounding her? And when you hear her speak in my

stories, how do you get around to the idea that it is actually her (or

at least a version of her) speaking? There are stories like “A Lady’s

Story,” which is told in the first person by Britney Spears, that wind

the ball of yarn even tighter. What does it mean to be in her head?

CM: You’ve written both novels and story collections, one of which was entirely comprised of stories

about letters. How do you decide what

material is better for each format?

A couple of Canadian personal historians, one specializing in books, the other in video work, have

received some nice press.

The Vancouver Sun writes about the work of Pattie Whitehouse, a veteran personal historian who has been

capturing life stories since 1992 (pretty significant as this type of work is still considered a fairly

new field). Capturing the stories of our lives by columnist Katherine Dedyna gives insight into

Whitehouse's efforts to capture stories primarily of everyday people, those she refers to as "Salt of

the Earth"..