The Wisdom Project

The semester is in full swing and I'm hard at work on the reading and writing for the first submission which is due in a couple of weeks.  I'm also working on my interdisciplinary studies class for the semester, and I'm really quite excited about it.  The class, Creative Writing Pedagogy, allows me to create any type of creative writing class that I might be interested in teaching, and among my tasks for the semester is coming up with a series of 12 lesson plans that would comprise a full class.  I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do.  I'd love to teach, and the options for what kind of class I could create were endless, but the choice was an easy one for me: I'm creating a memoir writing class for seniors.

My workshop, tentatively titled "The Wisdom Project" is something that I can teach to seniors in many different settings, including senior centers, community centers, assisted living facilities, and more.  My goal is to help seniors to learn how to record meaningful snapshots of their personal experiences that can be passed on to future generations.  The wisdom that our seniors hold within them is priceless, and that information is integral to the history of our country, and to their own families.

By the time that my beautiful Mom, Margaret Lane DeChario, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, so many of her memories were either lost to her or so intertwined with others that it was nearly impossible to record them in any kind of meaningful way.  While I remember some of the stories of her life, there are far more others that I never had the opportunity to learn.  A project like this, that might have preserved them for my siblings and I, our children, and generations still to come, would have been something that we would have cherished forever.  What a gift it would be to be able to give that gift to other families!

At some point, I'm interested in following this project with the creation of a business as a personal historian.  As such, I'd have the opportunity to interview families and create audio, video or written stories or books that comprise some of the important memories that we build our families on.  I'm hoping to ask my father to be my guinea pig, creating the kind of history of personal experiences that I was unable to gather from Mom.  Every now and then, when I least expect it, he pops up with some obscure memory that has me enthralled and amazed.  It's time to write them down, to record his words, and have something that I can give to my children someday.  Something to cherish forever - a piece of Dad that will live on forever.