Our dear designer Kate Moore is leaving Echo next week to go back to school (She’ll be staying on as a freelancer). As she was handing over some of her tremendous institutional knowledge a few weeks ago, she mentioned to me how much of an asset the City of Vancouver Archives would be to me in my role as a photo editor. I’m truly looking forward to diving into their fonds while working on our book projects, but in the meantime, I’m really enjoying their Twitter feed; it reminds me that history layers itself on the same 365 days, and that there are enough stories and pictures of this city to keep me fascinated and curious forever.

I should extend a hat tip to the Vancouver Archives for referring me to two great city history blogs, as well:

• Past Tense Vancouver pairs a black and white image from the archives with a fragment of Vancouver lore.
• The Dependent runs a daily feature called “This Day in Vancouver.”

History steps out of the archives in the community-run project Vancouver Street Stories. Nine plaques can be found on Fraser Street between 20th and 44th Avenue:

Each plaque location has its own identity, including a Foursquare check-in. Each plaque also corresponds to a page on our Vancouver Street Stories website, where anyone can leave a comment as long as it has some relevance to the plaque location. It’s an experiment in what we describe as digital placemaking that we hope visitors on the ground and online will embrace.

If you have a smartphone, you can get more info or leave your own stories:

For example, you walk up to the corner of say 28th & Fraser. There’s a little sign attached to a city lamp standard that says, “scan here”. What you get back to you is a little factoid about the ‘hood. For example, “Did you know someone was buried under the street at this spot in 1887 because of a deep snowfall that year stopped all horse carriages?”

Users are encouraged to share their own stories (“This is where I first saw the woman I married,” for example), developing the plaque into a living document of the neighbourhood’s collective history. This project is ripe with possibilities. I hope we explore and riff on some of them here in upcoming Echo projects. I’m wonderfully inspired by how these passion projects bring light and new meaning to the archives’ treasures.

Tickets: $15 early bird and $20 after that and at the door.

For the latest information, visit the DSU wiki. To volunteer, contact hello@denimandsteel.com

The word storytelling gets bandied an awful lot these days. It’s a term that has currency in industries and communities as diverse as activism, health care, advertising and art. It’s possible that the recent fascination with narrative comes out the immense possibilities that emerge out of digital technology—with each new web app, open-source community or forum, countless avenues for creativity and connection are opened up. With so much recent exploration in this arena, it feels like time to reflect on how digital tools and culture intersect with storytelling.

Since their formative January Forum, John, Echo’s creative director, and our studiomates Denim & Steel have been meeting as a digital/storytelling working group, spearheading conversation on this topic. In the hopes of expanding the conversation, this week, Tylor and Todd issued a call for interest in a summer Digital Storytelling Unconference in Vancouver:

Rather than a place to tell stories, this is about bringing together people from … ‘hard culture/soft culture’ (digital and analog) to see how traditional storytelling practice can inform digital tool-making, and what emerging opportunities digital tools offer storytellers.

Whether you’re interested in attending, presenting or organizing, please get in touch with Todd and Tylor through Twitter, or email them at hello @ denimandsteel.com.

Canadian business lost one of its foremost entrepreneurs when Tom Foord, co-founder of Kal Tire, and president of the company for half a century, died of heart failure at his home in Vernon, B.C. on Thursday, April 12, 2012. He was 89.

Over the past five years, Echo Memoirs has had the pleasure of working with Kal Tire and the Foord family on two books, one about the 50-year history of the company and one about the tight-knit family. Tom and his late wife, Norah, inspired us with their fierce love of family, friendship and life. They offered grit, generosity and affection in spades. Tom’s death follows that of Norah’s by only a few months. We were deeply saddened by Norah’s passing in February. As writer Eve Rockett wrote in A Full House: The Tom & Norah Family Story, “Norah has been the glue that holds the family together. They call her the CEO: The Chief Emotional officer.” We are honoured and grateful that Norah was able to see the proofs of the family book before her passing.

Tom and Norah met when he was posted to a teletype office in Newfoundland. They married in 1944. After the war, Tom moved to his new wife’s hometown where he spent almost a decade at a variety of jobs before buying the service station in 1951 that later became Kal’s first location in 1953. With fearlessness and innovation, the Foords expanded the company into what is now the largest independent tire company in Canada.

John, our Creative Director, came away from his first meeting with Tom with some lasting impressions. “I first met Tom at a dinner meeting more than four years ago. Right away I knew he was a charismatic, generous man, who also packed a great sense of humour and a capacity for keen observation. He was down to earth, interested in everything – especially our process – with an openness that made all of us feel as though we just at home relaxing and sharing the day’s events.”

Tom was the deserving recipient of countless honours in his life, including: Vernon’s Most Valuable People Award, the Order of British Columbia in 2000, and a Doctor of Laws degree from Royal Roads University, his proudest honour of all. In 2003, he became the first Canadian to be inducted into the Tire Industry Hall of Fame, which includes Harvey Firestone, Charles Goodyear and Les Schwab.

The Echo team is truly proud to have been able to tell the Tom and Norah Foord family story, and extend our sincere condolences to their family.

photo by Reynaldo R. Cayetano Jr.

Over in San Francisco, SFist, a local website, is collecting the photographs and anecdotes of natives and long-time residents of the Bay Area in a series called the SFist Memoirs. The stories and photographs give access to places and people from bygone days. In one “memoir”, the writer’s uncle remembers rock and roll parties on the houseboats of Sausalito; in another, a woman remembers the Gentleman Chefs Club, an elite club of Bay Area business owners with a mandate to have “fun” (think visits to the racetrack and trips to Reno). These insider photos and memories are priceless.

Collectively, these personal recollections comprise the memoirs of a city. They remind me of the Echo books that, through the stories of loved ones and admirers, have commemorated the lives of someone special. A city goes through lives and deaths after all, and as poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

“My maternal grandmother, Rebecca Appel Fost, grew up in Toronto, the daughter of Romanian immigrants (what I’ve since learned are Galicianers). She moved to New Jersey as a young woman, went to nursing school, married a doctor (my grandfather, William Handler Fost), and had four children. I loved her cooking as a child, although now that I’m finding her recipes, I’m surprised to see how much she—as what I’ve come to view as the quintessential 1950s housewife—used modern store-bought ingredients…. But there are throwbacks as well, such as the vague time and temperature (none is given). Her sister-in-law (my great-aunt Lillian) often accused her of leaving out ingredients when she shared recipes, so that no one else could ever make her dishes as well as she did.”

For several years, Echo has been incorporating mother’s and grandmother’s recipes into family-history books. Countless memories of kin and community are wrapped up in the meals shared together, usually cooked by mom. Our client Frank Giustra even asked us to publish a book of his mother’s best recipes.

Shaw said, “There is no love sincerer than the love of food”; we say there’s no love sincerer than the love in food.

]]> http://echomemoirs.com/blog/the-noodle-kugel/feed/ 0 http://echomemoirs.com/blog/echo-on-ckua-radio/ http://echomemoirs.com/blog/echo-on-ckua-radio/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:30:25 +0000 Megan Lau http://echomemoirs.com/blog/?p=234 Echo is an office full of radio listeners. We find company in those friendly voices while we’re on the road, at night, and on the weekends while we’re making breakfast in our pyjamas. One our best friends on air is Bob Chelmick from CKUA’s The Road Home, which airs 9:30 P.M. to 10:30 P.M. Mondays to Thursdays, Alberta time.

Bob shares poetry, song and reflections from his cabin home. The Road Home is an idyllic and peaceful respite from modern city life.

So how tickled were we when Bob made a mention of Echo Memoirs on a recent program? Echo’s founder, Samantha Reynolds, has been writing a poem a day on her website, bentlily.com. For the past several months, Bob has shared several of Sam’s poems on air. But just recently, he discovered her day job as the president of a storytelling firm, and was astonished.

Needless to say, we were thrilled to get such high praise.

Listen to Bob’s delighted musings on Echo and bentlily here.

In an world of information overload, advertisers are latching on to what publishers have known all along: if you want to influence or engage your audience, you need to tell them a story. A story with meaning to them.

But don’t take our word for it: Scientists are starting to come around to understanding how intrinsic storytelling is to the human experience, and tracing it to our biology, no less. A recent Scientific American blog post explains the essential nature of storytelling. It was long thought that our ability to connect meaning with outside stimulus lay in the connective tissue between the left and right brain—or, the creative and rational  sides.

However, a brain-surgery patient in 1960—and many after—have shown that we’ll tell stories to the end. We’re hard wired to tell stories to ourselves to give our lives purpose and meaning. The “…left hemisphere, our left-brain interpreter, [is] driven to seek causes and explanations—even for things that may not have them, or at least not readily available to our minds—in a natural and instinctive fashion,” the Scientific American article says. “Our minds form cohesive narratives out of disparate elements all the time: one of the things we are best at is telling ourselves just so stories about our own behavior and that of others. If we’re not sure, we make it up – or rather, our brain does, without so much as thinking about asking our permission to do so.”

Stories are the only way we know to make sense of the world. Powerful tales, they are. They created our science, our history, our arts, and now our commerce.

It was only natural.

Source: Nick DeWolf Photo Archive

In his memory, DeWolf’s son-in-law Steve Lundeen is publishing all the photos on Flickr (52,000 have been posted so far). It’s a beautiful tribute to a life lived to the fullest. Just think of all the stories told in these images.

As Echo’s photo editor, a treasure trove like this is thrilling to explore. It’s such a rich document of time passed. From artful to mundane, DeWolf certainly noticed the details of his experience. What a legacy he has left his family—and for posterity.

• Nick DeWolf’s photo archive | Flickr
• Digitize and publish your family’s shoebox of photos on 1000memories

We were thrilled to have Monica represent Echo Memoirs at the gala, and she was happy to report that many of Echo’s accomplished clients were in attendance, including Wendy McDonald (BC Bearing), Tracey McVicar (CAI), and FWE Chair and Founder Christina Anthony.

Echo also helped to raise $180 for the FWE through the silent auction, and our fearless Monica participated in one of Vancouver’s most glittering flashmobs ever. Watch it right here:

For more photos and information about the event, visit these links.

• Ariane C Design | FWE Sparkle Gala: 10 Years Strong! [photos]
• Facebook | Forum for Women Entrepreneurs BC
• Forum of Women Entrepreneurs BC