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Community Corner

Reston Seniors Learning to Tell Their Own Story

"Memories into Memoirs" class teaches how to record personal histories for future generations.

At age 86, Reston resident Herbert Miller can fairly be described as a survivor. First, the Great Depression as a child. Then, part of his young adulthood fighting WWII. These experiences, while made of difficult memories, are indelibly part of who he is. And they are part of the legacy he wants to leave his children and grandchildren.

“It’s a very long story,” Miller says. “I have so much to tell. I feel compelled to do it!”

He doesn’t have to do it on his own. Miller and several other senior citizens are students again this spring, in a class at that is helping them get those precious memories down on paper so they will be preserved for family, friends, and history.

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When they graduate in May from “Memories into Memoirs,” their diploma will be in the form of a record of their own personal story, in whatever format they decide to tell it.

“I’m the oddball,” chuckles Marcia McDevitt, another student. McDevitt’s memoirs will be practical as well as sentimental – she’s writing them in the form of a cookbook.

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“I learned to cook with my grandmother, who was a good Viennese baker,” she said at a recent morning in class with Miller and others. “This will be her stories, my stories, and recipes.”

Judith Mudd-Krijgelmans, a Reston resident and retired foreign service officer, has been teaching the class for three years. She began teaching at the Reston Community Center and then was invited to teach at Reston Association as well. She says she found that many seniors loved the idea of creating memoirs, but as with most kinds of writing, the biggest hurdle is just getting started.

“I learned it was an issue of motivating people,” as well as bringing them together, Mudd-Krijgelmans says. “If you meet regularly and keep at it, people will get a story going… Sometimes they don’t know they have it in them.”

Mudd-Krijgelmans has much in common with her student. She is a fellow senior who is writing her memoirs too, along with teaching. She is focusing her story on her career, which spans life and work in nine countries. But to keep everyone on track, including herself, she teaches from a curriculum that includes organization, mapping out a story, creating a timeline, finding objects that remind the writer of various points in time, fleshing out a story, and finally reading it aloud.

“The challenge is how to corral all of that into an interesting story,” Mudd-Krijgelmans says. “But this is the time. For people who’ve moved on in life, you have a whole life to draw on. We need to say, ‘Look at my life. Look at my family. Look at the state of my health. Look what I’ve done.’ We’re not used to saying – I’m a success.”

Proving that to her students by helping them write, “is what I’m here for,” she says. “It’s a really courageous thing for us to tell our stories.”

The current Memoirs class is well underway and ends on May 19. But if you would like information on a future class, contact Reston Association at 703-435-6530.         

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