Your Legacy - Your Memoir
Writing Legacy Memoirs and Histories
Do you need an experienced writer to GHOSTWRITE:
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Your memoir?
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Your company's history?
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Your family history?
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Or your community’s history?
What is your story that deserves to be told?
Desert Indian Woman: Stories andDreams
Manuel and Neff, University of Arizona Press, 2001
Based upon original ethnographic research and interviews, the life history of Native American Frances Manuel is part ghost-written and part experimental storytelling, a truly collaborative work where oral tradition becomes literature and the writer/editor fades into the background.
Frances didn’t write. But it was her book, written in her voice. Preparation for writing Desert Indian Woman involved in-depth exploration of creative writing techniques applied to capturing the nuances of personhood, culture, philosophy and values, and the personal significance of leaving a legacy for those to come. The book is currently being used in Native American Literature classes throughout the country, and Frances has received numerous awards as a result of the book’s publication.
Preparation for writing Frances' memoir involved in-depth exploration of creative writing techniques applied to capturing the nuances of personhood, culture, philosophy and values, and the personal significance of leaving a legacy for those to come.
Reviews:
“Basket weaver, storyteller, and tribal elder, Frances Manuel is a living preserver of Tohono O’odham culture. Speaking in her own words from the heart of the Arizona desert, she now shares the story of her life. She tells of O’odham culture and society, and of the fortunes and misfortunes of Native Americans in the southwestern borderlands over the past century...Throughout the book, Deborah captures the rhythms of Frances’s narrative style, conveying the connectedness of her dreams, songs, and legends with everyday life, bringing images and people from faraway times and places into the present.”
—UA Press
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"From growing up in a mesquite brush home to attendance at American boarding school, exposure to Mexican culture, time in the barrios before returning to the reservation, and many more incidents, Manuel relates her story with wit and perspective."
—Publishers Weekly
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“Anthropologist Deborah Neff avoids analyzing Frances's words or "subsuming them beneath mine" (205). Neff describes the challenge of retaining "Frances's individual style of speaking while editing for ease of readability for a primarily English-speaking audience." (205). Knowing the impact of form and content on meaning, Neff employs "a poetic format in section and chapter headings to evoke the original oral content" (205). She avoids the old style of anthropological writing that emphasizes analysis and comparison, presenting Frances's personal experiences as reflection rather than as "data" to "explain" Frances's culture (227). Herein lies a major strength of the book. By saying what Frances wants to say, instead of what the anthropologist would have her reveal about her culture, Desert Indian Woman opens a window on the perspective of an individual looking back on the course of her life as circumstances forced her to enter the Anglo-American world. …”
—Trudy Griffin-Pierce, Western Folklore
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History and Culture
Small Town History: Performance in America’s Little Switzerland: New Glarus Wilhelm Tell
Several decades ago, I lived and worked in New Glarus, Wisconsin, where I researched and published the history of a small immigrant town and its annual presentation of an outdoor theater performance of Wilhelm Tell.
The resulting book is being used in the town’s tourism industry to promote the summer festival and the unique history of the community.
Video Scripts, PBS Series, “The Border”
I researched and wrote video scripts for a KUAT-TV documentary series about native people living in the Sonoran Desert along the US-Mexico border, caught up in the drug wars and immigration enforcement on their ancestral lands. Hector Gonzalez, the documentary’s Executive Producer, reported: “Deborah helped us craft compelling narratives that were factual, culturally sensitive and evocative. These stories of real people living and dying on land that had become a battleground brought context and perspective to complex and heated issues and helped inform the national debate.”
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