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Published: Jan 28, 2010
Category: Art
J.D. Salinger has died. My appreciation for his work skipped "The Catcher in the Rye" --- I only cared for his short stories. Here's my piece.
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I met Alli Joseph a few years ago, when Plum TV cast us as Katie Couric and Matt Lauer for its coverage of the Hamptons Film Fesitival. Two hours each morning for days upon days, we sat next to one another in our director’s chairs and interviewed moviemakers, screenwriters and actors between sessions of banter with one another. During commercials, we gossiped. When it was over, Alli Joseph had stripped me naked --- I had learned a lot about her, but nothing compared to what she knew about me.
And the thing is, she was such a good interviewer that it took me a while to figure out how much I’d shared.
Later, I looked up her bio and understood. Alli Joseph won a Westinghouse Scholarship at Bronx High School of Science, graduated from Vassar with a degree in psychology and sociology, and worked with bottlenose dolphins in Hawaii. All of which turned out to be good training for stints as an Internet executive, magazine writer (People and many others), television host and producer (CBS and NBC, among others), and author of a book, published by HarperCollins, about Shaolin kung fu.
So I wasn’t surprised when Alli --- savvy investigator, empathetic listener --- told me she had launched Seventh Generation Stories, a celebrate-a-life service that starts with videos and books, but can include digital documentaries, Web sites, scrapbooks, calendars, collages, cookbooks, and quilts.
That’s a lot of range, but then, as I say, Alli Joseph is as much a therapist as a entrepreneur. So her clients include…
-- a 75-year-old grandmother who wanted help in solving a mystery and writing a book about this and other life stories to leave her grandchildren. A relative had died, leaving property to be dispersed. Perhaps, she thought, there were more people involved than the family thought. As she recalled it, her mother and aunt had been separated as children and put in separate orphanages. Later in their childhood, they were reunited. And they had warm relations until their 20s. Then… .another split. What had happened? “She decided to be Inspector Clouseau,” Alli Joseph recalls. “She was willing to open old wounds and find the truth.” And Alli could help turn those discoveries into a pageturner: “Genealogists specialize in the dead,” Joseph says. “I focus on the living.”
-- a son who commissioned Joseph to make a video biography of his mother and other family elders. Along the way, she told Joseph about some traumatic events in her childhood. They didn’t make it into the video --- the client didn’t want the entire family to know what he’d learned. “I always tell clients the truth is a salve,” says Joseph, “but her son wanted a happier set of memories. It was enough for him that he’d gained an insight into some of his mother’s behavior. That's fine with me. I don’t do journalism here. This is novelistic truth --- somewhat sanitized history.”
-- a museum curator who’d spent nine years compiling a 500-page tome about his family. Joseph acted as a producer and helped create the book.
Wedding videos, tributes, documenting a birth, converting a wedding dress to wall art --- Joseph is obsessed with preserving memories in any form the client fancies. There’s a reason: She’s a mother whose daughter will never know her grandmother.
"My mother Barbara, the family historian, was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, just before I found out I was pregnant," she explains. "I spent much of that year desperately trying to capture my mother's thoughts, voice and face on different media before she died just six months later. I felt cheated: my daughter would not have Grandma Bobbie's wonderful stories at her fingertips, and I knew this could have been avoided. It is my greatest regret."
Family and family history are important for another reason. Alli Joseph is part Native American, and she cherishes the tradition of personal history as the raw material of a larger story. The name --- Seventh Generation Stories, she says, “refers to the Native American conservation philosophy whose origins are found in the great Iroquois Confederacy. It suggests that everything we do affects the next seven generations, and thus we should govern ourselves in a manner that will preserve all things for them --- including their historical legacy.”
Alli Joseph works intimately with clients, usually meeting in person before agreeing to take on a project and continuing those meetings, if possible, along the way. “The most important moment is when we look one another in the eye --- that’s when people decide if they like and trust one another,” she says. “And the more I know you, the better. When I write as someone else, it helps to know how they sit, look and dress.”
The cost? Joseph begins relationships with a half hour consultation. From there, pricing is very broad: $850 for a basic video to$30,000 or more. “The cost of a typical project is $6-7,000,” says Joseph, “but I do try my best to work within the client’s budget, if possible.
Clearly, there’s an appetite for this kind of media --- the Association of Personal Historians has seen its membership ranks swell from 50 to 630 in 10 years. I only know one: Alli Joseph. But if I were tempted to have my life documented, I wouldn’t look beyond her.
To read more about Seventh Generation Stories and contact Alli Joseph, click here.