A Sample of Life Stories
When Joyce Wood needs a topic for her collection of life stories, she often opens a scrapbook and peruses old photos.
Looking at a yellowing, mouse-chewed photo I’d taken of Lake Tanganyika (in Burundi) brought back memories of the genocide soon to come. Then I remembered how the crocs used to eat people bathing in the lake at night. Dozens of story lines came to me just from gazing at that one photo.
When she found an old photo of herself standing in front of the Kremlin, in Moscow, she went to work. A week later she had crafted a life story about surviving winter days cold enough to freeze urine in midstream.
