Reflections on My "Material Memories"

Editor’s Note: In January, StoryCenter began offering a new workshop called Material Memory Storytelling. Below, our board member member Nina Shapiro-Perl shares her experience of the first-ever session.

By Nina Shapiro-Perl

I have worn a hammered Mexican silver ring embedded with a tiny ancient turquoise on my hand for fifty years. It belonged to my great Aunt Fanny, and I remember seeing its odd beauty on her hand when I was ten years old. Fanny was an artist, a puppeteer, and an author– living an unconventional life in a family bound by convention. Without her ever knowing it, Fanny passed on to me the possibility of living a creative life in a way I had never really understood– until recently.

I have long been aware of the power of objects to store memory within them. In fact, I taught documentary storytelling for eight years, encouraging film students to use objects, like passports and photographs, or a piece of of clothing, to spark memories about transformative moments in their lives and create digital stories. And, I directed a documentary about a Holocaust survivor and artist who poured her harrowing memories of survival as a  Jewish farm girl in Poland, into an astonishing series of thirty six wall-sized fabric collages with complex embroidery, to tell her story. A tour de force of traumatic memories poured into art of great beauty.

So it was with curiosity and excitement that I signed up for a new workshop at StoryCenter called “Material Memory Storytelling,” to gather new skills and ideas.

Developed and taught by StoryCenter’s Artist in Residence Parul Wadhwa, originator of a unique “material memory” concept in immersive (virtual reality, or “VR”) filmmaking, along with skilled StoryCenter facilitator Amy Hill, the workshop met in three, two-hour sessions in January.  Through Zoom, fifteen strangers came together from across the U.S., Canada, and Scotland, to share stories centered around a cherished object of each participant’s choice. Through a Story Circle process, the workshop helped us “excavate emotional and intellectual associations” that we carry with cherished material objects, and, with assistance from Parul, Amy, and each other, “create a polished written piece documenting precious memories.” And so it flowed: a mother’s glass jar filled with colored buttons that one woman played with as a child, ordering them by shape and color in ways that led to her adult work in design; a hair ribbon cut from a mother’s housecoat that floated through time and space from slavery to the present; a quirky label-maker from the 1980’s that carried a story of identity … And mine, a watercolor of my great Aunt Fanny in her early 30’s, painted 100 years ago by her husband, my great uncle, Amos Engle, when they lived in San Francisco.

I had taken great interest in the gorgeous watercolors of the Bay Area that Amos Engle painted before I ever dreamed of moving here. And it is through his 100-year-old eyes, that I find myself seeing the landscapes of my new home– the beaches, the coasts, the hills, the Sierra Nevada mountains. But my most treasured of his paintings is the one of Fanny, his lover, his wife, his muse.

I thought I knew this painting and why it meant something special to me. But through Parul’s guidance in immersing myself in the object, I got to understand its significance even more. Its size and shape and color. My relationship with Fanny and Amos, and the meaning they held for me, unbeknownst to them, in the past, and now. The personal and historical period associated with the painting, and the social environment shaping my own life. I held the painting in my hands and studied it, and then I wrote: 

Her heart-shaped face, framed by a brimmed black gaucho.

Her dark solemn eyes, the rose blush creeping up her cheeks.

Her full bosom draped in black silk.  A tiered brown skirt falling to her calf.

Her legs casually crossed, with small-pointed shoes.

Thin pale arms and tiny wrists settled on the chair.

Her strength and fragility. Her gaze looking out, toward something …

Not long after completing this portrait, Amos Engle died suddenly when a surgical procedure went terribly wrong. His and Fanny’s life together ended abruptly. Brokenhearted, she returned to her family back in New York at the age of 34. She went on to live a rich, long life, becoming a romance writer, a puppeteer, and the author of famous cookbook still in print.

But the lives she and Amos lived and the beauty they shared for a few short years, live on for me. I am now the age of Fanny when she died, with grandchildren of my own. I think about what I will leave them. Through this beautiful storytelling process, I realized why I have worn Fanny’s ring all these years: because she inspired in me the possibility of living a different life, a creative life. And to remind myself that how we live, has the power to live on.

Please join us to create your own object-based story! Register now for an upcoming session of Material Memory Storytelling.