What's in a memoir? There are many answers and probably none are wrong. The fact is, the memoir is inspirational. It's motivational, instructive, cathartic, healing, cleansing. It's one person's story. It's a collective message. It . . .

What's in a memoir? There are many answers and probably none are wrong. The fact is, the memoir is inspirational. It's motivational, instructive, cathartic, healing, cleansing. It's one person's story. It's a collective message. It can explain a life or define a generation. On one extreme it's all text. At the other end of the spectrum it is the scrapbook. Most memoirs fall somewhere in between, combining words and pictures.

Matilda Butler and I began to play with the memoir genre in our book Rosie's Daughters, which is the collective memoir of women born during WWII. In truth, gathering the stories was the easiest part of creating this book. Presenting these stories so as to create a meaningful message and designing a book that showed off the individual memoirs most effectively was our greatest challenge. We spent more than a year just trying to figure out how to present our story to its best advantage. The resulting book contains individual memoirs "above the line"--an artificial horizon we created for each page. "Below the line" is our running text explaining the collective stories and the watershed events in women's lives--education, marriage, family, work, spiritual lives, etc.

In addition, the book contains quotes from famous Rosie's Daughters side by side with the memories of the more than 100 women Matilda interviewed. We include iconic graphics that define the decades and a timeline that runs along the bottom of each page.

With so much going on, one might think the book would look like a mishmash of content. Well, that's where a good designer comes in handy. Rees Maxwell took quotes, narrative text, memoir blurbs, timeline and graphics and pulled them together effectively. We'd like this group to be a discussion of all elements of the memoir...words, graphics, and design. We'd like to converse with other writers to determine the possibilities as well as the limitations (are there any) of the memoir.

We believe that Rosie's Daughters is helping to expand the definition of a memoir. And we suspect we are not alone in pushing the envelope on this popular and versatile genre. We'd like to engage in conversation with others who are interested in exploring the memoir.