The Storymatic
Storymatic Rememory
You know how Storymatic helps you create stories out of thin air? Rememory helps you access stories you already have— your memories.
- 230 cards to prompt memories, stories, and conversation. There are 25 Season cards that orient you to a time frame, 25 Generation cards that help you focus you on a person, and 180 Prompt cards that lead you into a memory.
- Includes suggestions for using by yourself, with friends, family, colleagues, and people you’d like to know better.
- Easy, fun creative tool for writers, classes, and homeschool– as well as an easy, fun non-competitive game.
- Excellent prompt for poetry, memoir, personal essay, and memory-based art.
- A nice gift for anyone who cares about the stories we all carry around inside us.
- Parents, teachers, and therapists: Rememory can help with sharing (and comparing!) family history, as well as helping with conversation and listening skills.
- Performers: Rememory is a great tool for developing characters and exploring backstory.
- Made in USA and ships from beautiful Vermont.
Ages 13 and up. It helps if you have enough years to reflect back a little ways. Younger than 13 is fine too, especially if you like hearing the older folks tell stories about their lives.
Rememory is deceptively simple.
Take a breath, draw three cards, and remember. Yes, it's really that straightforward. But of course, the country of memory is a complicated place! You can look at each card as you pick them, or look at them all at the same time. Each way feels a little different. The first way funnels you into a memory, and the second way lets memory sweep across you.
There are three kinds of cards:
Generation cards are slate-colored and orient you to whose life you're thinking about. Don't know much about the person? That's okay. Let yourself wonder. Give yourself permission to imagine.
Season cards are coffee-colored and orient you to seasons of life. "Spring" can mean April or May, but it can also mean youth, the springtime of life. Likewise, "Summer" can mean August, or it can mean the summer of your life. You will find other "seasons" as well. We spend years and years in these seasons.
Prompt cards are ruby-colored. By evoking a person and a season, the slate and coffee cards lead you to the door of memory. Ruby cards open the door.
It's okay if what you remember feels small. Small is big. Even small memories can illuminate the great themes of our lives.
Think of all the poems, paintings, and songs based on memories. Songwriter Helen Hummel and visual and installation artist Lisa Urban are two talented artists who work with Rememory to turn memories into art.
Songwriter and animator Helen Hummel used Rememory and Storymatic to jumpstart new songs and reimagine unfinished ones for her album Many Waters. Helen says that using prompts helps to "remove some pressure I put on myself as a writer and get me past the initial stages where I often get snagged."
Painter, teacher, and knitting-artist Lisa Urban used Rememory to write a memory a day, and then she turned these memories into beautiful and unique knitted sculptures.
She then put lights into each of the one-of-a-kind memories so they were "illumin-knitted" and hung them in a narrow space where you could not help but be confronted by them. Her written memories lined the walls for reference. She writes:
Think about the idea of writing your memories and then working with yarn to shape those words into three-dimensional, luminous forms that begin to have their own language and their own reality. Imagine what it's like to touch and hold your memories at the same time as you shape them, and to literally feel your joys and sorrows flow across your fingers. Lisa's project has a lot to say about how we shape and are shaped by memories.
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