Rachel’s Story:

My first exposure to family history: papers in typewriter script, a faint smell of dust, the sound of my fingers click-clacking as I transcribed yellowed documents onto the Dell computer for my grandmother.

Grandma Arlene, our family matriarch, had a basement filled with three-ring binders, memory books, genealogy charts, newspaper clippings, and photo albums. As an eighth-generation Utahan, I grew up with a marrow-deep sense of the importance of knowing my ancestors. And yet, at eleven years old, I understood little of the gravity behind my grandmother’s efforts. I squinted at the fading cursive, collected my $1 per page, and the scrawl remained static words fixed to a faraway history. I did not yet understand the spark that brings that history to life.

Not until earning an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, where I wrote my first book—a memoir—did I start to understand how those stories, not merely histories, shaped me as a person. I revisited those events and people I’d read about so long ago. Beyond the dates and static facts, I came across vivid details, unexpected narrative breaks, and fun surprises that turned these figures from my long-ago past and present into complex, human beings. They became people I recognized inside myself.

Twenty years after sitting among the boxes, files, and mildewed books, I’m now an editor, teacher, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Like Grandma Arlene, I have come to see myself as a memory keeper, but of a different variety—one with a bit less dust. I’ve moved beyond transcription and into translation, discovering the shape, the deeply human parts, and the engaging details that make up a life. All this effort, I believe, makes these important memories more accessible.

Nothing brings me more joy than carving stories out of history, enlivening the characters hiding in plain view.