It’s one thing to tell someone’s story. It’s another to channel their voice.
When Elmira memoirist Stephanie Joan Donkers set out to tell the story of her mother Annie, she wanted to make the tale of immigration, war and hardship as immediate and compelling as possible – which eventually led to her adopting a first-person narration, constructed from a scaffolding of family interviews and historical research.
“I decided to draw people into the story and to tell it through her eyes. I had always heard the stories from her growing up, so a lot of the information is from her. I just had to walk in her shoes for a while and experience the story along with her,” she told The Observer.
