Family Recipe: Banana Bread

When I think of banana bread, I think of my grandparents, Larry and Joyce. Wherever they are--at home or visiting or even with a college care package--the small, moist, brown loaves are sure to make an appearance. Both grandparents make the recipe equally well and the foil is always lovingly wrapped the same way each time. You cannot simply fold it over the bread. Later, I will share the art of the foil wrap.

My grandparents’ trip out to Arizona in my senior year of high school coincided with the week of my knee surgery. I don't like to people to fuss over me when I am ill or injured but it was so wonderful to be pampered with what seemed like an endless supply of the recipe. One of the days I was home from school, my Grandma spent several hours in the kitchen making loaves of Banana Bread and dozens of muffins. Afterwards, we all gorged ourselves, eating the muffins for breakfast or for an afternoon snack and slicing off a chunk of the loaf for a late night treat.

As soon as the Banana Bread is removed from the oven, it fills the kitchen with a light scent of vanilla and banana. That, to me, is the smell of "home sweet home". And though most people would say that baked goods are best fresh out of the oven, my favorite way to eat Banana Bread is cold. Whenever my grandparents have sent baked treats (especially their Banana Bread) I take them out of the package and place them directly into the refrigerator…that is of course, after taking a small first bite. It's good when it's fluffy straight out of the oven, but I absolutely love it when the loaves are stored in the refrigerator because the cold makes the bread dense--and somewhat refreshing, I think. There is nothing like the mouthwatering first cut of a loaf as the butter knife slowly slices through. I have also found that no matter what, whether hot or cold, a slice of Banana Bread spread with some butter is the perfect balm for an especially bad day.

The cover and inner page of The Splettstoeszer Family Cookbook.

When I asked to have a copy of the recipe from my Mom, I discovered it was a multigenerational recipe going back to the Splettstoeszers, family on my Great-Grandpa Harold Karels’ side. In fact, the photocopy of the recipe is right out of the Sploettstoeszer Family Cookbook that was put together upon the death of a family matriarch who loved to cook named Lydia.  To continue her love of cooking and to share her recipes as well as family memories, the Splettstoeszers printed a book and shared it among the extended family. I am no cook, so it would have been a very long time before I found the book on my own among my Mom’s cookbook collection. But I have loved reading through the memories of an old farm kitchen and other family favorites I had not known also originated from Lydia. So I would like to continue her tradition by sharing the Banana Bread recipe.

While another recipe is listed first, my family has always followed Lydia’s Banana Nut Bread Recipe just below it, though the nuts are sometimes left out.

What You Will Need:

¾ Cup Oil

1 ½ Cups Sugar

2 Eggs, Well Beaten

1 Tsp Baking Soda

½ Cup Buttermilk

2 Tsp Vanilla

1 – 1 ½ Cups Mashed Bananas

2 Cups Sifted Flour

¾ Tsp Salt

Directions:

Mix in the order given: oil, sugar, eggs, baking soda, buttermilk, vanilla, bananas, flour and salt. Bake at 350° F. for 1 hour and 35 minutes. Makes 1 large and 1 small loaf.

The Art of the Foil Wrap:

Rip off a sheet of foil long enough to wrap around the loaf and then some. Wrap the loaf lengthwise so that the two edges of the foil meet above the loaf. Press them together then fold one over the other and roll the excess until you reach the loaf. Simply fold the foil roll over the sides of the loaf. This ensures a perfect seal, easy access, and classic packaging of your finished Banana Bread.

Family Resemblance

Left: My uncle and mother. Right: Me in the same dress my mother is wearing on the left.

A shy little girl walks out of the church service. She follows closely behind her parents as they make their way down the church steps, weaving through the crowd. It seems like they stop to talk to every member of the congregation. The little girl doesn’t talk to anyone. Her cousins have gone somewhere else. All the adults talk and laugh. Finally, someone notices the girl standing partially behind her Dad. Her blonde bob complete with thick bangs framing her oval face elicits memories of her mother as a child. Sometimes it is an elderly woman who exclaims with a smile,“Oh my goodness, well you must be little Kim Burandt!” Other times, the little girl hears “I sure know who you belong to. You look just like your mother.” from someone who is probably one of her parents’ friends. She doesn’t reply, only shyly smiling from her partial hiding place. The little girl doesn’t remember any of these people but they all seem to know who she is.

Elementary school portraits. Left: my mother. Right: me. 

By now, years later, it is a running joke that everyone in church will tell the girl she looks like her mother. In fact, if the comment is actually directed at her, there is usually the follow-up comment: “I’m sure you get that all the time.” She does. A few years earlier she might have thought it was annoying. But now, it’s such a familiar occurrence that she keeps a count of how many times she receives the comment—variations on wording don’t matter. When her grandparents reintroduce their grandkids visiting from Arizona, there’s usually a “Little Kim” somewhere in the response. Her cousin shares a knowing smile and a giggle with her every time they hear it.

My mother and I in 2012.

Her family has been returning to this scene for over 15 years now. Everyone is older and fashion has evolved; yet nothing about this scene has really changed. The church congregation crowds the upper and lower lobby as they merrily converse and avoid stepping back out into the snow. Cousins watch over their own kids while the now great-grandparents catch up with neighbors. Her Dad is joking with a former teacher. Her Mom is laughing with a friend, the guy who played the Mayor and her husband in The Music Man, remember him? One of her parents’ friends remarks to another man, “That must be Kim’s oldest. She looks just like her.” It marks the third tally of the night. This year, she only overhears the comments, sometimes from several conversations away.  Three is the 2013 grand total.

When she shares the results, her grandparents, parents, and siblings laugh. Then they realize how small the number is. “You look like your mother” had always been a marker of her growth and connection to her mom as well as a deeper connection to the small town, even though she has never lived there. Now she has seen the phrase in a new light: it also signifies the relationship between her family and the actual people in the town. The people they know have influenced the tally each year. People have moved away, skipped an annual visit, passed away, or simply have not risked the icy roads this Christmas. “You look like your mother” honors a kind of family legacy, which links the familial resemblance with the past and a tight-knit community.

Review: Beginners

Christopher Plummer & Ewan McGregor in The Beginners.

As a Focus Features fan, I first heard of Beginners when it was released back in 2011 but didn't actually see it until recently. I was hooked within the first ten minutes by the second photomontage, which flashed photographs of various objects and events from both 1955 and 2003. I found the film so entertaining in its simplicity and warmth. I smiled and laughed, fell in love with the characters—a definite requisite for anything I watch—and even cried alongside them. But I was as much engaged by the story-telling as the story itself, since Beginners frankly explores cinema as a way to address the problems of blending autobiography and fiction in a personal narrative.

The film follows two transformative threads of Oliver Fields’ life (played by Ewan McGregor): one being the relationship with his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), and the other with his new romantic interest, an actress named Anna (Mélanie Laurent). After Oliver’s mother passed away, Hal reveals he had always been gay and is going to finally embrace that lifestyle wholeheartedly. Oliver must come to terms not only with his father’s busy new social life--and much younger boyfriend--but with Hal’s cancer diagnosis as well. After Hal dies, Oliver experiences the highs and lows of life that come with his romance with Anna even as he copes with the loss of his father.

Beginners has a little bit of everything: drama, comedy, romance, and a foundation in real life. It's common knowledge that writer-director Mike Mills used his own experience with his father, who had also revealed his homosexuality after his wife’s death, as a source for the film. I found Mills’ script completely genuine and believable, even in the sections where Oliver converses with his father's dog. It's clear to the viewer that the dog's responses--presented as subtitles--are happening in Oliver's imagination. Moments like these bring real humanity as well as the sweet balance of comedy to Oliver’s grief.

Mills’ use of multimedia to create a scrapbooked component also sets this film apart from others. Between the two narrative threads, he weaves in graphics like photomontages voiced over by McGregor that contextualize the simultaneity and similarity of the storylines and their place in time. This effect is both existential and personal, moving the film to a deeper level while adding to its entertainment value. 

In addition to Mills’ personal experiences, the photomontage effect really brings the grey area between autobiography and fiction to the forefront. With the film's 2011 release, it is easy to forget that the second thread takes place in 2003, already placing the characters in a kind of period piece, and then even farther back before Hal’s death and in Oliver’s childhood. It was the inclusion of photos from 1955 that reminded me that the film is conceived as a memoir, whether or not it reveals a true-life story. The narratives appear to be told and lived in real time, but, in actuality, as with memoir, reflect a double telling: by Oliver as a character and Mike Mills the writer-director. Everything that we see is subject to their memories and perceptions of events, which I find to be a very interesting play on the way we remember.

The theme of perception also plays out graphically through graffiti that Oliver and his friends spray all over Los Angeles. The lens through which we see our own life events also extends to how we see history around us. Rather than draw something vulgar, Oliver tags contemporary events on the walls, drawing attention to how popular culture and the media impact our perception. Each statement is a marker of a moment in time, and thus an eventual part of history. We often forget that we are not only looking back on history, but are part of it, shaping it, all the time.

I highly recommend Beginners--even if you are not looking for a cinematic exploration of autobiography, memory, and perception, the cast brings a delightful story to life, making this a movie not to be missed.

Watch the trailer below:

Happenings About My Mother

My project has catalyzed a lot of activity surrounding ancestry knowledge, old family photos, and town history. My tech savvy grandparents even emailed me two stories from their iPad. My grandma had thought of two funny stories about my mom as a little girl and wanted to share them in case I could use the stories somehow for the blog. I wanted to share these happenings -- as she calls them -- just as they are since they are so much more meaningful in her own words. I think the stories are also very telling of her joyful spirit and ability to find the positive in any situation.

My mom at the lake several years before The Air Mattress Episode. 1964

The Air Mattress Episode.

On a 4th of July about 45 years ago our immediate family and all four grandparents & other relatives went to enjoy the holiday with a picnic lunch and swimming. It was a very hot day. We went to Pleasant Lake at Annandale. We took sand toys and air mattresses for the kids to float on. The adults were visiting & watching the kids. Kim was on one of the air mattresses when all of a sudden we saw the waves had taken Kim out farther than she should have been. It was too deep for anyone to walk out to her. Luckily we were close to Grandpa Burandt's cousin's lake home. He quickly got his boat. Grandpa Larry went with him. Somehow they attached a rope to mattress & got her back to shore safely & without scaring her too much. We were afraid she would get excited & fall of the mattress. Oh such excitement! There was someone watching over us for sure.               

She would have been closer to this age. This is my mom and my Aunt Kristi.

This is her peanut adventure.

Kim had turned two years old a short time before this happened. It was a Sunday evening and we went to visit Grandpa & Grandma Karels, like we did quite often. We were sitting in the living room visiting. Bruce and Kim were playing. Grandma K. had some Christmas goodies & nuts that she set out on the coffeetable. We were all snacking, Bruce & Kim started running around & the next thing Kim started coughing & choking. We tried to help her but couldn't. We called Dr. Smyth in Lester Prairie & he was not available. We called emergency in Glencoe hospital & told us to bring her there. As soon as we arrived there the nurse & Dr. took her & after a bit they told us they couldn't get out what they thought was peanuts. The Dr. actually made it worse. He told us it was not a big hurry but she would need to go to St. Mary's hospital in Minneapolis. We drove back to Lester Prairie & called the mortician because he used his hearse as an ambulance for emergencies. He would put a red light on top. We were on the way to Minneapolis going down Hwy. 7 and got to about Excelsior when Kim started gasping & choking so of course I got excited, I was holding her. I told him to drive faster. After about a mile he stopped the vehicle because he had forgotten to put the red light on top of it. Then the vehicle didn't want to start.  He did get it started & from then on it got worse. Kim stopped & started breathing several times. When we got to the hospital the staff grabbed her & told us they would be taking her right to surgery because it was just a matter of time before we would have lost her. They were able to get the pieces of peanuts out & she was as happy as a lark. She had to stay overnight and we weren't allowed to stay with her. Her lung had started to collapse & they said that she could have problems in the future with pneumonia but fortunately she didn't.

This would have been right around the time of The Peanut Adventure.
This is my Mom and my Uncle Bruce with their stockings.

The nurses were nuns and wore long dresses so when we went back the next day to get her they told us that Kim would follow them & try to step on their dresses. Kim had just gotten potty trained & with staying in the hospital they put diapers on her so that was the end of going potty. We had to start over but that was the least of it. The moral of the story is do not let kids eat peanuts if they are not sitting still. 

Here are the two rascals from The Peanut Adventure, the previous Christmas.
Pictured are my Uncle Bruce and my Mom.

Family Recipe: Green Wreaths

Celebrating a real Midwestern Christmas means an abundance of assorted baked goods, bars and other lovingly prepared holiday treats. After the meal, whether lunch or dinner, emptied casserole dishes and salads are quickly cleared away to make room on the counters. Overflowing trays and vintage tins filled with layers of cookies between wax paper are brought in from the garage where they have been kept from melting by the winter chill. There are, of course, staples that annually return; several of them being Spritz cookies, melted hugs over pretzels, fudge, Oreo balls, and the very festive Wreaths.

Similar to a Rice Krispie Treat, Wreaths are a simple mixture of marshmallows and cereal formed into small wreath shapes in honor of the holiday décor. But there is nothing simple about the feelings the green circles bring. Wreaths are one of those things for me that instantly make me feel a strong sense of nostalgia, of all the Christmases spent eating these between the meals, church service, and opening of gifts. Practically none of the desserts on the aforementioned trays and tins require a fork or plate. So you will always see someone walking around the house with one or two of the treats in their hands, though they have been told many times to grab a small plate to prevent crumbs. Everyone always ends up with sticky fingers and wreaths are no exception to these instances.

I honestly cannot remember a Christmas without them. Even when my immediate family couldn’t make it out to Minnesota for the winter the one or two times, we still gathered in the kitchen to whip up a batch. Usually several batches of wreaths are made for us in advance since my family gobbles them up on visits without even trying to keep count of how many we have eaten. I think my Dad would agree he is the worst. Except for the intricately shaped Rosettes, my Dad’s favorite Christmas dessert is a green wreath, sometimes two sandwiched together so that they only look like one. My Mom always seems to be asking him how many he’s had once the desserts have been out for a while.

Maren, Grandma Joyce & Grandpa Larry making wreaths circa 1997.

My sister, Maren, is always right behind my Dad in Wreath consumption. Though she also has always loved to participate in the dessert’s preparation. This past Christmas when she and her boyfriend, Alec, were visiting home from Santa Barbara, they whipped up a batch of Wreaths. I arrived home a day or two afterwards once my finals had finished. I was so excited to see the cookie jar full of Wreaths. I had one my first night back, but when I went to grab another the next day, they were already gone. All of them. Alec had been allowed to bring a Wreath back for each of his family members to try but still, there should have been plenty left for me to have another. When the matter came up at dinner that night and everyone shared the number of wreaths they had consumed, the case was closed. I hadn’t stood a chance coming back so late in the game. It just goes to show how irresistible Wreaths are.

To make your own batch of delectable Christmas Wreaths, I have included my Grandparents’ recipe:

What You Will Need:

30 Marshmallows

½ Cup Butter

¼ Tsp Green food coloring

½ Tsp Vanilla Extract

3 ½ Cups Cornflakes Cereal

Directions:

First, melt the butter. Then add all of the marshmallows and stir until they are melted. Next, add the vanilla and food coloring followed by the cornflakes. Stir until the cornflakes are evenly coated in the green mixture.

Grandpa Larry, me, Grandma Joyce, Maren & my brother, William, making wreaths circa 2005.

Be sure to form your wreaths on greased wax paper or foil or you will be left carefully picking off the liners from your Wreaths when you go to eat them. Decorate your Wreaths with red cinnamon candies (or whatever) for a real festive touch. And don’t forget to lick the spoon!

Enjoying the sticky leftovers from the pot.

Document Chronicles: Christian & Henriette Jaekel

I am fortunate to have an incredibly supportive network of relatives, who, upon hearing of my project, have been forwarding memories and whatever familial documents they have in their possession. One such resource is a genealogical booklet of the Christian and Henriette Jaekel Family, which was sent by my grandparents, Larry and Joyce. They are the great grandparents of my grandfather. A team of relatives, the Boettchers, compiled the booklet in 1993 and was able to find many significant historical documents to complement the family tree. I have been absolutely amazed by the document copies. It is one thing to imagine your ancestors emigrating and starting anew in another country but it is certainly another when you can see tangible evidence of their life-changing decision.

My Great-Great-Great-Grandfather, Christian Jaekel, was born in Wentsie, Kries Behrendt Provinz and Koenigreich Preusen, Germany on December 23, 1825. Germany then was not a unified country, but rather a group of independent states, like the Kingdom of Prussia, that were part of a larger area usually referred to as ‘the Germanies’ even during the Holy Roman Empire. According to Meyers Gazetteer of the German Empire from 1912, Wentsie was a noble’s estate of 49 persons in West Prussia. It was 3.5 km from the Berent Railroad Station. I have discovered an old map from 1855 that depicts the Behhrendt Province near the main port of Danzig. 

Behrent is just west of Danzig, which is on the coast of the bay of yellow-outlined West Prussia.
Image courtesy of Reinhold Berg Antique Maps.

Christian’s wife, Henriette Kowalke was born in Old Paleschken, West Prussia, Germany on June 12, 1833. Old Paleschken is now known as the small village of Nowe Polaszki, Poland. Its current population is around 460. This is not much of a change since the 521-person population listed in the 1912 Gazeteer. Another Prussian genealogical researcher discovered Alt Paleschken’s village dates back to 1289 during the Northern Crusades against the pagan Prussians. Teutonic Knights later purchased the land in 1359 but by 1456 the village was royal property.

Alt-Paleschken is to the right of Neu-Paleschken in the upper left corner.
Other similarly small manorial villages can be seen.
Image courtesy of Bill Remus.

View of Nowe Polaszki, Poland today (Point A).
Image courtesy of Google Maps.

Though they lived in different villages, both the Jaekels and the Kowalkes would have been peasant farmers with little to no land of their own and even less to pass on to their descendants. It is easy to understand how Christian and Henreitte Jaekel might have felt at the prospect of new unclaimed territories in America. The Jaekels left no evidence as to why exactly they emigrated, but being free to work their own land would be my guess. Other Germans were known to have immigrated to America due to the potato famine in Germany, draft evasion in the Germanic/Russian territories and religious oppression. Once they had decided to make the journey, the Jaekels would have sold off their possessions to pay for passage as well as to downsize their portable property. Then, they would have needed the requisite “Permit to Emigrate” and passports, which were sometimes combined documents. Personal recommendations from local church officials went far in obtaining these permits. So far as we know, neither a passport nor a permit survives.

However, we do have copies of Christian’s, his son’s (Gustave), and his brother-in-law’s (August Kowalke) Certificates of Renunciation of Citizenship to Germany. The forms clearly state that “it is my bona fide intention to become a Citizen of the United States, and to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity which I in any wise owe…to the Emperor of Germany, Emperor Wilhelm I of whom I have heretofore been a subject.” Gustave’s certificate is below as it is the clearest copy from 1993. Signing and submitting this kind of document must have been an incredible moment for immigrants; it was the final official step from their homeland and embrace of their new life.

Gustave Jaekel's Certificate of Renunciation 1886

Several years later, the Jaekels and the Kowalkes would have been eligible to file their Certificates of Naturalization, a legal affirmation of their new American citizenship. August Kowalke’s (Henriette Jaekel’s brother) copy is dated 1868, just five years after their presumed arrival. Christian Jaekel's is not included in the ancestry booklet. But his son's is. According to the 1790 Naturalization Act, the wife and children of a naturalized citizen are automatically considered naturalized. So, I can only conclude that since Christian's is missing--as is Henriette's--and that his son still went to swear before the Chaska Court over thirty years later in 1897, Christian and Henriette Jaekel never followed through their promise of becoming legal status U.S. citizens. This is definitely an interesting plot-twist, if true.

By 1868, the Jaekels and Kowalkes had been farming on their new homesteads for five years, the requisite time for their land to officially be their own property. Though the certificates would have meant their new legal American nationality, I can only wonder if this paper would have truly felt like an equally large step as the renunciation. Working for five years on American land that I had paid for would certainly have made me feel more American already. Perhaps the reason Christian and Henriette never filed (if our research is correct) is because they did not need to prove they had become Americans. They had cleared and toiled unsettled land for five years. Would a paper have brought them any further validation? Obviously official legal status is extremely important to the foundation of a new settled life, as Gustave and his uncle felt. But I ask myself if this might be where my inherited indifference for any kind of certificate of participation or certain award stems from? While my friends pined over small blue ribbons at Field Day and what have you, I have always been content knowing I had done the best I could and did not feel the need for any kind of recognition. Then again, I have always been very shy and probably never wanted any extra attention. Whatever the case, I happily imagine a large traditional German feast in honor of August Kowalke's (and later Gustave Jaekel's) authenticated naturalization as well as the new life these families had started in Minnesota.

 

August Kowalke's Certificate of Naturalization 1868.

Watch for Part Two of my Document Chronicles series, which covers the Jaekel’s homestead in early Waconia, Carver County, Minnesota.

Review: The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Klinkenborg’s The Rural Life approaches memoir through his collection of seasonal journal entries. These entries reflect the passage of time and seasonal changes brought to his farm over several years. In his opening, Klinkenborg describes how the writer in him pressured him to keep a journal but the farmer in him desired a more pragmatic approach. He not only wanted to capture the essence of rural life and how it felt, but what plantings had been done or how many animals he had at any one time. Journaling in the style he does fulfills his desire to record the everyday pleasures or practical notes of living on a farm.

“It’s no longer the writer in me that wants to keep a journal. It’s the farmer—or rather the son and nephew and grandson of farmers.”

When reflection on the land does spur personal memories, Klinkenborg’s interruptions in exposition to describe his mother’s voice or the age of the universe flow within the entries as if he was meant to speak of them all along. The beauty of his writing is simple and genuine, almost intimate as Klinkenborg shares the minutest details he notes of his land and the life that occupies it. But there is more to the book than a “herd all ones days” as he puts it.

“In America, we’ve learned to locate the meaning of rural life in the past, thereby dismissing it.”

The Rural Life brings the small-town farm back into the present. Klinkenborg makes no official claims against the progression of the modern era. Instead, he reminds the rest of the world of this somewhat hidden life of rural farmers by celebrating the farming tradition he has upheld. It is easy to forget the quiet yet extremely productive day on a farm when you live in the middle of a metropolitan city.  For the duration of the book, the reader is brought face-to-face, sense-to-sense if you will, with the earthy link between a farmer and his land not as he is in the past but in the same present as the reader.

“A conscientious journal keeper is really the natural historian of his own life.”

I thoroughly enjoyed my reading experience. Having spent much of my childhood visiting family in rural Minnesota, the summer and winter months felt as though they had been plucked from my own memory. From the first page I found a strong sense of kinship to Klinkenborg and his nostalgia as well as his relationship to the land. The progression into the other months enveloped me in the spring and fall on his farm with such effortless yet reverential descriptions of the landscape. I could clearly see what Klinkenborg was seeing when he was writing without him ever becoming too poetic or metaphorical. Nothing felt forced in his writing, even when he sporadically brought up his personal memories. Reading was more akin to sitting next to Klinkenborg and hearing him speak over a warm mug of coffee. His writing is a new model of how I am trying to approach my own accounts of rural land and memories. I want to reach that kind of level of naturalness that he achieves.

“A journal always conceals vastly more than it reveals. It’s a poor substitute for memory, and memory is what I would like to nourish.”

Klinkenborg’s writing is delightful to read, especially when he connects the scenes outside his door to his family memories. There is warmth to his descriptions indicating his genuine appreciation for what nature gives his farm. Anyone interested in a location-focused memoir will find The Rural Life enjoyable. But anyone with firsthand experience of northern rural life on or near farmland will feel right at home in Klinkenborg’s accounts.

“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”

 -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Here it goes, my first blog post! I find this experience incredibly daunting yet exciting. As I mentioned in my About Me blurb over to the right, I started this blog as a way to document my journey discovering who I am and how I have been shaped by my family. It is a creative means of approaching my senior capstone requirement for my interdisciplinary major, Narrative Studies. The overall project is best explained in the description I wrote for the Independent Study Contract, which you will find below:

We, as thinking beings, are often confronted by age old questions like “who am I?”, “where do I come from?” and “how have my life experiences shaped who I have become?” As a young woman in my 20s, I have felt an increased pressure to answer these questions as I navigate undergraduate education, career paths, and professional and social relationships. I journal, but that reflects on my own personal thoughts and choices. People are an amazingly complex combination of their original experiences and the influences of their environments and genes. We are products of all of these things and more. If I want to answer these nagging questions on a deeper level and tell a good story, I need to look not just to my feelings and personal experiences, but to my history and the literature of creative nonfiction.  

For my creative project, I propose the use of memoir and personal essay in a blog format to document and examine this journey. While these writing styles will serve on an intrapersonal level, they are also a means by which to contextualize my experience and to create and understand a larger narrative. My goal is to accomplish the transformation from oral storytelling to a written account. In a way, personal essay and memoir can both create and preserve a familial oral tradition. These styles also allow for a closer study and shaping of story arcs that occur in real, everyday life.

I chose the blog format because it is an interesting and proven means of sharing life stories. It will be the physical adaptation and manifestation of the modern storytelling and sharing tradition. But on a more personally significant level, other members of my family will be able to access what I’ve shared on the blog.

This project was inspired by several sources. First and foremost, I have to credit my roommate, Selby, for changing my original project idea to something along the lines of family history and memory. I had no idea I so often went into anecdotes about visiting family in Minnesota and included such sensory details about the feeling of being out on the lake or flying over a snowing Minneapolis.

Several years ago, my Dad's sister, Gloria, put together several genealogical scrapbooks about my father's side of the family. She had extensively researched up to our German immigrant ancestors. But the books are beautiful. Not only had she included and scrapbooked her research, Aunt Gloria had collected photos and handwritten memories from all of us to also paste in the books. They are a great resource and memory bank that I always gravitate towards when I visit my Grandma Doris. I frequently wished I could pause school just so I could further my aunt's research or do the same kind of in-depth and personal project for my mom's side of the family. 

Ever since my freshman year of college when I sat in the back of my Russian Music & Literature class, waiting for the day to begin and googled my own name, I have been following a distant relative's blog. She is a writer, photographer and poet still living in Minnesota near the very small farm town where my dad's side, the Kletschers, have lived for generations upon generations. Her blog beautifully celebrates life on the prairie today, covering events, the determination of small towns, and the beauty the prairie supplies even when in the middle of one of the coldest and snowiest winters like this one. Sometimes she covers her family (relations I've never met before) and weaves their stories into the larger thematic context of her Minnesota Prairie Roots. Her intimate writing and storytelling as well as connection between present and past are things I would like to aim towards with this blog project.

Lastly, I have been inspired by the TLC show "Who Do You Think You Are?", which is based on the eponymous long-running UK show. Each episode follows a celebrity as they research a thread in their ancestry, usually leading them across the U.S. to various historical societies and sites. While the search is based on an innocent question, it always leads to an extraordinary discovery in the celeb's ancestry. Zooey Deschanel wanted to look into the strong women who came before her and found her family was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Jim Parsons was interested in artists in the family which led him all the way to France where he discovered one of the premier architects and revolutionary intellectuals of the Royal Academy. I don't expect to find anything as "grand" as Deschanel or Parsons but I do love the idea of documenting the journey and discovering more about myself from the link between past and present.