About Speak Memories
For 25 years, Speak Memories has helped clients tell their stories…and a whole lot more
Since 1996, Robin Fowler has worked with individuals, families, and organizations to create and complete remarkable memoirs. She has provided editing assistance to many writers. She has offered vision to those starting out on a writing journey. She has coached novice personal historians in the art of project planning and business development. She has spread her passion for memoirs as invaluable legacies for generations to come. In 2020, Speak Memories’ focus shifted to provide a narrower selection of services, including Coaching, Interviewing, Editing, and Project Management.
Snapshots of Selected Speak Memories Projects
Corporate History
A large, national company based in Richmond, B.C. commissioned Speak Memories to interview current and past executives and write an anecdotal book that explores the many stories and situations behind its growth over fifty years. The completed book served as an inspiration to employees and selected clients.
Retirement Gift
Speak Memories researched and wrote the life history of a prominent Canadian businessman. The gift, announced on our client's 75th birthday, was an intimate look at this man's business and family, involving numerous interviews with friends, relatives, and business associates.
Family Courage
A Vancouver family contracted Speak Memories to document the stories of their family's oldest living relatives, many of whom survived and escaped the Holocaust in Europe and came to Canada to create a new life. This vanishing history was written with great attention to its social and political context, and is now housed in a stunning book designed by Linda Parke, with hundreds of photos and archival images, as an important legacy for grandchildren and future generations.
Personal Gift
In honour of his wife's birthday, a Vancouver executive contracted Speak Memories to prepare a biography in time for a surprise celebration. Through interviews with a host of friends and relatives in eastern Canada and on the West Coast, this celebratory book documents the first part of an exciting and inspiring life. Specific themes are woven into seven chapters containing over 80 photographs that complement the stories and tributes described in this unique gift.
Family Letters
Speak Memories coordinated and produced an anthology of open letters sent by an esteemed Canadian lawyer to his many grandchildren. The hardbound book included long-lost family photographs, a dedication, and additional letters from this man's many admirers.
War History
A plastic surgeon recounted his many years of battlefield experience providing immediate relief to soldiers and civilians during wartime, from Europe in WWII, to Vietnam, Jordan, and other global hotspots. Covering highly personal anecdotes, this very private Speak Memories book has been written, designed and distributed to immediate family members only.
Nine Decades
A family of five siblings went in search of a meaningful gift for their father’s ninetieth birthday. They found such a gift in a process of interviewing through Speak Memories that collected their father’s stories and translated them into a professionally written manuscript. This book holds an invaluable permanent record of an inspiring life, well lived and much admired.
War Heroes
A family from eastern Canada contacted Speak Memories with a request that their mother’s stories be recorded and preserved. This remarkable woman and her late husband survived the Second World War after working as agents behind enemy lines. Speak Memories wrote a manuscript that tells their story.
Sixty Years of Marriage
A healthy and vital couple living on the B.C. coast asked Speak Memories to help them document their individual and joint stories in time to celebrate their sixtieth anniversary. Imbued with a positive spirit that has taken them through six decades together, this unusual pair wished to have a permanent record of their adventures and their wisdom so that their grandchildren could carry these stories forward. The manuscript is now a beautiful hardbound book, replete with scanned photographs – one for each family member.
A Russian Heritage
A mother’s important birthday prompted a Vancouver physician to invite Speak Memories to help celebrate by conducting a workshop at her mother’s birthday party with close friends. At this event, Speak Memories introduced the concept and process of recording personal histories. Since that time, hours of interviews have been transcribed and edited to provide the family with a wealth of wisdom from a woman whose roots in Russia and childhood in Shanghai, China speak of a time in history that has completely disappeared. Now in possession of a rich treasury of recorded stories, this woman and her family plan to write a novel based on her experiences.
A Mother’s Legacy
An executive from Montreal contracted Speak Memories to record and write the life story of his aging mother, a story now housed in a large book. This woman recounted vivid memories from her childhood in southwestern Ontario, filling in details about the life of her late husband so that his story will also live on. The book contains a trove of photographs, artwork and invaluable information about several generations of this family in an era that is slowly fading from the collective memory of rural Canada.
A Promise Fulfilled
A daughter from Victoria promised herself that she would honour her aging parents through the documentation of their individual and joint stories before it was too late. In 2005, this promise came to fruition when she contracted Speak Memories in partnership with Vera Rosenbluth of Links & Legacies to create a beautiful book containing an exciting story of family, hard work and public service.
A Narrow Escape
A Vancouver businessman wanted to know more about the details of his 91 year-old mother’s story and contracted Speak Memories to interview her until the tales had been told. This project chronicles childhood memories in Europe and this woman’s escape from her homeland, and her brave journey with her husband through Italy and France before arriving at Ellis Island weeks after the Nazi invasion of France.
An Intellectual Life
A prominent retired psychoanalyst and professor asked Speak Memories for help in the documentation of her life stories. While she planned to write her own story, she wanted another party to elicit the details through a lengthy interviewing process completed in 2007. Unfortunately, this wonderful woman died before she had a chance to write her memoir, but her voice and her stories are forever captured on those digital recordings.
Growing up on the Prairies
A Saskatchewan man contacted Speak Memories to ask for his mother’s story to be recorded in Vancouver, with a view to creating a book for the family to remember. The documentation of tales of dust storms in the “Dirty Thirties,” raising seven children and running a family business is now complete.
A Family Gift
Four siblings gathered their resources to contract Speak Memories to document the life story of their father whose memory is beginning to fail. Interviews are under way with a view to creating a first-person narrative combined with photographs so that these stories are always remembered.
A Posthumous Honour
The wife of a prominent and adventure-loving West Coast businessman approached Speak Memories to compile a story about her late husband who died many years ago. This impressive book uncovers stories about this remarkable man through interviews with friends and family and by researching his rich archive of letters, speeches and photographs.
Celebrating a Philanthropic Life
A prominent Ontario family approached Speak Memories in 2011 to begin the process of working with their celebrated father to create a personal memoir to complement a professional biography written a decade ago.
A Global Family
Three sisters and their brother-in-law celebrated the life story of their late father and mother whose travels from the Middle East to India to Japan and on to Bangkok made for a fascinating life of international trade and an overriding mission to find a safe haven for their large family. The resulting book, designed beautifully by Linda Parke, has been distributed to over fifty family members and friends across the globe.
Too Short a Life
Two young sisters lost their mother early to cancer. As new mothers themselves, they wished to memorialize their own mother and the magic she wielded in their lives by creating a book filled with memories and photographs from family and friends. Speak Memories conducted many interviews for this project and carefully edited and compiled these in multiple chapters that honour a remarkable woman.
Coaching a Spiritual Memoir
With the coaching assistance of Speak Memories, a Vancouver woman wrote her own memoir as a seeker to pass along to her children and grandchildren. A deep, thoughtful and unique vision is now housed in a colourful and enchanting book that will provide a legacy of wisdom to her family for years to come.
Hinge of Fate
As an adventurous sixteen-year old boy in Scotland, this client answered an ad for young men interested in working for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Canadian Arctic. He never looked back and tells the story of his life in this book for his family.
Like a River
A well-known performer contracted with Speak Memories to complete a manuscript about his exciting life in the American south, New York City and Canada’s west coast. Working with twenty-five hours of interviews conducted by another personal historian in 2005, a manuscript was written that covers important historical issues concerning racism and social justice.
