One question a week · Fifty-two stories · One book
The book
A year of stories, bound in cloth.
Every story on its own page, under the question that drew it out, with what your family said back printed in the margins.
One page
What a story looks like in print.
Every week becomes one of these. Nobody lays it out, chooses a font or picks what goes where. It is the same page every time, so fifty-two of them read as one book.
04
Chapter · Family
What did your father let you do around the print shop?
He'd let me ink the rollers on a Saturday, which I thought was the whole job. The press was a Chandler & Price and it made a noise like a train going through the floor — you could hear it from the corner, and I always knew he was working before I turned onto Water Street. He wore an apron that never came clean and he'd hand me one that went round me twice. I was allowed the rollers and the broom and nothing else. Once I put my hand somewhere near the platen and he didn't shout, he just took my wrist and held it up and looked at it, and that was worse than shouting.
From the margins
Ellen · by email
At his retirement party one of the pressmen told me Dad never stopped talking about you. They all knew your name before they'd met you. He just never said any of it to you.
Reactions
Week of April 6 – 12
with Walter, Ruth
This or that
Ford or Chevy? — Jo says Ford.
31
- 1
The question, above the story
Printed exactly as it was asked. In ten years nobody has to guess what they were answering.
- 2
The week it was told
And who was in it: the people they named when they wrote it, not a guess made afterwards.
- 3
One this-or-that
The small either-ors they answered between questions. Ford or Chevy. They print at the foot of the page.
- 4
From the margins
What the family wrote back, in full, under the story it was written about. Photographs they sent print here too.
- 5
Reactions
The taps: one face from the email, no account and nothing to write. They collapse to a single printed line with the names.
The half they don't write.
Anyone who gets a story can write back. The storyteller reads it and decides what stays. What stays goes in the book under that story, name and all.
From the email
A tap
Pick your reaction from the foot of the email. No account, nothing to write, and it still prints with your name.
By reply
A few sentences
Hit reply and write back. We print the whole thing, in your words, under the story.
By reply, or by text
A photograph
Attach one to your reply, or text it in. It goes in the book beside your note, and it says who sent it.
It starts out as one person's stories, and by the end there's a bit of everybody in there.
After the last story
Three chapters that come with the year.
They fill in on their own as the year goes along, and nobody has to remember to do anything about them.
The Weeks Themselves
Check-ins, kept as they happened
The small things asked between questions, in the order they were answered.
A year has weather as well as stories.
The Family Album
Shared along the way, kept as they came
Photographs anyone sent in across the year, printed with who sent them and when.
Most families have a drawer. This is the drawer, emptied out.
The People in This Book
Everyone the stories name
Who they were, their dates where you gave them, and the pages they turn up on.
The page a grandchild goes to first.
The binding
The one part you get to choose.
It's one choice for the whole family, and everything else about the book is already designed.
The Wilson Family
Longtold
Night ink
The Wilson Family
Longtold
Denim
The Wilson Family
Longtold
Clay
The Wilson Family
Longtold
Linen
You don't wait a year to see it.
The book exists from the first story.
Open it any week and it is there: the cloth you chose, the cover, the pages so far, the margins filling in underneath them. Turn to the end and you can see how much of the year is still blank.
Which is the part that keeps people answering. It isn't the reminder. It's seeing how much of the book is still empty.
The year so far
22 told, 30 still to come.