Words + Photos Always

Words + photos have long been my love.

Sometimes the photos are on the walls (framed or unframed), sometimes they are in albums (slipped inside sleeves or crafted alongside other fun things), sometimes they are in photobooks, sometimes they are tucked in a drawer at my bedside table + or tapped to my bathroom mirror, sometimes they live on my computer, sometimes they get shared here on this platform, sometimes they live in boxes under my eaves where I store things from many years ago.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions this past week about what my memory keeping plans are for 2023.

My plan is to simply keep telling stories.

Sometimes it will be in a notebook (like the upcoming Pieces Of Play), sometimes it will be using a full page photo as the base and adding words + little details that support the story I’m telling, sometimes it will be inside the pockets of a page protector, sometimes it will be in a journal/on my computer without any photos, sometimes it will be a highly crafted interactive scrapbook layout using stuff from one of our collections or subscriptions, sometimes it will be responding to simple prompts, sometimes it will have one photo + other times it will be a collection of a bunch of smaller photos.

Sometimes the words will be telling the story of something in my childhood, sometimes it will be about this moment + other times it will be about the recent past, sometimes it will be a story about what I see one of my kids experiencing (from my perspective because that’s the only way I can tell a story), sometimes the words will focus on a challenge I’m facing and other times it will celebrate how far we have all come, sometimes it will be in the form of a letter to myself that holds things I want to remember in the future, sometimes there will be a lot of words + other times it will be just a few.

I say over + over again that there is no right way to be the keeper of our memories. That is the true beauty of this experience: it doesn’t have to be the same all the time and rather than trying to put ourselves into a specific box we can embrace all the pieces as a part of our overall adventure in memory keeping.

I feel really excited about this upcoming year of storytelling + am looking forward to telling them alongside so many of you in this wonderful community.