An Offering

A blog post by Publishing Intern Pam Gainer

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“Ring the bells that still can ring,
forget your perfect offering,
there is a crack, a crack in everything,
that’s how the light gets in.”
—Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

A sunlit moment of presence during a winter walk at Silver Bell Farm in Monson, Massachusetts

What element of my Modern Memoirs publishing internship do I like best so far? I’ve only been here for about a month, but here are a few things I can offer:

I enjoy learning about the different clients and their needs and desires. Each client is unique, and the company works to be flexible and adapt to each one. Some clients are doing their own writing, while others are interviewed and have their stories written in-house. Some want a shorter book, some want a longer book. Books vary in size, and some are softcover, while others are hardcover with leather and gold-foil stamps. There are an infinite number of design possibilities; in the same way, there are an infinite number of human stories.

I was asked to share my writing by contributing posts to the company blog. My blog post about “Beginnings” was shared last month, and I am writing another post about my grandmother and her journals. I appreciate this very much.

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“Here’s a question for you, dear reader: do you know the difference between output and offering?”

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And while this is not something specific to this internship, it has felt great to go into an office and contribute. The last time I worked in an office was at a software development company thirteen years ago. So, this new role isn’t a small thing for me! Most of my professional career has been working for my family. It’s important to be in my MFA program now and to take on work out in the world.

Here’s a question for you, dear reader: do you know the difference between output and offering? I didn’t until recently, when I was researching different types of writing for a class project. As I engage in my internship and contribute what I can, I see how “output” is work completed with the energy of fixing a problem. “Offering” is work completed in flow, with presence. The distinction has me reflecting on my work, my writing, and on the years (a lifetime, really) I’ve spent trying to fix myself.  I’ve prioritized output over offering, and it has left me feeling like something is missing.

Fixing oneself is different from taking care of oneself. In the latter, healthier vein, I’ve been taking Pilates classes for the past three years, and I have the absolute best instructor. She owns the studio and is a beautiful teacher in so many ways. This winter, with the bitter cold here in Massachusetts, a pipe froze, flooding her studio. She had to cancel classes for the week. Today, she told us how glad she was to be back teaching, how much she needed to be back, for herself. And as a drove away, I thought about how her teaching is her offering.

To be able to contribute, to offer something to the world, is life-giving. It’s your energy, it’s your creativity. It’s you. And maybe the person your offering gives the most life to is you.

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This post is slightly adapted from a piece I wrote for my MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at Bay Path University.  To see the original post, as well as more of my writing, visit my Substack, “Pam’s Daybook.”

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Pam Gainer is publishing intern at Modern Memoirs, Inc. in spring 2026

Love Is a Memoir

Hearts, Cupid, and chocolates are all around, and I’m thinking about one of the main reasons people write memoirs and family histories: love. It is an act of love to pour your energy into writing, to delve into your psyche or the past—painful or distant or beautiful or conflicted—and record your memories, knowledge, or family lore. An account of feelings, reflections, or recollections is a gift to your loved ones, a golden gift that only you can give. It’s a window into your soul. It also can provide roots for family members or promote belonging, connection, and understanding among people.

However, writing can take so long, be so tiring, become so tedious. It’s easy to lose interest or momentum. Yet the rewards abound. Memory may not last, but books do.

Looking on the shelves here in our Modern Memoirs library, I can quickly spot titles that quite literally embody love. These are commissioned joint memoirs of couples, and I remember working closely and compassionately with these partners during their book projects. A few examples:

A Love Story: A Memoir—interviews with a family matriarch, augmented by stories and memories from her husband

The Hallam Family—interviews with an elder couple, including a WWII veteran’s war stories and photographs

Pam and Harry—interviews with a dynamic couple centered around family, family business, and community initiatives

Some memoirs include written contributions from family, colleagues, and/or friends:

Kaddishel, A Life Reborn—one man’s Holocaust experience, with extensive interviews of his contemporaries on three continents, conducted in a variety of languages and translated for the book. (Click on book cover or on title to read this open-source digital volume.)

An Unlikely Entrepreneur—narrative by a businessman diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, with additional chapters written by his wife

Conitex Sonoco 35th Anniversary: In Celebration of José Luis Artiga—company history and retirement gift to former founder/CEO, with written tributes from colleagues and family

And then there are the more varied styles of memoir, compilations of authentic journal or diary entries, letters, poems, even notes on index cards:

Walking Together: A Mother and Daughter’s Journey through Aging and Alzheimer’s—imagined letters from daughter to her mother during her final years

“No Excuses” Love, Dad—notes on index cards written by a father and stuffed into his son’s backpack every morning before school

A Grandmother’s Diary—journal writings about raising bilingual grandchildren

Eighteen Letters from a father to his daughter—a father’s letters written, but never sent, to his daughter, from birth until she went off to college when he shared this book with her

Reading Proust to My Mother—memories from childhood through sunset years with a literary mother

All My Love Always, Your Gampy—hundreds of letters from a grandfather to his grandchildren, though they are still too young to read a book!

In every one of these personal books, love shines through in the words of each narrator, in that unique way only seen in writing—with thoughtful attention to memory, detail, phrasing, relationship, and what Wordsworth called “the breathings of your heart.”

Perhaps you’ve thought about writing and not yet jumpstarted it. Perhaps your writing is just sitting on a desktop, idle. Try to get to the next step! Get the book done. Some day, somewhere, some family members or friends will be interested. And I’ll bet they will love it.

Beginnings

A blog post by Publishing Intern Pam Gainer

My internship at Modern Memoirs is a component of my Immersion in Publishing class at Bay Path University. One assignment is to write regular blog posts incorporating our internship experience. Fittingly enough, in our first post for class, we were asked to write about “beginnings.”  Referring to the staff bio I wrote as one of my first tasks at Modern Memoirs, I wrote about authenticity and beginning again, sharing:

“I’m inspired by my boys, as I watch them go out into the world, knowing themselves and following their own unique paths. I see myself doing the same thing, only it’s happening during the second half of life.”

Here is a link to the full blog post, which appears on my Substack, “Pam’s Daybook,” where you can find more of my writing, too.

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Pam Gainer is publishing intern at Modern Memoirs, Inc. in spring 2026

No Longer Viral

Salk Institute entrance

High on a cliff in La Jolla, California sits a marvelous building, the Salk Institute, and if you can ever get yourself there and take a tour, it is well worth it. From the website’s mission statement:

Unlocking the secrets of life itself is the driving force behind the Salk Institute. Our team of world-class, award-winning scientists pushes the boundaries of knowledge in areas such as neuroscience, cancer research, aging, immunobiology, plant biology, computational biology, and more. Founded by Jonas Salk, developer of the first safe and effective polio vaccine, the Institute is an independent, nonprofit research organization and architectural landmark: small by choice, intimate by nature, and fearless in the face of any challenge.

If the founder, mission, research and researchers weren’t astounding enough, the building, designed by renowned architect Louis I. Kahn, will astonish. I’ve visited a few different times and taken the tour, and each time walked away more fascinated than the time before. Given the chance to go back in time and redo my education and career, without a doubt I would become a scientist—that’s how inspired I feel.

If you aren’t or weren’t much aware of polio, it probably means that like me, you were born after 1955 and thus received the vaccine and may never have encountered anyone who’s actually had polio. You can look up for yourself the horrific, widespread effects of the disease. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), by the mid-20th century, polio could be found the world over, killing or debilitating over half a million people every year.

Scientists’ research offices

Remarkably, when Jonas Salk’s IPV vaccine was first introduced in 1955, polio cases saw a dramatic decline, falling from 58,000 to 5,600 by 1957, and finally to just 161 cases in 1961.

Salk recognized that fair access to the vaccine would help end the disease, and consequently he did not profit from sharing the formulation or production processes with the six licensed pharmaceutical companies. In a 1955 interview, Salk was asked who owned the patent for IPV. His reply: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

A true Helios, that Salk.

In 1960 he went on to enlist Louis Kahn in designing the Salk Institute, a residency for scientists embarking on their research. At the entrance of the complex is an infinity pool that extends out to a deep “Pool of Knowledge” surrounded by “Conversation Pits” where people are encouraged to share their ideas, dreams, and findings.

When stepping into this venerable space, one of the first things you see are Salk’s words carved into the Italian marble at your feet:

“Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”

In closing, I offer a few verses written while I was there in 2025:

For Jonas Edward Salk, M.D. (who would be age 111)

You were the brave soldier to plod onward
in the face of tragedy and illness,
hand in hand with a fierce reality,
pushing, pushing to find a piece of an answer
to overcome a relentless tsunami
of a dark disease.

In slaying a beast named Poliomyelitis,
you gave an answer and a hope
to the world ’round
for life itself,
for countless lives to live on and on
for beholden generations.

Built of your vision is the Salk Institute,
a Brutalist castle on a cliff
to welcome dreamers,
the scientists, seekers, and givers—
the humans devoted to that very human thing:
to analyze, to figure, to test and to cure.

This concrete wonder—
marble floor, teak beams, and
a travertine tableau paving the way for dreams—
pours an infinite line of liquid neurons
into pools of knowledge, of science,
and over a precipice into eternity, 
ever flowing forward, rivers of human trial and error,
turning mystery into the known,
while cradled in the universe of the unknown.

You give hope even as you aren’t here to say it.
You give honor to those science-soldiers who follow.
You embrace the world with your open arms
holding the globe in one small cell
or heaved upon your Atlas shoulders.

—Ali de Groot, 2025

All photographs © 2026 Ali de Groot

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Ali de Groot is director of publishing for Modern Memoirs, Inc.