Duane Roen
It's no secret that one of my greatest passions in life is family history and writing about life experiences. It all started when my Grandma Roen showed me the Norwegian family Bible when I was in my mid-teens. She opened the cover to reveal the name of Grandpa Roen, along with the names of his siblings and parents, their dates of birth, and my great-grandparents' marriage date. I was instantly hooked, and I've been doing research ever since.
With a burning curiosity about my ancestors and their lives, I was driven to follow my passion through writing to develop my workshops. I have conducted roughly 1200 family history/life writing workshops in the last 20 years, and I have written with the participants at every one of them. Workshop sizes range from 1 to 800 participants.
One of my passions is teaching writing, which I have been doing for over five decades, most recently at Arizona State University. One of the principles that I learned early on is that everyone can learn to write effectively and that there is always something new to learn. I’ve been writing for nearly seven decades and teaching writing for more than five, and I’m still learning.
Anyone who has done much family research has collected many names, dates, and places. However, they usually have collected relatively few stories. When my wife Maureen and I realized that, we became determined to leave many stories for future generations of our family. On the day our son Nick was born in 1978, we started a daily family journal and have written in it every day since then. We are now approaching 21,000 pages of journal entries full of stories about our family, as well as some events in the world. Reading an entry from forty-five years ago is like watching a video of what happened that day - all the memories come flooding back. We hope that these stories will continue to be cherished and passed down through generations, preserving our family's legacy.
Because I am committed to helping others have their family memories come flooding back, I have developed more than eighty workshops that generate memories about a wide range of life experiences with family. Some of those topics include family and food, family photos, heirlooms, holidays, joyous moments, a conversation with an ancestor, family names, gratitude, childhood toys, family lore, humor, love, and dozens more.