A Tell Me Again sample
A Working Life
Walter “Walt” Nowak is an example, not a customer. We’ve written him to show you what the book does, because we’d rather do that than describe it.
Born 1940, Hamtramck, Michigan · thirty-four years on the line · commissioned by his son
The same question, four ways
This is what changes between the four options; the story stays his.
Prompt & Print
$49 · you receive the book
“What was your first job, and what did it teach you?”
His son chose the questions. What Walt does with the page is up to Walt.
Guided Completion
$195 · he writes, you bind
“What was your first job, and what did it teach you?”
“Sweeping at Dodge Main. 1957, I was 16. My dad got me on. He was on the line 31 yrs. Never said it was a good job. Said it was steady.”
Shorter than he’d say it out loud — most people write about a third of what they’d tell you. His hand on the page is the thing the family keeps.
Full Interview
$595 · two conversations, 120 minutes
“What was your first job, and what did it teach you?”
“Sweeping at Dodge Main, sixteen years old, summer of ’57. My father got me on. He worked that line thirty-one years and he never once told me the job was good — he told me it was steady, and that was a different word. He meant it to be. I swept the aisle between two lines for eleven weeks, and what I learned had nothing to do with sweeping. The men who lasted were the ones who talked. The quiet ones went home angry.”
The same memory, three times the length, and the ending only arrives because someone was sitting there when he got to it.
The Written Story
$1,595 · three conversations · the only option that reads as a story
Walt was sixteen in the summer of 1957 when his father got him on at Dodge Main, sweeping the aisle between two lines. His father had worked that line for thirty-one years and had never once called the job good. He called it steady. Walt understood, even then, that the two words had been carefully kept apart.
He swept for eleven weeks. What he took away had nothing to do with sweeping: the men who lasted were the ones who talked, and the quiet ones went home angry.
He might have arrived at that on his own, because the floor made talkers of people whether they intended it or not. It was loud enough that you read faces instead of listening — you watched a man’s mouth and got most of it — and it smelled of cutting oil and cigarettes. In February the doors at the east end came open and the cold came in at knee height and stayed there all shift.
He worked in that noise, in one plant or another, for thirty-four years. Three more than his father. He has never once mentioned that, and it is not clear he has ever counted.
The cold at knee height came from a different question — “what was the place you worked like?” — asked on the second conversation. In a question-and-answer book those two memories sit four pages apart and neither one explains the other.
More Samples
Four other lives, the same set of questions.
- A Courtship — Peggy Whitfield, married in 1959.
- A Childhood in Another Country — Beverley Clarke, Jamaica to Birmingham.
- Two Languages, a Grandson Asking — Rafael Villalobos, Guatemala to Houston.
- What If Someone Doesn’t Want to Answer — Joan Petrie, and the questions that go unanswered.
Every book starts the same way: you choose twenty-five questions once, from eight categories and one of your own. What comes back depends on who you’re asking and whether they’ll write.