Some Stories Can Be Researched.
Others Must Be Remembered.
Author • Storyteller • Educator • Creator of The Traveling Memory Museum
For nearly nine decades, Elaine has witnessed history not from a distance, but through everyday life — through family, community, change, loss, resilience, and the ordinary moments that rarely make it into history books.
Today, she brings those memories into conversation, offering audiences something increasingly rare: the opportunity to encounter history through the voice of someone who lived it.
Signature Talks
Conversations That Stay With You
Elaine doesn't speak about history from a distance. She speaks from inside a life that has witnessed nearly nine decades of it. Each conversation brings memory, lived experience, and storytelling together—revealing not only where we've been, but why the stories we carry forward matter.
I Remember It Well: Why Our Stories Matter
Every life contains history worth preserving. Drawing from nearly nine decades of memory, Elaine reveals the extraordinary history hidden inside ordinary experience—the people, places, traditions, struggles, celebrations, and seemingly small moments that become the record of a life.
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Through her stories, audiences begin to recognize something important: history does not belong only to famous people or major events. We are all carrying pieces of it.
Ideal for: Libraries, conferences, cultural institutions, community organizations, family-history programs, and intergenerational events.
Growing Up in Philadelphia: A Living History
Elaine didn't learn mid-century Philadelphia only through books. She lived it.
Through vivid firsthand stories, she takes audiences into the Philadelphia of her childhood and young adulthood—its neighborhoods, people, institutions, opportunities, limitations, traditions, and everyday rhythms.
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These are not reconstructed accounts. They are memories carried by someone who was actually there, offering something historical records alone cannot: the human experience of a time and place remembered from within it.
Ideal for: Museums, historical societies, libraries, colleges and universities, Philadelphia organizations, and local-history programs.
Before the Stories Are Gone
What happens to a family's history when the people who remember it are no longer here to tell it?
Elaine explores what disappears when memories go unasked, unrecorded, and unpreserved—and why the stories carried within families and communities deserve to be treated as part of our historical record.
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Audiences leave with more than appreciation. They leave looking differently at the elders, photographs, traditions, names, and stories in their own lives—and with a renewed urgency to preserve them while there is still someone to ask.
Ideal for: Genealogy and family-history groups, libraries, museums, senior communities, cultural organizations, and intergenerational programs.
87 Years, and I’m Not Finished Yet
What does nearly nine decades of living teach you about beginning again?
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At 87, Elaine is still writing, publishing, creating, learning, building, and imagining what comes next. Her life challenges the quiet assumption that purpose diminishes with age—or that our most meaningful contributions must belong to our younger years.
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With warmth, humor, and the perspective that only time can give, Elaine speaks about reinvention, curiosity, purpose, and continuing to participate fully in your own life.
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This isn't a conversation about staying young. It's about refusing to stop becoming.
Ideal for: Women’s organizations, conferences, senior communities, colleges and universities, faith communities, professional organizations, and programs focused on aging, purpose, and lifelong learning.
Some History Can Only Be Told by Those Who Lived It.
Elaine brings audiences something no textbook, archive, or presentation can reproduce: firsthand memory. Her programs combine lived history, storytelling, humor, reflection, and conversation to create experiences that inform while making history deeply human.
Ways to Experience Elaine
Featured Talk
A prepared program centered on one of Elaine’s signature topics, weaving firsthand memory, history, and storytelling into an engaging experience, followed by audience questions and conversation.
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Moderated Conversation
An intimate, interview-style conversation with Elaine that allows her stories and memories to unfold naturally through thoughtful questions, reflection, and exchange. Ideal for fireside chats, cultural programs, conferences, and special events.
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Interactive Storytelling
Elaine combines her own stories with guided prompts and conversation, inviting audience members to reflect on the memories, people, places, and experiences that have shaped their own lives.
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Virtual Conversation
Bring Elaine’s stories and perspective to audiences anywhere through an engaging online talk, interview, or moderated conversation — creating connection across distance without losing the intimacy of the exchange.
Bring the Traveling Memory Museum to Your Event
The conversation can become something your audience helps preserve.
Pair Elaine's storytelling with an interactive Traveling Memory Museum experience that invites guests to move from listening to remembering — reflecting on their own photographs, keepsakes, family stories, and memories.
In this way, Elaine's history becomes a doorway into their own.
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Depending on the event, the experience can include curated displays, guided storytelling prompts, audience participation, and opportunities to preserve stories that might otherwise disappear.​
The Traveling Memory Museum can accompany select in-person engagements, creating an even richer opportunity for audiences to encounter memory, history, and story together.
Bring Living History Into the Room
Every year, firsthand memories become harder to recover. Elaine’s work is rooted in a simple belief: the stories carried by ordinary people are part of our history, and they deserve to be heard while the voices that carry them are still here.
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For nearly nine decades, Elaine has witnessed a changing America through the intimate lens of family, community, work, womanhood, aging, and everyday life. She brings more than memories to an audience. She brings the perspective of someone who was there—and the wisdom to help others recognize the history they are carrying, too.
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For conferences, libraries, museums, universities, cultural organizations, and intergenerational gatherings, an engagement with Elaine offers something increasingly rare: the opportunity to encounter history through the voice of someone who lived it—and to leave with a deeper understanding of the stories we are all responsible for carrying forward.