If you’re a family historian, you’ve likely spent time collecting old photos, scanning handwritten recipes, documenting genealogical charts, and maybe even recording the occasional oral history. But what if the raw conversations — those messy, beautiful, unfinished ones — held more than just factual value?
What if they were seeds for something bigger?
Something weirder?
Something personal and unrepeatable?
At GAJOOB, we’ve been exploring what happens when you treat family recordings not just as artifacts, but as material — for poetry, for zines, for surreal songs, for digital storytelling. The result is something like memory collage meets audio folk art. It’s not always clean, but it’s always alive.
Your Transcripts as a Living Archive
Let’s say you record your parents at lunch, or your grandpa telling a story about working at the Bluebird Café. You get it transcribed (tools like Otter.ai or Whisper can help), and now you’ve got this chunk of spoken memory in text form.
Instead of just filing it away, you can:
- Tag it by theme (e.g. “anxiety”, “childhood punishments”, “grandma’s kitchen”)
- Slice out unusual quotes that don’t seem important but feel like something
- Mash them together across time and speakers
A simple line like “We fed one to the dog. He grinned.” becomes lyric gold in the right hands.
Create Stories That Aren’t Just Stories
Using these transcripts, you can build:
- Tonguepocket-style songs: a surreal lyric series we’ve been producing that reassembles family dialogue into poetic absurdism
- Zines: topical mini-books built from quote scraps and recollections (e.g. “Family Misunderstandings #1”, or “Nervous Food Conversations”)
- Scripted voiceovers: a collage of voices for videos, possibly animated or over abstract visual layers
- Fictionalized scenes: take a true story and bend it until it reveals something more than just what happened
The key isn’t accuracy — it’s resonance.
How to Structure Your Archive
Set up folders like:
/transcripts/parents//transcripts/childhood//transcripts/melancholy/
And index each file with a little metadata:
- Title: “Dad Talks About Stealing Melons”
- Summary: “Memory about sneaking into a neighbor’s field, eating unripe fruit, joy of disobedience”
- Tags:
rebellion,summer,humor
From there, you can pull quotes and ask ChatGPT:
“Build a surreal story using lines from this transcript and another about grandpa walking everywhere without a license.”
It becomes creative fuel. A multi-generational sampler. A spoken-word patchwork you can stitch together into anything.
Ready to Get Weird?
This is about turning family history into something more than preservation. It’s about transformation. About bending the light until it hits something unexpected.
Your family stories don’t have to stay locked in their folders. They can sing, rant, whisper, and loop. They can fall apart on purpose. They can be funny and sad and true — even when they’re not.
If that excites you even a little, you’re one of us.
