Everything Connects

Joella Werlin, founder of Familore – a trade name for services she offered as a professional personal historian – looks back on her two principal careers, her interests, experiences, education and family, with wonder and appreciation that “everything connects.” She is still connecting, drawing on her skills as an oral historian, as a writer and collaborator on family and individual life story projects, to counsel others and to pursue her deepening interest in how the lives of historic figures are understood and recreated in books and film.  To paraphrase Isabel Allende, “All biography and autobiography is fiction — what we put in, what is left out, what remains in the shadows — because that is not how a life is.”

In her active Familore years spanning two decades, Joella recorded more than 100 life story interviews (most over several hours, one more than 30!). Some projects expanded in unexpected ways: An interview with an Oxford University professor about his early field work among forest nomads in Borneo was published in the international Borneo Research Bulletin. Her interviews with a pioneer teacher of the lute at Juilliard led her to be invited as a speaker at a symposium at Cambridge University commemorating this fascinating racconteur’s father, an important composer. (See projects.)

For fifteen years, Joella served as Director of Public Affairs and Community Relations for the ABC-TV network affiliate in Portland, Oregon. In that capacity, she was liaison with the community for public service campaigns and creator-executive producer of several public affairs programs. She is proud of her awards, but more proud of ways she was able to mobilize talent, energy and resources to raise awareness and funds, partnering with not-for-profit organizations to address critical community needs and concerns.

Joella was born and brought up in Houston but has lived a greater number of years in cities on the east and west coasts. She is a graduate of Connecticut College, where she majored in European history, focusing on cultural history and international relations. She holds a graduate Diploma in Anthropology from the University of Oxford (College, LMH). She moved to Seattle in fall 2014.