HOPE — Meghan Vigeant’s current title as personal historian is not likely to be a category found in the classifieds. In fact, living in rural Maine, Vigeant didn’t find much at all in any list of classifieds, let alone jobs involving creativity. So, after a year and a half working as a marketing manager in Whitefield, she decided to grow her own business. 

Through her business, Legacy Preserves, Vigeant helps people write and self-publish their memoirs. She travels to the homes of clients, or wherever the clients feel comfortable meeting.  Some have already written the memoir and need help with the layout.  Others have a general topic idea that needs assistance to develop.  But mainly Vigeant sits and listens to people. If her ears perk at an interesting detail, she helps the writer expand upon that point.

Of course, Vigeant’s timeline of employee to entrepreneur is not the quick wrinkle of the nose, snap of the fingers, that anyone traveling such a route wishes it to be. 

In her off hours working as marketing manager, Vigeant continued with independent projects for local and public radio — a passion that took her from her native Metro-Detroit community to the SALT Institute in Portland years ago.  And still, during the year and a half in Whitefield, Vigeant spent a month in Nepal, producing a documentary revolving around an upper-caste daughter who escaped her aunt and uncle who’d kidnapped her in order to keep her from her lower-caste husband.

Vigeant learned a lot from her marketing job, a puzzle piece she realizes in hindsight was of great value as she now builds the promotional and technical side of her business. But Vigeant decided to go her own way.  So she drummed up an image of being — a tea shop owner. 

The organization Women, Work and Community offered a free course in Lewiston called New Ventures. Vigeant trekked to this class, learning the ropes of business plans, cash flow, and insurance.  About a month into the course, her sentiments changed.  Not about entrepreneurship, but about her proposed business. 

At the time, she was depriving herself: “of something so fundamentally a part of who I am, which is storytelling. I’ve had a lot of different reincarnations in my career, but there’s always been a thread of storytelling.”

Vigeant’s undergraduate degree is in theatre. She worked as an actor, and produced for the radio.  Always with an eye towards stories.

And, then, there was the fire on Swan’s Island.

Vigeant had been the fellowship recipient called to Swan’s Island by the Island Institute after a 2008 fire burned the historical society library and museum. Vigeant worked with the residents from 2009 to 2011, documenting the oral history by those old enough to remember. Swan’s Island: Guts, Feathers and All is the book created by her and Island residents.

According to Vigeant, more than half the people in the book have passed away since the interviews. 

“I’ve really been able to see how powerful these stories are to the families,” she said. “It’s very reaffirming of what I do.”

What she does is wear many hats for the sake of a person’s memoir. She is interviewer, transcriber, planner, coach, friend, and project manager.  She also works with book designers and copy editors. Projects durations vary in time, and sometimes location. 

Life is Not a Rehearsal by John Barnett, as told to Meghan Vigeant, is the life story of a summer resident of Swans Island.  The book was produced after 10 hours of interviews between himself and Vigeant.  Two of those interviews took place on the island.  The other interviews occurred at a relative’s house on the mainland.

Mostly, Vigeant sits in the figurative passenger seat, along for the ride as the client drives down memory lane. 

In the year and a half of her storytelling business, she has been to Micronesia in that figurative car; she hung out in the year 1940, she attended baseball games.

“There have been some very powerful experiences that I have been privileged to be a part of,” she said. “Both of the joyful happy kind as well as the incredibly tragic kind. It is an honor to help them bring these stories out to the world.”

Contact Meghan Vigeant at 207-975-0508 or LegacyPreserves@gmail.com. Visit her website, LegacyPreserves.com. 

Vigeant will be on stage for Pecha Kucha Night, Feb. 27, at the Blue Goose in Northport.  The theme will be The Power of Stories.

Books published:

Swan’s Island: Guts, Feathers and All

Life is Not a Rehearsal by John Barnett, as told to Meghan Vigeant

Maine Boy Goes to War by Paul Marshall

Before by Robert Lee Brewer

Illustrated Six Word Memoirs by attendees of the 2014 Mini Makers Fair in Camden