It All Comes Down To Story: Angie Turner’s Expanding World Of Legacy
Barbara Smith
Talk with Angie Turner for a few minutes and one thing becomes clear: she has a remarkable ability to see connections. Guided Autobiography, photo management, digital storytelling, legacy books, end-of-life work, and even her career teaching veterinary students may seem like separate worlds. For Angie, however, they continually intersect around one central idea: story.
“Overall, it’s all about life story,” she says. “For me, that’s it.”
Check out her website https://www.soslegacies.com, and you’ll see how, as a legacy preservation expert, she helps individuals and families preserve their stories, memories, and values through meaningful projects that can be shared across generations.
Based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Angie serves as secretary of the Birren Center board while working full time in the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of Veterinary Pathology. A veterinary technician by training, she teaches veterinary students how to conduct animal autopsies, and she also helps administer graduate courses. Somehow, around that schedule, she finds time to lead GAB classes, along with digital storytelling, photo management, and a myriad of creative legacy projects.
Angie’s road to GAB began with photo management and a growing interest in helping clients preserve photographs as a form of life review. She is a Photo Book Design Specialist with The Photo Managers, a resource for people who want to organize their photos and share their stories, and she is certified in Photo Reminiscence Therapy.
After hearing about GAB in a webinar, the instructor training she completed in early 2024 gave her another tool for helping clients uncover the stories behind their pictures. With this new perspective, she found ways for GAB to inform other avenues of legacy work. In her classes, Angie encourages participants to look for photographs and memorabilia to accompany the stories they write. By the end of a course, a participant might have several stories plus a collection of meaningful images— a tangible legacy project, which could be a magazine-style collection or an 80-page hardcover photo legacy book filled with stories and photographs, links to videos, and even a digital photo collection.
Digital storytelling provides another natural extension of GAB. Using themes and prompts much as a GAB instructor would, Angie helps participants find the story they want to tell through photographs, narration, and other media. Look for her Digital Storytelling workshop, which she will offer at the GAB Summit in October.
Her training as a human death doula, companion pet doula, and grief doula adds still another layer. To Angie, end-of-life work and legacy work belong together because both invite people to consider what matters and what they want to leave behind. “It all comes together,” she explains. “It’s all one purpose.”
In a recent conversation, Angie reflected on how GAB has influenced the way she approaches her life. “In thinking about what GAB changed for me, I realized that I live my life differently now. I’ve really started thinking about my own legacy.” Drawing inspiration from words attributed to Marianne Williamson (“our greatest fear…”) and Theodore Roosevelt (“the man in the arena…”), that realization eventually led to her latest tattoo, she says, which captures her mission: “Do not play small, get in the damn arena.”
For GAB instructors wondering how to find their own path, Angie offers encouragement: look for connections, partnerships, and possibilities. Her first GAB class was offered through the Saskatoon Council on Aging, and she has approached community organizations directly with proposals. Her advice: don’t wait for opportunities to arrive. “You have to find your angle and your tone and then propose it out there. You just have to keep going until you find where your fit is and where your people are.”
That willingness to keep exploring explains why GAB fits Angie so well. The GAB process has become not just another strategy in her legacy toolbox, but a way of looking at life’s arena itself—backward, forward and most importantly, at the stories still waiting to be created.
A “Freebie” for GAB Instructors from Angela Turner and SOS Legacies!
Historical Timeline Memory Prompter
