A book that interviews you

Ask someone to write their life story and you get silence. Ask them “what did your kitchen smell like when you were seven?” and you get twenty minutes nobody in the family has ever heard.

That is the mechanic at the center of Velena: the book interviews you. Guided questions, answered by voice or on camera, in the language the storyteller actually thinks in. Velena shapes the recordings into chapters and prints them as a book, with each story’s QR code putting the original voice behind the page.

It works in both directions: a storyteller can record their own life, or a family can build a book about a loved one, answering the questions from memory.