Dear Pop — About the Project
How a box of wartime letters became a book and a podcast
Updated 2026-06-16 · session 23
A 60-second tour

How it was made

Three hundred letters, a grandfather's voice, and a handful of AI tools — the whole project in about a minute.

▶ 60 seconds · best with sound on · download

About this project

Dear Pop is a family undertaking: the wartime letters of Cpl. Arthur M. Yena — written home from training camps and from Italy between 1943 and 1945 — restored, transcribed, and turned into a book and a podcast. The letters sat in a box in the attic for sixty years. This is the story of bringing them, and his voice, back. It runs as two projects side by side.

Two projects, side by side

Part One

The Book

  1. Photograph each letter, page by page.
  2. An AI — Google's Gemini — reads the old handwriting and turns it into text.
  3. Claude keeps everything organized and fact-checked, then helps weave the letters into a true, chapter-by-chapter narrative.
  4. A website (this one, built with Fable 5) follows along, letter by letter — about 37% transcribed so far.
Part Two

The Podcast

  1. The finished narrative becomes an audio documentary.
  2. It's told by an AI documentary narrator — the storyteller's voice.
  3. For Pops's own words, his voice was recreated by training an AI (ElevenLabs) on ~30 minutes of him talking, recorded in the 1990s.
  4. So when a letter speaks, he reads it himself — in his own voice, again.

The tools

Gemini · reads the handwriting Claude · organizes & writes ElevenLabs · the voices Fable 5 · this website Cloudflare · hosting
About the voice. Pops's voice was recreated with his family's blessing, from a home recording — and used only to let him read his own words aloud.