My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I started our new year of elementary school visits in a big way: we took a commuter train to Elmhurst (The Chicago suburb where I grew up) and gave a presentation to 250 kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. All. At. Once. Whitney usually leads me to the train station in […]

Here in Chicago it’s beginning, at last, to feel like January. Yesterday, a sunny Sunday, the temperature only hit 18 at its peak here near the lake, and it was more in the 10 range out in the suburbs. But we dodged what looked like a bad storm—we got rain and not snow and ice […]

Our regular blog readers will remember the You read that out loud in class?” guest post Regan Burke wrote for us about the value of honesty in memoir-writing. Regan is a civil rights activist,and she’s enrolled in the memoir-writing class I lead at Grace Place in Chicago. When I discovered she’d been at that same […]

I’ve already written a post here about how people who have visual impairments can use Siri to send text messages and make calls on iPhones. Now, after having broken some fingers in my left hand, I’ve started toying around with another dictation feature on my iPhone: the microphone on the keyboard. So far, for me, […]

Awhile back I mentioned these holidays have been harder for me than usual. I’ve always loved them, but this year, I’m happy to see them go. Here’s why: Beth broke her hand. That sucks for both of us. I miss my mother, my father, and my sister. And in the past few weeks three people […]