During the current six-week session I’ve given a writing prompt about name changes, and two seasonal prompts as well: “Back to School” and “Rite of Passage.” This essay Audrey Mitchell wrote could have qualified for all three! Hearing it read in class taught us what a gift her mother, Leila Goodwin, had for solving the […]

What fun it was to be interviewed in front of an audience by my friend and fellow memoir-writer Regan Burke last Friday. Here’s an account of the evening from her, well, point of view. Last Friday night Beth and I participated in an event called “Body Language—Reading and Discussions about Writing the Body.” The event […]

In the Chicago area? No big plans tonight? Come to Access Living (115 W Chicago Avenue) at 6:30 pm for a book presentation. Regan Burke, one of the writers from my memoir-writing classes whose stories intertwine with mine in my latest book, Writing Out Loud, will be interviewing me on stage about teaching and writing […]

As Whitney guided me through the lobby to our memoir-writing class at the Chicago Cultural Center last Wednesday, I got wind of a special exhibit there about a Chicago neighborhood called Bronzeville. Wanda Bridgeforth, the 95-year-old matriarch of my classes? She grew up in Bronzeville. In her essays, she describes that segregated South Side neighborhood […]

Here’s a post I wrote for the Easterseals national blog before we left for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. An opinion piece about the banning of plastic straws in different businesses and municipalities published in the Washington Post earlier this month caught my attention. Written by disability advocate Karin Hitselberger, the piece was brilliant at […]