Happy Immunity Day! It’s been 14 days since Mike and I got our second Pfizer vaccine, and I’m celebrating by leading a memoir-writing class in person this afternoon. The last memoir-writing class I taught in person met 13 months ago. It is downright amazing how quickly we all adjusted to using Zoom and meeting online. […]

Happy anniversary! It’s been a year now that we’ve featured essays by writers in my memoir classes on the Safe & Sound blog every week. The writers in all my classes are on Spring Break now, so here I am with a short piece boasting about the strength they’ve exhibited since the shutdown in March […]

With many of the seniors in my Zoom memoir-writing classes away on Spring Break now,so I am pleased to have 14-year-old Anja Herrman as a guest blogger today. I got to know Anja very well when she was nine years old and learning at home during a casting program (casts on both legs from her […]

Over the years, many writers in the memoir classes I lead have self-published their work. Until now, only three had found independent publishers: Hanna Bratman’s collection What’s In My Head was published by Blue Marlin Publications in 2011 Anna Perlberg’s The House in Prague was published by Golden Alley Press in 2016 Regan Burke’s long-awaited […]

I am pleased to introduce Andrea Kelton as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. A retired educator, Andrea has been in the “Me, Myself and I” memoir class at the Chicago Cultural Center for 15 years (another longtime writer in Andrea’s class, Sharon Kramer, has generously volunteered to lead that class via Zoom now). […]