Writers sign up for my memoir classes for all sorts of reasons. Many want to get their stories down on paper to leave for their families, some start off writing their own stories and continue coming to listen to classmates read theirs, and others want to see their essays published. With that last group in […]

The memoir-writing classes I lead are all on break now, so I have time to file through essays they wrote for our last six-week session and choose some to share with readers here. At Halloween I asked writers in my class at The Admiral at the Lake to use 500 words to answer the question […]

Award-winning writer Elly Fishman contacted me from her Montreal home a few months ago. A magazine editor in Chicago before moving to Canada, Elly is freelancing now. She had an idea for a story that would require some research in Chicago. Could she visit her grandmother’s memoir-writing class while she was in town? Thoughtful, playful, […]

All five of the weekly memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago are back in full swing now, and Michael Graff, a writer in one of the Village Chicago classes I lead, generously agreed to let us share a deadpan “Back to School” essay he read out loud Monday for the first meeting of the current […]

Writers join the memoir-writing classes I lead for all sorts of reasons. Some tell me they want to hone their writing skills, some hope it will improve their memory, others want to publish their work. And so on. None of the writers in my classes have told me they signed up for their first class […]