I am pleased to feature Gabriela Freese as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Her parents immigrated from Germany to South America; she and her twin sister were born and raised in Paraguay, and Gabriela immigrated to Chicago in 1959, where she met her husband, a German immigrant. Gabriela received a degree in dentistry […]

I am pleased to feature 99-year-old Wanda Bridgeforth as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know Wanda – she’d been attending the memoir writing class I led in downtown Chicago for nearly two decades before coronavirus hit last year. What you might not know about […]

I am pleased to feature José DiMauro as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Born in Argentina, José graduated from medical school at Univ De Buenos Aires. He left home in 1963 to start his medical career at Chicago’s Mercy Hospital, then became board certified as a pathologist at University of Illinois in Chicago. […]

I am pleased to feature Ann Parrilli as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Ann joined the “Me, Myself and I” class last year when we were still meeting in person at the Chicago Cultural Center and continues writing — and reading — essays while that class meets via Zoom. Here she is with […]

Every December the publisher of my book Writing Out Loud asks me to write a year-end holiday message to send out to people who subscribe to my newsletter. But this past holiday, I had writer’s block. Who wanted to think hard about 2020? What would I write about? Conference presentations that got cancelled? Visits to […]