Tonight, April 11, 2018, at 9 pm Central Time, memoir-writer Audrey Mitchell and I will be interviewed by Justin Kaufmann, host of The Download on WGN Radio 720. Audrey is one of the many writers from my memoir-writing classes whose stories intertwine with mine in my latest book, Writing Out Loud.
What will we talk about? Who knows? It all depends on the questions Justin Kaufmann asks us, and when it comes to Audrey’s life story, he has a lot of material to choose from.
Justin might ask her about the Great Migration — her parents came to Chicago from Edgefield County, South Carolina. Maybe he’ll ask about the years of genealogy work Audrey did before enrolling in my memoir-writing class — the 1870 Census was the first U.S. census to list all persons, including former slaves, as individuals. “I don’t have their slave records, but I do know my great-grandparents lived in Edgefield County in 1870,” she told me once, reasoning that they’d stayed there after the Emancipation Proclamation. “I have oral history and written data to back that up, but what I’m missing is the voice of my older relatives, what they were thinking, what they were feeling and like that. That’s why I keep taking your class. So my stories don’t get lost like theirs are.”
Audrey Values family history so much that she volunteers to lead a memoir-writing class at the Wrightwood-Ashburn Branch of the Chicago Public Library in her southwest side neighborhood of Chicago. Maybe Justin Kaufmann will ask her about that, too, or who knows, Maybe he’ll ask about getting up extra early with her two kids on Saturday mornings in the 1970s to make absolutely sure they’d finish their errands by noon. That’s when Soul Train was on! Tune in to WGN Radio tonight, April 11, 2018 at 9 pm central time and see what Justin Kaufmann — and Audrey and I — come up with.
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