A Visit from Chicago Tribune’s Heidi Stevens

Hey, did you read that piece Chicago Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens wrote last month about the memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago? It’s the most well-written and accurate piece any journalist has ever published about how I got started teaching memoir-writing and why I love my classes so much. Bonus: I hear the photos are pretty great, too!

Heidi Stevens did a great job, and so did the photographer.

Heidi first learned about me from my childhood friend Jill Foucré. This past May, Heidi appeared at a fundraiser for The Ross K. MacNeill Foundation that was hosted by Marcel’s Culinary Experience in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Jill owns Marcel’s, she and Heidi got to talking at that event, next thing you know an email lands in my in box from the Chicago Tribune. Heidi Stevens wants to interview me!

Heidi offered to come down to meet me in a coffee shop here in Printers Row. Her initial questions were about the people who take my classes, the benefits of writing  — and teaching — memoir, that sort of thing. As the interview was drawing to a close, she wondered out loud if being blind might be an advantage when it comes to teaching memoir-writing classes for older adults.

I had to think a bit before answering. Heidi is a good listener and did not rush me. “Not being able to see them means when I sit there in class, I really listen and focus on what they are reading,” I finally said. “I picture them as the people they are describing in their essays. I don’t think about what they look like or what they aren’t able to do anymore or how old they are. I get lost in their writing.”

That quote made it into the published piece, and it led to another question from Heidi. “May I visit one of your classes?” She explained that observing a class would give her a better picture of how it all works, Mondays would work best for her, the writers in the Monday afternoon class I lead for The Village Chicago approved the visit, and Heidi showed up the next week with a photographer.

Having a busy newspaper columnist spend 90 minutes with me and a coffee shop was plenty flattering, but then she takes the trouble to visit a class — and arrange for a photographer to accompany her, too?

Well, hey. Good reporters are thorough with their research. And Heidi Stevens is a good reporter. “Her students write about grieving for spouses with whom they spent decades,” she wrote in the column. “They write about children who died far too young. They write about unhappy childhoods and happy childhoods and a city that has changed, dramatically, in their lifetimes.”

I was on Cloud Nine the day the story was published, and I haven’t come down yet. I’ll say goodbye here with one last excerpt, and I do hope you’ll take the time to read the entire piece. It’s a tribute to the writers in my classes and the value of preserving their stories:

Earlier this week, I attended one of Finke’s Lincoln Park classes. Toward the beginning, the students explained why they were there, learning to write and share their stories.
“My mother, as a gift to her children, wrote her own memoir and sent it to us in letter form,” a student named Bill said. “Over a period of about 20 years, every week we’d get a new installment. And it’s one of the great treasures of my life.

“And it stimulated in me,” Bill continued, “this notion, even though I have no children, of how much a memoir can mean.”