Hey! I’m doing another Writing Out Loud event in Chicago this Friday, and Audrey Mitchell (a writer from the “Me, Myself and I” class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center) is going to be with me at this one, too: Friday, July 28, 2017 1:00pm – 3:00pm Ditka’s Restaurant, 100 E. Chestnut I’ll be […]

One of my favorite Indie bookstores in Chicago (outside of Sandmeyer’s, right down the street here in Printers Row) is The Book Cellar in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. The Book Cellar is my kind of store. Suzy, the owner, is a caring woman who supports local authors, the thoughtful bookworms Suzy hires are happy to […]

Hello from our little inn in Lubec, Maine. We won’t be heading across the river to the Iota: The Conference of Short Prose at Roosevelt Campobello International Park until later this morning, but in the short 24 hours we’ve been here I already have a lot to write about. A worker at our gate at […]

One of the many many things I love about people of a certain age? They answer their phones when you call. After my new book Writing Out Loud came out last month, I dug up a computer file from a dozen years ago and started tracking down the seniors who’d been in the first memoir-writing […]

I assured the standing-room-only crowd at our Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground session at Printers Row Lit Fest Sunday morning that their wait for 95-year-old panelist Wanda Bridgeforth would be worth it. “Funny thing was, Wanda Jr. was waiting for me upstairs,” Wanda told me later. “And I was waiting for her downstairs!” My […]