I am pleased to introduce Iliana Genkova as a guest blogger today. Born and raised in Bulgaria, Iliana completed a degree in the sciences there and came to America to work with weather satellites. From there she went on to live and work around the world — UK, the Netherlands, Australia— before settling in Chicago, […]

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 […]

A few months ago Variety Magazine presented the first-ever in-depth look at people with disabilities in the entertainment industry. They started looking for writers to work on the special report this past summer, and it was important to the editors that one of the freelancers they hired for the project have a disability. Thanks 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 […]

The essays writers bring to our weekly memoir-writing classes teach me a lot about history, geography, and civil rights. Gabriela Freese and her twin sister grew up in South America — their parents had emigrated from Germany to Paraguay during the European depression after World War I. “I grew up in a German household,” she […]