Last month I happened to catch a story on Weekend Edition and heard NPR’s Rachel Martin talking with Lisa Fenn, the author of Carry On: A Story of Resilience, Redemption, and an Unlikely Family. The two athletes Lisa Fenn profiled in her book and in a documentary for ESPN’s Outside the Lines program were present at […]

Here’s The opening paragraph from the essay Wanda Bridgeforth wrote when I assigned “I Walked Home” as a writing prompt this week. My father grew up in the South under a caste system that clung to the old thought of blue bloods. Looks and family were of great importance — even if your family was […]

The writers in the memoir classes I lead keep me amused, alert and alive. One of them phoned this week bemoaning our assignment. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about it all week,” she said. “I can’t come up with anything to write about. I want to keep doing everything! We both laughed. “You are my […]

Roughly one in five Americans lives with a disability. So where is our pride movement? That’s the subhead to an op-ed piece called Becoming Disabled in the New York Times Sunday Review this week. The piece was written by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, an academic who has a disability. The piece is well-written and looooooooooong — Professor Garland-Thomson […]

Last week’s writing prompt was “Happy Camper.”. After explaining that the phrase is American slang for a happy, contented person, I asked the writers in my memoir classes to think of a happy time in their lives. “Picture the setting, where you were, the sounds, what it smelled like, the feeling in the air,” I […]