This past week I asked the memoir-writers in my classes to write about “someone special” in honor of the 25th anniversary of The Americans with Disabilities Act. Mary Rigdon wrote about an athlete who uses a wheelchair and said his determination was the impetus for ensuring the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta were open to […]

When I finished college I got a job at the Study Abroad Office at University of Illinois. During one-on-one appointments with U of I students, I’d ask what they might like to study overseas, what sort of living arrangements they wanted, did they speak a foreign language, which countries they were particularly interested in, that […]

Last month an email popped up in my in box from the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) asking me if anything new has happened in my life since 2001, when I appeared on Oprah’s After the Show segment and spoke about my job modeling nude for art students. After dozens of email messages and some phone […]

Many of the fledgling memoirists who sign up for my 90-minute Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground workshop at Northwestern Summer Writers Institute on July 30 will be younger than the seniors in the memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago. When I address groups like this, I can count on one of the writers asking […]

Earlier this summer I spoke at a memorial service for a writer in one of the memoir writing classes I lead at Lincoln Park Village. This week a thank-you note arrived from her daughter, and along with the note she included a copy of an essay her mother had written when I assigned “I Have […]