Roberta Siegel, our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today, is working on a book about her father. Henry Naftulin’s parents and older siblings immigrated from Kiev — he was the first to be born in America, he served as a medic in World War II, and later worked as a scientist and inventor at the […]

I am pleased to feature Marjorie Freed as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Longtime Chicago residents might remember her as the owner of Nonpareil, one of the coolest shops on Clark Street back when Clark Street was full of very cool independently-owned stores. She and her husband Harvey collected outsider art and were […]

If you’re reading this before 4:00 pm CT today, you’re in luck. You can still register for the free online launch for Regan Burke’s published memoir, “In That Number.” I’m reposting Regan’s own announcement from her Back Story Essays blog. The book launch is free, but you have to register first, and registration information is […]

1921 was a very good year: Wanda Geneva Johnson was born that year! If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know Wanda Johnson by her married name, Wanda Bridgeforth. Witty and talented, Wanda had been attending the memoir writing class I led in downtown Chicago for nearly two decades before coronavirus hit. What […]

To honor what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday yesterday, I asked writers in my memoir classes to choose a Beatles song title and use that as the title of their 500-word memoir.  A few writers came back with essays about being “back in the USSR,” one wrote about how they “should have known better, […]