Happy Fourth of July weekend, everybody. Last week we published a post Mike wrote about his visit to Pittsburgh and to the area in Western Pennsylvania where his parents grew up, and his visit with his cousin Linda. Well, that sparked Linda to write about one of the unique facets of the small town near […]

After Prince died, I asked the writers in my memoir classes to write a 500-word essay about a celebrity’s death that made them especially sad. We published writer Bob Eisenberg’s essay about Vidal Sassoon here, and it inspired my young friend Tara to publish an essay about Vidal Sassoon on her taraisarockstar blog as well. […]

My assignment to write a 500-word essay about One Thing I Own that I Should Throw Away but Probably Never Will exposed a few of the writers in my memoir classes as…gasp….hoarders! Nancy Lerman, one of the youngest writers in my classes, is one of the packrats, and she managed to avoid writing about something […]

My husband Mike Knezovich and I have written posts about our writer friend Jean Thompson many times before – everything from the one I wrote about how she introduced herself to me decades ago from the barstool next to mine at Champaign’s Esquire Lounge to the one Mike wrote after Who Do You Love? (One of […]

School is out now, which means DJ Mermaid has time to blog for us again. Hooray! A lot has happened to DJ Mermaid since her last guest post. Most importantly, she had a birthday. Ten-year-old DJ Mermaid has been in a casting program the past couple months. She still has casts from her hips down […]