Our regular blog readers will remember the You read that out loud in class?” guest post Regan Burke wrote for us about the value of honesty in memoir-writing. Regan is a civil rights activist,and she’s enrolled in the memoir-writing class I lead at Grace Place in Chicago. When I discovered she’d been at that same […]

Here’s the guest post you’ve been waiting for! Floey’s account of her tenth birthday celebration in Chicago Monday… by AnnMarie Florence Czerwinski I experienced a birthday of a lifetime. I got to go to the ocularist with my great ol’ Aunt Betha. It was a little freaky but it was really cool. First probably the […]

December 21 is our great-niece Floey’s tenth birthday, and I’m giving her the gift of a lifetime: on Monday she’ll come along to watch an ocularist polish her Great Aunt Beth’s fake eye. Eye surgeons did all they could to restore my vision when retinopathy set in thirty years ago. One of my eyes is still […]

It was a lucky day for me when Regan Burke turned up for one of my memoir-writing classes. A civil rights activist, Regan was a White House staffer during the Clinton presidency and has colorful – and moving – stories to tell. She files away unusual words she hears and cleverly shoehorns one or two […]

A 79-year-old writer learned a lot about his fears when I gave “What are you afraid of?” as a writing prompt over Halloween. Loyal blog readers might remember a post I published here last year featuring excerpts from an essay Bob Eisenberg wrote then about his best job ever, when he was 11 years old, […]