In the dozen or so years I’ve been leading memoir-writing classes, I always pretty much assumed that getting life episodes down on paper is good for your brain. Now studies are starting to prove it. A Creativity and Aging Study by the National Endowment for the Arts shows that writing memoir can result in the […]
Okay. One last essay from that “What I hope for” prompt I assigned late last year. This one comes from Elaine Fishman. Look up the word “Delightful” in the dictionary, and you should find a photo of Elaine’s tiny face there. She and her husband Guy, a well-known Chicago architect, raised their four children in […]
Annelore is one of four writers in the memoir class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center who was born in a foreign country. She met her American husband Roy in the small town they both worked in on the Czech border, and the two of them moved to his hometown in North Dakota 55 […]
The announcement of the final writing prompt for 2017 was met with a chorus of groans. “What I hope for?” they asked. “For what? For Christmas? When? You mean you want an essay about what I’d do if I won the lottery? Is that what you mean? The Chicago Bears winning a game this year…can […]
Mike, Seeing-Eye dog Whitney and I are taking a train to Wisconsin tomorrow to visit our son Gus for the weekend, and while we’re away our niece Janet and her kids are staying at our place to enjoy Christmassy Chicago. So, like so many others, Mike and I are running around packing, shopping and cleaning. […]