My next book Writing Out Loud will be out by early May. I’d cross my fingers for good luck on that statement if they weren’t already occupied – I’m still busy typing last-minute revisions and rewrites! Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s description–it’s straight from the Books by Beth Finke page: Writing Out Loud: What […]

A couple days ago I sat on a panel at Chicago Shedd Aquarium with a theater director, a mother of three school-aged children, and a lawyer. Theater director Brian Balcom uses a wheelchair, one of Laurie Viets’ children is on the autism spectrum, attorney Rachel Arfa is profoundly deaf and uses bilateral cochlear implants to […]

Some writers in the Memoir-writing classes I lead have had their memoirs published, but none has ever won an award (with a cash prize, no less!) for their writing…until now. A poem Andrea Kelton wrote has been awarded a cash prize for Second-Place in the Magnets and Ladders poetry contest! Andrea’s poem What a Feeling will […]

An eighty-year-old writer in the Thursday memoir-writing class I lead for Lincoln Park Village was so moved by the Mondays with Mike post here this past Monday that he wrote his own essay about author Wallace Stegner. Bruse Hunt read this essay in class yesterday and generously gave us permission to share it with all you […]

I subscribe to something called The Writer’s Almanac and wake up every morning to a poem and an email message listing things that went on in the literary world that day in history. Today’s listing includes something about writer and publisher Dave Eggers that I thought worth sharing here. I could still see when I […]