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, […]

It’s been a very happy week here in Chicago. Ours started last Friday, when Mike and I took an el to Schaller’s Pump on the South Side to watch a playoff game. Schaller’s Pump has been at 37th and Halsted since 1876, and from Mike’s description it hasn’t changed much since then. The bar is […]

It’s Wanda Bridgeforth’s 94th birthday, and without telling Wanda, I asked her fellow writers in the Wednesday “Me, Myself and I” to surprise her with essays on “What I Learn from Wanda’s Wise Words” and read them aloud to her this morning. Here’s mine. Bee-you-tee-full Wanda Bridgeforth has taught me the meaning of beauty. More […]

A blog post I published here earlier this month got such an intriguing comment from a blogger in Germany that I asked her to write a guest post here. She said “Ja!” Photo Narrations — pictures for the blind and sighted by Tina Paulick Beth’s post was about how she asked writers in her memoir […]

If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know who Wanda Bridgeforth is: She’s witty, she’s talented, she’s 93 years old and she’s been attending the memoir-writing class I lead in downtown Chicago for a decade now. When Wanda was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, her mother worked “in private family,” […]