My one minute of fame from that “Where are They Now?” video about me on the Oprah Winfrey Network last month brought up a lot of questions from friends who didn’t know me back when I modeled nude for art students. One Safe & Sound blog follower emailed me personally with a lot of questions, […]

This past week I asked the memoir-writers in my classes to write about “someone special” in honor of the 25th anniversary of The Americans with Disabilities Act. Mary Rigdon wrote about an athlete who uses a wheelchair and said his determination was the impetus for ensuring the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta were open to […]

I’m old enough to remember when it was illegal to advertise prescription drugs on television. And even if it had been legal, the idea that the commercials would be talking about erectile dysfunction would’ve been a non-starter. As in, on TV? Really? Plus, we wouldn’t have known what erectile dysfunction was. Of course, a lot’s […]

Many of the fledgling memoirists who sign up for my 90-minute Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground workshop at Northwestern Summer Writers Institute on July 30 will be younger than the seniors in the memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago. When I address groups like this, I can count on one of the writers asking […]

Earlier this summer I spoke at a memorial service for a writer in one of the memoir writing classes I lead at Lincoln Park Village. This week a thank-you note arrived from her daughter, and along with the note she included a copy of an essay her mother had written when I assigned “I Have […]