Hava Hegenbarth volunteers as a puppy-raiser for Leader Dogs, and she’s been following my Safe & Sound blog for years. Hava is retired after a career in the diplomatic service, and after reading a recent post here about a Holocaust survivor, she commented that she, too, had survived a genocide — it happened when she’d […]

With all the talk about political conventions in the news lately, I can’t help but think of what happened right here in 1968. Many of the writers in my memoir classes were young adults in Chicago then, but when I assigned “1968” as a topic, few of them chose to write about the Democratic convention […]

Last week I asked my memoir-writing students to pick a song, any song, and use that song title as the topic for their next essay. Take “All Shook Up,” for example. With a title like that, you could write about living through an earthquake. Or about a startling event in your lifetime that really left […]

The seniors in my memoir classes have clever ways of letting me know when they disapprove of a writing topic. Wanda groaned when I assigned “in-laws,” and she returned the next week with a colorful essay about a second cousin once removed who’d spent much of his adult life in and out of prison. I […]

A screen reader called JAWS lets me use a computer to read and write, and when power user Sue Martin generously donated a series of her JAWS refresher classes to this year’s auction benefitting the Seeing Eye, , I bid on it – and won! Sue lost her sight when she was 26, and she […]