With all the snow and ice this winter, and then with this week’s mayoral election, I just knew that the seniors in our memoir-writing class were getting phone calls. “Friends and relatives from warmer places are calling you, right? They’re asking you why you don’t move closer to them.” Their heads nodded in unison. A […]
The memoir-writing class I teach for senior citizens at the Chicago Cultural Center was cancelled on Feb. 2 due to the blizzard. You know, I’ve seen other winters, and I’ve made it through, but this one doesn’t seem the same. After a phone call to Flo to make sure she was doing alright, I dialed […]
That’s the topic I assigned to my memoir-writing class last week, and my stellar seniors did not disappoint. Annelore opened her essay wondering whether there could possibly be one best invention. In the days when my grandmother told tales about the awesome impressions of seeing her first airplane fly and land, riding in a […]
Myrna Knepler enrolled in my memoir-writing class after retiring from teaching at Northeastern Illinois University. Having a smart woman like her as a student could have been intimidating, but Myrna is so sweet, so patient and so downright fun that you just can’t be nervous around her. Plus she has a terrific laugh! Myrna saw […]
In honor of our infamous Illinois ex-governor, the topic for my memoir-writing students last Wednesday was “guilty.” Hanna, the matriarch of our class, came back with an essay that was, in a word, stunning. You might remember Hanna from a previous blog post. Hanna grew up in Germany. Her family was Jewish, and Hanna escaped […]