This Tuesday afternoon I’ll be sitting on a panel at Chicago’s 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 […]

Whitney and I gave a presentation at Bethany Retirement Community yesterday. Bethany sponsors a weekly memoir-writing class for residents there, and yesterday’s event began with a lovely reading of short pieces six of the writers in their class had written. Each participant had provided photos. While staff members read the essays aloud, the photos that […]

A confession of sorts: I was going to just feature excerpts of Wanda Bridgeforth’s essays here on The Safe & Sound blog while Mike and I were away on Martha’s Vineyard, but I’m having such fun reading over her work that I’m continuing the series. Here’s another story Wanda might read when she appears with […]

The week the Cubs won the World Series last year, I assigned the writing prompt “Winners!” A year later, the Chicago Cubs are in the running again: they play their first game of the 2017 NL Division playoffs against the Washington Nationals today. This post is the second in a series of posts considering which […]

Mark your calendars: Ninety-five-year-old writer Wanda Bridgeforth is appearing with me for an author talk at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago Tuesday evening, October 17, 2017 at 6 pm. Stories by Wanda and other writers in my classes intertwine with mine in my new book Writing Out Loud: What a Blind Teacher Learned […]