My husband Mike Knezovich and I have written posts about our writer friend Jean Thompson many times before – everything from the one I wrote about how she introduced herself to me decades ago from the barstool next to mine at Champaign’s Esquire Lounge to the one Mike wrote after Who Do You Love? (One of […]

A group of handsome guys with British accents met me for coffee Sunday morning. The rendezvous came after Neale Minch, a longtime friend from my days working at the University of Illinois Study Abroad Office, emailed me the night before. “I am in apartment in Chicago (55 East Washington) with Mike Selbie and Julian Hamilton-Peach. […]

We get horrified. We get sad. We get voyeuristic—we want the details. We get angry. We want this never to happen again. We blame. It goes away. And it happens again. We’re doing something wrong. That’s what I know for sure. I have opinions about that, but everybody does right about now; it just sort […]

School is out now, which means DJ Mermaid has time to blog for us again. Hooray! A lot has happened to DJ Mermaid since her last guest post. Most importantly, she had a birthday. Ten-year-old DJ Mermaid has been in a casting program the past couple months. She still has casts from her hips down […]

Lots of people have interesting life stories to tell. The hard part? Getting those stories down on paper so that others can read — and reread — them. As the writers in the memoir classes I lead for the City of Chicago, Lincoln Park Village and at Grace Place in Printers Row master the art of writing […]