Last month an email popped up in my in box from the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) asking me if anything new has happened in my life since 2001, when I appeared on Oprah’s After the Show segment and spoke about my job modeling nude for art students. After dozens of email messages and some phone […]

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 […]

A deadly heat wave hit Chicago twenty years ago. WBEZ (Chicago Public Media) aired stories about the 1995 heatwave all this week, and when I heard they were looking for personal stories from listeners who’d survived the heat wave I encouraged my niece Janet to send one in. “If WBEZ doesn’t use it, I’ll publish […]

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 […]

Been cogitating on a bunch of stuff since last weekend, which saw hundreds of thousands of Grateful Dead fans come to our neck of the woods. I started on one topic but it sort of got out of control so I’m backing off and am going to keep it short here. The upshot is what […]