Beth announces a new memoir-writing course she’ll be leading in Printers Row in the South Loop of Chicago.

Last week my friend Dean and I parked downstairs in his man cave and watched part of an NFL game. At one point, Dean looked away from the screen and said, “These guys just beat the **** out of each other.” I was thinking precisely the same thing at that very moment. Watching football is getting less and […]

I usually avoid reading novels and short stories with characters who are blind. Too many fiction writers portray blind characters one-dimensionally — we’re either heroic or tragic, bumbling or, particularly lately, blessed with super-powers. But Anthony Doerr isn’t like other authors. One of the main characters in Doerr’s current best-selling novel All the Light We Cannot See is […]

Whitney usually leads me to the train station in downtown Chicago on her own, but when my gem of a husband, Mike Knezovich, generously offered to walk us this morning, I said “YES!” Reasons: Freezing temperatures — if Whitney and I got lost or turned around for just a few minutes, we’d end up with […]

Beth wrote a post last week about how author Laura Hillenbrand and NPR’s Terry Gross—like Beth—conduct interviews without being able to see their subjects. Of course, that’s owed to very different circumstances for each of them. Not being able to do something in a conventional way can be the mother of invention for other methods that have their […]