Every once in a while a writer in my memoir classes will suggest a writing prompt for me to consider. I like that — their ideas clue me in on what they’re especially interested in writing. Only problem? Too often their prompts are too specific. A prompt one of my writers suggested during our recent […]

Writers sign up for my memoir classes for all sorts of reasons. Many want to get their stories down on paper to leave for their families, some start off writing their own stories and continue coming to listen to classmates read theirs, and others want to see their essays published. With that last group in […]

The memoir-writing classes I lead are all on break now, so I have time to file through essays they wrote for our last six-week session and choose some to share with readers here. At Halloween I asked writers in my class at The Admiral at the Lake to use 500 words to answer the question […]

The essays writers bring to our weekly memoir-writing classes teach me a lot about history, geography, and civil rights. Gabriela Freese and her twin sister grew up in South America — their parents had emigrated from Germany to Paraguay during the European depression after World War I. “I grew up in a German household,” she […]

All five of the weekly memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago are back in full swing now, and Michael Graff, a writer in one of the Village Chicago classes I lead, generously agreed to let us share a deadpan “Back to School” essay he read out loud Monday for the first meeting of the current […]