Another benefit of the 500-word limit I impose on writers in the memoir classes I lead? Magazines, newspapers and blogs publish short pieces like that. This week I asked some of my writers for 500 words on “Witnessing Love.” Sharon Silverman was so pleased with the poignant piece she wrote about witnessing the love in […]

The essay Maggy Fauché wrote for our “The First Time I Laid Eyes on You” prompt last week was about a teenage crush. When I wondered out loud how she managed to capture those long-ago feelings so beautifully, she gave all credit to Orhan Pamuk . Orhan? I thought the crush was on a guy […]

In the dozen or so years I’ve been leading memoir-writing classes, I always pretty much assumed that getting life episodes down on paper is good for your brain. Now studies are starting to prove it. A Creativity and Aging Study by the National Endowment for the Arts shows that writing memoir can result in the […]

Okay. One last essay from that “What I hope for” prompt I assigned late last year. This one comes from Elaine Fishman. Look up the word “Delightful” in the dictionary, and you should find a photo of Elaine’s tiny face there. She and her husband Guy, a well-known Chicago architect, raised their four children in […]

Annelore is one of four writers in the memoir class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center who was born in a foreign country. She met her American husband Roy in the small town they both worked in on the Czech border, and the two of them moved to his hometown in North Dakota 55 […]