When I heard that yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the Bud Billiken Parade in Chicago, I called Wanda Bridgeforth. Sure enough, she was in the parade a few years after it first started. “Oh, yes-in-deedy, I was 11 or so, and we were the Young Girls Athletic Club of Bud Billiken,” she said. “We […]

After we published Mike’s thoughtful post about my Seeing Eye dog Whitney’s upcoming retirement, caring friends and family have been asking if I know what breed my next dog will be. Do I know the name of my next dog, Will they tell you if it’s going to be a male or female? Hearing myself […]

As writers in the memoir classes I lead master the art of writing about their lives, they find themselves with a new challenge: assembling finished stories into book form. Many of my students have met that challenge. Some collected their essays into self-published books for their families, a few worked with an online company called […]

Here’s part two of my post encouraging dads to write their memoirs. The dad I mentioned at the beginning of that post has more than one daughter — he has two. Both live in California, and when one gifted him with my memoir-writing class she made it clear to her father that he would be […]

The email came just before Father’s Day last year. A young woman wanted to know how to sign her dad up for my memoir-writing class. The request made me a little nervous. What if her dad didn’t like to write? Didn’t want to write? Couldn’t write? It’d be a gift, she said. A gift for […]