This just in! The Hinsdalean newspaper did a great article on our visit. You can read it here if you want to get another point of view on our class visit.   Whitney and I spent an entire day last week with sixth-graders at Clarendon Hills Middle School (CHMS). I’ve visited students at hundreds of […]

If you ask me, the best way to enjoy my new book is to hear it…out loud. So now’s your chance: The audio version of “Writing Out Loud” is now available at Amazon.com. And Audible.com, too I would have liked to have narrated the audio book myself, but I’m not good at reading Braille and talking […]

This week I asked writers in my memoir classes to put together 500-word essays about the best thing they ever bought, borrowed or stole. Essays came back about a yoyo, a wedding dress, college educations, a maternity dress, a black walnut dining table, condos with lake views, a black leather jacket, artwork, a stylish mmauve […]

When I assigned “Spirits” as a writing prompt over the Halloween weekend, I expected the writers in my memoir classes to come back with stories of living in houses that were haunted, going to psychics, reading Tarot Cards, seeing ghosts or visits from the “other side.” Instead, I heard essays about team spirit, kindred spirits, […]

When I fell a couple winters ago and broke some fingers in my left hand, I started toying around with a dictation feature on the iPhone. The microphone next to the space bar on the keyboard is far more accurate than Siri, and last month I showed an 80-year-old writer in one of the memoir-writing […]