Last week I asked my downtown Chicago group of memoir-writers to come up with 500-word essays titled What Makes Me Happy. “Don’t come back with lists, or with vague things like ‘family and friends’,” I said. I asked them to write about an event from the past couple weeks that left them feeling fresh, energized, […]

Every week is a history lesson: Two writers in my memoir classes marched in Selma, a writer in one class was at Woodstock, and this one was at the 1963 MLK march in DC.

Four different editors at University of Illinois Press went over the rough draft of my memoir before they published it. All of them suggested changes. One of the most common request? Stronger verbs. They also wanted descriptions that were more precise, more colorful, more heartfelt. Now, 12 years after my memoir, Long Time, No See […]

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

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 […]