A deadly heat wave hit Chicago twenty years ago. WBEZ (Chicago Public Media) aired stories about the 1995 heatwave all this week, and when I heard they were looking for personal stories from listeners who’d survived the heat wave I encouraged my niece Janet to send one in. “If WBEZ doesn’t use it, I’ll publish it on our blog. Chicago Public Media’s loss is Safe & Sounds’ gain. Here’s my niece with a guest post about what she was doing 20 years ago.

Janet and her newborn daughter, Anita, 20 years ago.

by Janet May Sterling

During the Heat Wave of 1995, I lived alone in an apartment in Waukegan with a broken air conditioner. I was 25 years old, getting a divorce, and nine months pregnant.

I worked full-time as a Foster Care Worker serving Lake and Cook Counties, and every day I’d see that I was one of many, many who didn’t have working air conditioning. My landlord was sympathetic, but I was on a waiting list for repairs.

So, after work, I would fill my bathtub with ice water and sit in there for hours. I listened to the news on the radio while I was in the tub, and I remember feeling fortunate that I at least had access to finding some relief.

Day after day I’d soak in that tub after work listening to the news on the radio, and day after day more and more people were dying from the heat. Some evenings after my bath I’d head over to Walgreen’s and just walk around the store for an hour or two. The store’s air conditioning was working just fine!

Twenty years later, Anita’s hitting jump shots for North Central College’s basketball team.

I was a very healthy young pregnant woman, and on July 19, 1995, my daughter Anita Lynn Sterling was born. When we came home from the hospital, my apartment was nice and cool. The repairs were done! Today Anita plays basketball on her college team and is majoring in Sports Management.

Anita turns 20 today, and you can read more about her basketball success (and see photos of her in action) on this post her great Uncle Mike wrote about Title IX last year. Janet raised Anita on her own before marrying hardworking fun-loving Mike Czerwinski, and now Justin, Floey and Ray have Anita as a big sister. At twenty years old, Anita is a caring, loving, talented, witty and, dare I say warm young woman we are all proud of. Happy birthday, dear Anita. Happy birthday to you!

This book would likely have been a lot different if it’d been published in my 20s.

Many of the fledgling memoirists who sign up for my 90-minute Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground workshop at Northwestern Summer Writers Institute on July 30 will be younger than the seniors in the memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago. When I address groups like this, I can count on one of the writers asking what age you should be before writing a memoir. Can a writer reflect on life experiences without putting some distance on them first?

I don’t know.

With that question in mind, though, an essay in the July 6, 2015 New York Times Sunday Book Review caught my eye. Or, okay, my ear. The woman who wrote the essay had a memoir published when she was 29 years old. She says that in her twenties she was convinced that any event in her life that seemed taboo or inappropriate absolutely must be included in her memoir:

So I shared how, at the age of 9, I made out with a neighborhood companion. How at 15, I implored my boyfriend to have sex. How I stole my mother’s lingerie, and wore it while humping a door frame.

Now, thirteen years after her memoir Dress Codes was published, the author says the tell-all nature of her first book is complicating her life as a parent. “For example, if my middle-school-age daughter ever asks me when I lost my virginity, I have to tell her the truth,” she writes.  “After all, it’s searchable on Google Books.”

The essayist concedes that by definition, younger memoirists do lack perspective, but that whatever they lack in perspective, they “make up in urgency, the sense that here is a story that must be told.” More from her Sunday Book Review essay:

If I’d waited to sprout gray hairs before writing my book, I might have eliminated a handful of excruciating details from my text, to the delight of my parents, ex-boyfriends and a few commenters on Goodreads.com. But I might also have skirted unpleasant truths in other ways too. Being honest about something troubling or taboo is easier when you have little to lose.

Hmmmmm.

I’m a huge proponent of memoir-writing. I know first-hand that getting life stories down on paper can be therapeutic. I was in my twenties and losing my sight when a social worker suggested I get my thoughts down on paper. Writing proved to be cheap therapy for me at the time. The journal pieces I wrote were a priceless resource years later, when I started composing a memoir.

Long Time, No See, was published when I was in my forties, and reviewers commented on how frank and honest my writing was. The book definitely benefitted from perspective — and lots of editing.

So gee, maybe the answer is sure, go ahead and start a memoir when you’re in your 20s. Just don’t publish it until you’re older.

Been cogitating on a bunch of stuff since last weekend, which saw hundreds of thousands of Grateful Dead fans come to our neck of the woods. I started on one topic but it sort of got out of control so I’m backing off and am going to keep it short here.

The upshot is what most of us know, whatever our self-identified political stripe is: politics gets so stupid that we’re never talking about what works and what doesn’t, at least in a rational, evidence-based way. Everything is reduced to symbols, moral finger-wagging, fear, hate, ad hominem attacks—you know the drill.

I think we can agree reducing teen pregnancy is a good thing. Then why not do it?

But there are people working to solve intractable problems—and they’re doing things that seem to be working. Here are articles about two of them:

• In Colorado, providing young women long-term birth control has cut the rate of teen pregnancy by 40 percent (and reduced abortions by 35 percent). Read this piece in The Washington Post—I did and I also read some other pieces about it, and it doesn’t seem to be an illusion. So, to those squawking about the demise of the traditional family, and abortion, if you really care, you should at least consider this solution.
• In Utah, The New Yorker reports those crazies out there are reducing homelessness by—drum roll—giving people places to live. Yes, yes, it unnerves all of us who obsess about anyone getting anything free—but read it. It makes perfect sense. Provide some stability up front to a homeless person and that person has a much greater chance of maintaining that stability than they ever do attaining it in the first place. When you’re homeless, it’s tough to solve problems.

These are great efforts that yield long-lasting benefits. To everyone. There’s hope, but we’ve got to neutralize the numbskulls somehow.

Earlier this summer I spoke at a memorial service for a writer in one of the memoir writing classes I lead at Lincoln Park Village. This week a thank-you note arrived from her daughter, and along with the note she included a copy of an essay her mother had written when I assigned “I Have a Dream” as a topic in class.

The grandmother who wrote that essay in2010 started in this downtown Chicago class. Later she attended my class in Lincoln park Village.

The writer addressed that essay to her first grandchild, due to be born a month later. That baby’s upcoming birth was already a dream come true, and the writer used her 500 words to outline her dreams for herself as a grandmother, and her dreams for her new grandchild, too.

That grandchild is four years old now and was able to know her beautiful grandmother. What a gift that essay is for that little girl, and for me, too.

Mike read the essay out loud when it arrived in the mail, and it brought back vivid memories of that writer overflowing with joy when she first read it in class. What a joy for me to hear it again and discover just how many of her dreams had come true before she died this year.

That essay in the mail confirmed what I already know – getting our life-stories down on paper not only helps us keep our minds and memories fresh, it also enriches the lives of our families and friends who will have them to cherish long after we’re gone.

All four of the memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago are back in session this week after a short summer siesta. Both classes I lead for Lincoln Park Village are full, as is the “Me, Myself, and I” memoir-writing class I lead at Renaissance Court in the Chicago Cultural Center.

But wait! There’s hope! You don’t need to attend a class to start writing your life stories, and you don’t even need a computer – a pen and paper will do. But if you’re someone who needs a deadline, or appreciates an assigned topic, or enjoys meeting regularly with other writers to share written stories out loud, the Thursday morning class I lead in Printer’s Row still has three two openings!

That class meets on the second floor of Grace Place (637 S. Dearborn, Chicago) on Thursday mornings at 10 a.m., and the next six-week session starts this Thursday, July 16, 2015. You don’t have to live in Printer’s Row to attend this class – our neighborhood is a cinch to get to with public transportation. You can register on line for the Printers Row class or email me at info@bethfinke.com to find out how to register and pay by check.

Maybe I’m being too harsh? I can’t see? So it’s possible I rely too heavily on the way things sound? I’m walking down the street? Or sitting at our local tavern? Hackneys? And people around me talk? As if they aren’t sure what they’re saying? They ask questions? But never pause for an answer?

By now you’ve all experienced this upspeak phenomenon, but Tuesday’s Fresh Air interview on NPR gave me a new perspective on it all. Terry Gross interviewed Susan Sankin, one of the voice experts featured in a new documentary called Do I Sound Gay? The film was produced by David Thorpe, a gay man who had a problem with his voice — he thought it sounded annoying and stereotypically gay. Thorpe narrates the film, which follows him as he looks for insights and advice from experts and talks to gay friends about his voice and their voices. He also talks to several gay people with very familiar voices, including David Sedaris, Tim Gunn and Dan Savage.

In the interview Terry Gross asked Thorpe and Sankin, a language and speech pathologist, what they thought were the distinctive qualities of the “gay voice.” Their answers:

• dentalizing the “S” sound
• overexaggeration
• hanging onto vowels
• upspeak

“Upspeak is that tendency to kind of speak in that way where you’re going up makes your voice sound a little bit musical,” Sankin said. “I think that’s what people associate with a gay sound to some degree.” From the interview:

GROSS: So you’re hearing that more in men and women, and in girls and boys? SANKIN: The upspeak, definitely. Initially when I heard it, it was among younger women. It seems now, though, that men have caught on as well. It’s just across the genders, it’s across age categories, and it’s become as contagious as the common cold.

Sankin explained how she had filmmaker David Thorpe read the Gettysburg Address so he’d understand and hear how much more authoritative and assertive he’d sound if he didn’t speak that way. She said upspeak makes people sound very immature and very unsure of themselves. Four Score? And seven years ago? Our forefathers Brought forth? On this continent? A new nation? Conceived in Liberty? “It’s almost as if they’re asking for approval.”

And so, just for fun, let’s end by rewriting my first paragraph with more declarative punctuation. Tell me how it sounds.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. I can’t see, so it’s possible I rely too heavily on the way things sound. I’m walking down the street, or sitting at our local tavern, Hackney’s, and people around me talk as if they aren’t sure what they’re saying. They ask questions, but never pause for an answer.