Hey, it’s time to sign up for the 2015 Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, a three-day institute at the end of July that’s dedicated to the creation and revision of novels, short stories, nonfiction, and poetry. From their web site:

The program is tailored to writers of all genres, backgrounds, and levels of experience, and welcomes anyone seeking a fuller understanding of the craft — and business — of writing.

This conference is held every summer on Northwestern University’s Chicago campus, and this year I’ll be giving a workshop at 9:30 a.m. on the morning it opens: Thursday, July 30, 2015.

My 90-minute workshop is called Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground. I plan on giving a couple in-class exercises and discussing techniques to get past whatever it is that’s stopping writers from getting their work done, whether it be worries about writing as a victim, facing issues that come with writing about friends and family, or arranging writing they’ve already completed into book form. The overall emphasis will be on craft and on overcoming the barriers that keep us from writing and assembling our stories.

Each workshop at the Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference is limited to 18 participants, and organizers tell me workshops and panels are filling quickly. My friends and fellow published authors Miles Harvey and Audrey Petty are giving workshops at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 30 as well.

That’s Miles Harvey. (Photo by Matt Moyer.)

I met Miles long ago when both of us wrote for the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His first book The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime was a national and international bestseller, and a session he’ll be giving at the Northwestern conference is called Start Here: Get Your Story Started with a Map:

Writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Ursula K. Le Guin have begun their books not with an outline of the plot but with a hand-drawn map. In this workshop — open to essayists and fiction writers alike — you’ll learn how to establish setting and ignite action through the creative use of cartography.

Miles will also be leading a workshop called “The Instant Essay” where attendees will learn the basics of essay writing and get started on an essay of their own. And as if that isn’t enough, he’ll be moderating a panel about taking a Book from inception to completion, too.

As for Audrey Petty, I was introduced to her in Urbana, too. Audrey taught creative writing there, and she and I took to each other the minute we met.

Audrey was born and raised in Chicago and moved back here with her husband and their daughter a few years ago. An oral history Audrey put together of stories from residents of Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, Robert Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens and Cabrini-Green (all publicly-funded buildings here in Chicago that no longer exist) called High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing was published by Voice of Witness, the nonprofit division of McSweeney’s Books. She’s had essays published in Saveur and in a 2006 anthology of Best Food Writing, and her workshop for the Northwestern conference is called Writing about Food. Audrey will give in-class exercises and use texts by Laurie Colwin, John T Edge and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor as examples so participants can “venture out and begin their own stories and/or essays about food.”

Check out the conference schedule to learn about dozens of other workshops being presented this year — I hope to sit in on many of them myself.

A guide dog who saved his blind companion from getting hit by a bus has been getting a lot of attention in the media. And well he should! A story in yesterday’s USA Today reports that the driver of a school bus in Brewster, N.Y. told police he didn’t see Audrey Stone and her guide dog Figo crossing the road as they made their way home. After the accident, Audrey was rushed by ambulance to a hospital while the Brewster Fire Department rushed her heroic guide dog to a vet. Both were hurt, but sources say both are recovering well:

Stone, 62, suffered a fractured right elbow, three broken ribs, a fractured ankle and a cut to her head in the accident, said Brewster Police Chief John Del Gardo. Figo’s leg was cut down to the bone, said Paul Schwartz, who manages the Extra Mart gas station at the intersection and ran to the scene.

The lead to the story in USA Today claimed that Golden Retriever Figo’s “protective instincts kicked in” to save his human companion, and while that may be true, it’s only a part of it.

Guide dog schools spend months teaching dogs to pull their blind companions back should oncoming vehicles come too close, and when we humans arrive at the schools to train with our new dogs, we practice over and over and over how to react to the dogs should something like that happen.

Harper is very happy in his well-earned retirement, living with our friends Chris and Larry, and hanging out with a Collie named Beau.

I have received all four of my dogs from the Seeing Eye school. With each one I’ve stayed there in Morristown, N.J. three weeks to learn how to work with that new dog before flying back home to Chicago. After the first week of training, Seeing Eye staff start heading out in vehicles to intentionally cut in front of us, simulating the very real behavior of drivers like that bus driver in New York. All four of my dogs routinely refused to step into the street if they saw a vehicle barreling toward us, and if a car cut in front of us in the intersection, these dogs knew to pull me back from harm’s way. Otherwise they would never have been placed with a blind person as a Seeing Eye dog. All four of my dogs have saved us from multiple near misses, but the near-miss I had with my third dog Harper was too close for comfort. I’ve told this story to you blog followers before, but that article in USA Today spooked me a little, and I felt a need to repeat it.

Harper and I were at a busy Chicago intersection in 2012, and hearing cars going straight at our parallel, I commanded, “Harper, forward!” We’d taken a few steps into the intersection when a woman in a van turned the corner right in front of us.

Harper pulled us back with such force that I fell backward, cracking the back of my head on the concrete. The woman driving the van said later that she hadn’t seen us. Harper saved our lives.

My husband Mike inspected the harness later and discovered it was bent. I Suspect Harper was clipped by the car. After a near-miss like this, guide dogs will do one of three things:

1. Brush it off as to say, Hey, we almost got hit!” and just keep working
2. Need a little retraining before they get their confidence back
3. Never feel confident again and have to retire

Harper started showing fear around traffic after the near-miss. Three Seeing Eye trainers came one after another to help retrain him, but nothing worked. Harper trembled around traffic, his head down, his tail between his legs. City life had become too much for him.

The Seeing Eye staff members who’d come to visit us met in Morristown afterward to discuss Harper’s future. Could they bring him back to the Seeing Eye for retraining? Place him with some other blind person, one who lived in a calmer environment?

The head of training phoned me after their meeting. Harper would not be retrained, he said. I could go ahead and find friends to adopt him. I was crushed. So much time, energy and money had gone into training Harper. I’d hoped he could be placed with someone else so that all that effort wouldn’t have to go to waste.

Hearing the disappointment in my voice, the trainer on the other end of the phone assured me that the Seeing Eye’s hard work — and Harper’s training — had not been wasted at all. “Harper took a bullet for you,” he said. “And for that, he’s earned an early retirement.”

Last week I turned 58. The birthdays all seem to be one big blob now. The exuberant 16th, 18th and 21st are long forgotten milestones. Thirty, forty and fifty were, I guess, somewhat noteworthy. But now, I don’t think much about them. The writer Richard Ford referred to this stage of life as “the permanent period” in his novel “The Lay of the Land.” That seems about right.

It’s not that there aren’t things to look forward to. Or that every year will be the same. Or that there is no significance in 58. For one thing, I like the look and sound of the number 58 better than 57. So that’s something.

Another is that my father was 58 when he had a massive heart attack. He lived, I’m happy to say. But it took months before he recovered to the point where he could go in for quadruple bypass surgery, and then recover again. It was my first awakening to mortality, and my first full appreciation of how much I loved him, and just what a good guy he was.

So I thought about that. And I received some simple but priceless little messages—emails, texts—from my old friends, near and far. My college roommate whom I don’t see often enough. My nephew, whom I’ll never see often enough for my satisfaction. My good friends from my days living in Northern Virginia and working in D.C.

Of course, there’s Beth, who loves her birthday so much that she’s taught me how to enjoy my own. I’m always happy to see one more year together on the horizon.

And that’s what birthdays are good for these days. Gratitude. Deep, enveloping gratitude—it’s no substitute for spry youth, but spry youth isn’t a substitute for it, either. And it’s this kind of gratitude that, I think, can only be earned, felt, and understood over some significant time and living as well as one can.

This permanent period ain’t all bad.

You might recognize my friend Lynn LaPlante Allaway’s name: she is principal violist with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. Lynn wrote a guest post here after Whitney and I visited her kids’ elementary school, and your fun comments to that post helped encourage her to start a blog of her own called Backwards and in High Heels. Read these excerpts from a post she published there last Tuesday and you’ll discover that Lynn’s new blog is going to be about more than music:

One of the classrooms we visited at Lynn’s kids’ school. Hope the tooth fairy finds them when she needs to!

The title of Lynn’s June 2 post is Our Tooth Fairy Is A Lazy, Shiftless Hussy, and it starts like this:

Oh, the shame! I was walking past my kids’ room last night and on the bedroom door, there hung a note. It was addressed to our Tooth Fairy, that truant little bitch.

Here Lynn inserts a photo of the note her dauther wrote. Seeing, ahem, as I can’t see photos, I was ever-so-grateful Lynn spelled out the words on the note, too. She writes, “If you can’t decipher kids’ scrawl, here it is spellchecked, for your reading pleasure.”:

Dear Tooth Fairy,

Please come get my tooth. I have been waiting for 4 days.

From,
Sophie
Top Bunk

Lynn speakes out “on behalf of beleaguered Tooth Fairies everywhere” when she admits she didn’t even know Sophie had lost a tooth. “It apparently happened the night I had a concert, so go ahead and throw a big heap of Workin’ Mama Guilt on top of this Shame Sandwich,” She writes. “Our partially-toothless daughter had been suffering in silence, waiting patiently for three nights before she even let us know she had a tooth under her pillow!” Back to the excerpt:

When she finally told us about it, I was horrified and said many nasty things about our Tooth Fairy that I now regret: how she is unreliable; takes to drinking under stress and blacking out for days and nights on end; how after she’s been to the house to collect teeth, I notice little things, like jewelry and loose change, have gone missing. Maybe, in retrospect, I laid it on a little too thick but I wanted her to understand who we’re dealing with here.

So back to me. Is Sophie’s fairy tale ruined for life? Will she start therapy soon? Or does the tooth fairy elbow out the evil mother? Do Sophie’s GPS coordinates finally lead the fairy to the upper bunk? I guess you’ll just have to link to the shiftless hussy blog post on Backwards in High Heels to find out for yourself. Welcome to blogland, Lynnie

Forty years ago this summer I graduated from high school, I was working at the candy and nut counter at Sears at the local mall, and I spent my summer anticipating just what life at the University of Illinois would be like. I also met my newborn nephew for the first time, and changed my first diaper.

I’d never so much as dipped a toe in the ocean, and Lake Michigan was the biggest body of water I’d ever seen or swam in. But, like a gazillion other people that summer, I was terrified and mesmerized by a Great White Shark.

Ahh, the summer of 1975.

I saw Jaws at a movie theater in downtown Chicago with my high school girlfriend. It was quite the exotic date for us back then. I can still hear the collective gasp and see the simultaneous physical recoil of the entire audience when the disfigured head of an ill-fated fisherman floated down right in front of Richard Dreyfus’ character.

And I pretty much have never tired of it. It’s a running joke in our household: “Jaws is on!” I’ll say. Beth will then say “I’ll see you later.”

I cannot get enough of that movie. And I’ve been fascinated by sharks ever since seeing Jaws in 1975. Gus, Beth and I lived on the oceanfront in North Carolina in the 1990s and though I spent hours gazing at the sea, I never saw a shark. I knew they were out there, though. My fear didn’t keep me from swimming in the ocean and body surfing, though I would get a shudder from time to time thinking about a big one maybe swimming around out there.

My other lifetime fascination and terror — since childhood — has been tornadoes. I’ve had a recurring nightmare where I’m
being chased by a tornado that I just can’t shake. As with sharks, I have this deep fear but also this perverse desire to see one, for real. (I promise, though, I had nothing to do with Sharknado.)

Back to Jaws. I was thrilled to read this the other day. On the 40th anniversary of its release, Jaws is going to be shown in movie theaters across the country, including here in Chicago.

And I’m going to party like its 1975.