I already published a post earlier this week letting you know that to help celebrate the return of Printers Row Lit Fest this year Seeing Eye dog Luna and I will be sitting in front of Sandmeyer’s, our favorite local bookstore at 1:00 p.m. today (Saturday) signing books alongside Regan Burke, author of In That Number, (Tortoise Books, 2020). So my plan for this morning was to write and publish an ode to the return of our beloved book festival.

The view on Friday night in 2018, with everything ready to go.

But then Brian Hieggelke, editor of New City Chicago, published a love letter to Printers Row Lit Fest a few days ago that reflected my own sentiments about the annual festival so beautifully that I thought, well, why Bother?

Some back story: Newcity Today is such a well-written and well -organized daily reminder of all cool things going on in Chicago that I subscribe and donate to the newsletter. If you have any interest in Chicago arts, artists, architecture, theater, culture, museums, dining, drinking, film, media, television, music, literature, or festivals I encourage you to subscribe and/or make a donation to Newcity Chicago publications too.

But back to Brian Hieggelke. I enjoyed his love letter to the annual book fair so much that I contacted him to ask if he’d allow me to share that letter here. lucky for you loyal Safe & Sound blog readers, he said yes! Thank you Brian, and here’s that Newcity Today letter from the edition he published earlier this week:

Every day we report on the return of another cultural event, to the point where it starts becoming normal rather than news. But I am personally excited by the return of Printers Row Lit Fest this weekend (see Cultural News below for details), as we’ve grown up together—both Newcity and the book fair started within a year of each other in the South Loop. Over the years we’ve been involved with the event in too many ways to list here, and have become friends, not only with many of the writers who will be speaking, but with just about everyone connected to it.

We live and work right above it, so we have a relationship with the fair that is quite tangible. We awaken in the morning to the bustle of booksellers setting up their booths, listen all day long to the din of the crowd blended with the music of children’s or other cultural programming and finish our weekend listening to the clanking of the crews breaking down the booths into the night as they pack them away for next year. See you (and hear you) Saturday!
Brian Hieggelke

Printers Row Lit Fest is back! I’ll be sitting with Luna the Seeing Eye dog in front of Sandmeyer’s, our favorite local bookstore at 1:00 this Saturday afternoon, September 11 to chat with passers-by and sign books for any and all interested bookworms.

Sandmeyer’s first honored me with a spot at their table way back when my children’s book Safe & Sound was published and Printer’s Row Lit Fest was still called Printer’s Row Book Fair. They’ll have copies of Safe & Sound available at our table for me and Luna to sign, along with Long Time, No See and my most recent book, Writing Out Loud.

But wait. There’s more! Published author Regan Burke (a writer in one of the memoir-writing classes I lead here in Chicago) will be at the table with Seeing eye dog Luna and me, too, signing copies of her new memoir, In That Number, published by Tortoise Books.

September 11 (Saturday) 1pm
Sandmeyer’s Bookstore
714 S. Dearborn St.
Chicago, IL 60605
Phone: 312-922-2104

It’s pretty swell to live in a neighborhood that devotes an entire festival to books every year, and having it cancelled last year was a bummer. Sitting in front of Sandmeyer’s Bookstore for Printer’s Row Lit Fest has become an annual ritual for me, and I’m really looking forward to being back there this Saturday to celebrate and share Regan’s success. If you’re free this weekend, please join us outside in front of Sandmeyer’s . If you can’t get here by 1 pm, you can catch Regan at the Tortoise Books table later Saturday afternoon at 2:30 pm.

The Chicago Public Library (CPL) has asked me to lead a free four-part virtual memoir-writing workshop,.and The first class starts Tuesday, September 14 at 2 pm central time. and then at 2 pm every Tuesday up to and including October 5, 2021. You don’t have to be a Chicago resident to register, anyone anywhere can attend – we’re meeting via Zoom.The four-part CPL workshop is intended for people who are just starting to think about memoir-writing and will be much different than the weekly memoir-writing classes I’ve been leading all these years. Rather than giving assignments, editing, and asking workshop participants to read 500-word essays out loud in class, I plan on focusing the four-part CPL workshop on the merits and process of writing memoir … and ways to get started. Here’s an excerpt from the description on the Chicago Public Library site:

Award-winning author, journalist and teacher, Beth Finke teaches the craft of memoir and first-person narratives in this four-part writing workshop, answering common questions about getting started, the difference between autobiography and memoir, exposing family secrets, using pen names and pseudonyms, writer’s block, researching, organizing your work, self-publishing and working with publishers. A fun and easy-going workshop to discover ways friends,  family, celebrations, milestones, moments and place can be catalysts for unlocking memories and uncovering stories.

Chicago Public Library will provide us with 75 minutes on Zoom each week, but it’s unlikely classes will last that long — the plan is for me to start each week with a short talk, then open up to discussion, questions and comments from participants.

Want to attend? Register here and you will receive an email with a link to the secure Zoom meeting about 24 hours before each meeting. Zoom you there!

Questions about attending online events like these at CPL? Check out the Chicago Public Library Events faq page.

My mom, Esther Knezovich, nee Latini, taught school for decades. Mostly first and second grade. And she never took her teacher hat off.

The Great Santini? The Great Latini. Somewhere she’s watching, and ready to point out a typo in this post.

If she heard something ungrammatical on a commercial, or if a news anchor used a bad sentence structure, or say, her son used the wrong word, well, she was never shy. She yelled at the TV or she was quick to correct my poor diction.

Not sure if I’m sorry or glad to have inherited her finickyness about language. It’s served me well in my professional life. But in recent times, as in, pretty much since the internet, the language police gene just gives me a headache. As in, why bother? Or I GIVE UP!

Back in the day when I walked barefoot through snowdrifts to get to my unheated school house … actually, back in the day when I was working in the publications department at the University of Illinois, designers cut and pasted colored paper to create a mocked-up design called a comp (for comprehensive sketch). Once we agreed on a design, they’d give us word counts for every single item in the publication.

We used IBM PCs with WordPress to write our stuff. We’d print pieces out in typewriter font, and then a copyeditor would mark it up. We’d enter the changes and send it to service bureau, and that company would send back nice, slick, typeset copy. If the copy was clean after proofreading, the designers would cut the type and pasted it onto sheets that would be shot photographically and converted to printing plates.

If the typeset copy was NOT clean, we sent it back to the service bureau for what was called author’s alterations. That is, it was our mistake, not theirs, so the author paid. Well, our university department paid.

That painstaking process and the literal cost of error seems mindboggling in retrospect, but it enforced a disciplined carefulness.

Welp, desktop publishing, web sites, instant messaging, social media—fuhgeddaboudit carefulness. We’ve all seen bad typos from the most respected online publications. The ability to change things on the fly or fix them on the fly has eroded whatever it was I learned at my Illinois job.

But still I persist. And gripe. For example, one thing that drives me loopy is people using postal abbreviations for state names in the middle of text. For example:

Betsy first lived in Reno, NV, but moved to Springfield, IL. Now she wants to move again.

No, no, no.

Better to use the AP’s updated guidance and simply spell out names of states, whether or not they’re used in conjunction with a city name. Chicago Style also now spells out state names. They differ, I think, in when abbreviations can be used (lists, tables, etc.). The postal codes should only be used in…postal addresses!

Inner Esther still lives.

My friend Bill Green can see a little bit. I can’t see at all. The two of us have known each other for years, and a trip to Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood three weeks ago marked the first time we’ve actually worked together.

If you call getting a personal tour of Chicago’s new Pullman National Monument work, that is.

Let me explain. After learning of our involvement with the Chicago Cultural Access Consortium, The President & CEO of Museum Partners in Virginia emailed each of us, introducing herself as a museum consultant. She said she was working with an exhibit fabrication firm, and that firm had created an audio-described tour for the Visitor’s Center at the National Park Site.

”They would like it tested by two people,” she said, explaining that the site would be having its grand opening on Labor Day this year ,and they needed one tester to have low vision, the other to be totally blind. “They primarily want feedback on the directional aspect of the tour, she wrote. “But any feedback is welcome.”

Exhibit fabrication? Museum consultant? “Directional aspect” of a tour? I had no idea what those words meant, but I knew I qualified in the “totally blind” category. And once I got to the part of the note that said, “We will provide lunch,” I was in. During our six hours there, I learned :

• How the U.S. National Park Service ended up opening a site in Chicago’s historic Pullman neighborhood, (President Obama designated Pullman as a National Monument on February 19, 2015)
• Pullman was the first model, planned industrial community in the United States
• In its time, Pullman Company was one of the most famous company towns in the United States, and
• In the late 19th century, Pullman was the scene of the violent 1894 Pullman strike.

My ability to retain all that information three weeks after my visit supports the idea that the “directional aspect” of the tour works, don’t you think?! Before our visit, all I really knew about Pullman was that they were the ones who hired the Pullman Porters, the sleeping car porters Wanda bridgeforth talks about in stories she writes for our “Me, Myself & I” memoir-writing class. Pullman was the largest employer of Blacks in the country when she was a kid, and the greatest concentration of Pullman porters lived in the neighborhoods she’d grown up in on Chicago’s South Side. “Pullman only hired Black’s as Porters,” she told me, and on my visit to the national site I learned that, in its heyday, Pullman was the nation’s largest employer of African Americans.

What? Pullman had strong beliefs in social justice? Afraid not. He’d simply reasoned that newly-freed slaves and their sons and grandsons would make excellent servicemen who would work for long hours at little pay. Exhibits at the national site talk about the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and how they became the first Black labor union in the United States chartered under the American Federation of Labor, an extremely important step in African American Civil Rights.

That I have retained a lot of what I learned at the Pullman Porter exhibits should tell you the audio description was pretty good, too. Still, most of what I know specifically about the Pullman Porters comes directly from Wanda Bridgeforth.

Wanda’s father and her five uncles grew up near the train station in Jackson, Mississippi, and Wanda writes how the Pullman Porters’ practice of bringing copies of The Defender,  — Chicago’s Black weekly — encouraged her relatives to migrate north (they’d find out about available jobs and housing in Chicago by reading the paper).

Porters were happy to deliver goods from the south to friends and family north of the Mason-Dixon line, too. Wanda loves to share how her Grandma Lula Johnson in Jackson would regularly bake birthday cakes for her offspring in Chicago and send them north with a porter. Wanda’s favorite uncle, Hallie B., would head to Chicago’s 12th Street Station on every birthday, collect the cake, and hand-deliver it to the birthday party here in Chicago. “The porters all knew my Grandma Lula,” Wanda laughs.

The National APR Pullman Porter Museum at the National Pullman Monument is dedicated to African American labor history. My time at the National Pullman Monument reminded me what a privilege it is to learn history directly from the people who lived it. Like Wanda.

PS: At 6 p.m. tonight (Thursday, August 26) you can Zoom in and hear a 2018 StoryCorps Chicago conversation I had with Wanda Bridgeforth  followed by a live Q&A with emcee Nestor Gomez asking me about my friendship with her. All free of charge, and all part of the StoryCorps Chicago Listening Event Finale tonight from 6 pm to 7:30 pm. Tune in!