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!

A view of the park from our unit. The trees at the top are hiding the fountain.

When we moved into our condo in Chicago’s Printers Row neighborhood in 2004, there was a mangy little parking lot just to the south of our building, immediately below our window. But a mangy little parking lot was OK. Some of our neighbors bought a place with a view only to have it blocked by new hi-rises. Before we moved here, some developers had proposed a hi-rise on that space, but a group of committed neighborhood residents fought it and won. As a result, our unit still has a nice little view.

In 2009, the Chicago Park District, which bought the mangy lot, combined it with a tiny little plaza to the south that was the site of a decorative fountain. The result: Printers Row Park. In fact, it’s more of a plaza. It’s got benches and a little green space and some greenery and its landscape architecture is a clever homage to the days when the neighborhood was home to printers and adjunct businesses. Plus, the Park District refurbished the fountain—which had seen better days, and that alone was quite an improvement.

The park has always been a welcome addition–on Saturdays in spring, summer and fall, it’s the home of a farmers market. Beth and I have always been regulars at the market, but otherwise, she and I mostly walked by it rather than stop and sit and use it.

Until the pandemic lockdown. Then it became an oasis for us and our friends. With camp chairs and portable tables and maybe a festive beverage or two (it’s technically not allowed in parks), we’d gather for outdoor get togethers. We weren’t alone—groups regularly gathered with lawn chairs—it was a social oasis.

The fountain.

It didn’t stop when winter arrived—more than once we put our down jackets on to meet with friends at the park.

If we got one good thing out of the pandemic, it was a change in habit. Now we regularly use the park for get togethers. For some of us, that’s out of necessity. Two couples have to essentially act as if the lockdown is still on. One friend has two transplanted lungs and a transplanted kidney. He’s vaccinated, but vaccines are less effective in folks like him who take immunosuppressants. The stakes are high, so he and his wife have to be more careful than the likes of me a Beth.

Same goes for another friend, who is being treated for cancer, and her husband.

With very specific exceptions, we only see these people outdoors, and the park is a godsend. Last night was a summer potluck with a gourmet green bean salad, a caprese salad, fresh fruit, cheese, and salami.

Oh, and wine.

Beth was pouring herself a glass of white when one of our friends said, “Uh oh. There are two cops headed straight toward us.”

Beth said out loud, “Oh, I gotta put this away quick…”. As she scrambled to put the bottle back into her bag, one of the officers, a barrel-chested guy, said, quietly, “Not quick enough.” (He seemed to get a chuckle out of it.) But he and his partner walked right by us toward a group of kids who were doing skateboarding tricks on a ramp they’d set up. They were videotaping each other’s feats. The cops politely broke it up. (Lest you think it was heavy handed, there’s a very cool skateboarding park nearby. And the kids use one of the benches as a prop, scraping it up.)

As they walked past us back to their cruiser, the same cop said, “You’re gotta to be quicker next time,” with a smile on his face, and they got in and drove away.

P.S. The Printers Row Fountain needs another round of cosmetic and mechanical restoration. The Printers Row Park Advisory Council, a group of local citizens, is raising money to help with the costs. If you’re a local, or if you just like fountains, you can chip in here.

Here’s a story with a sad beginning…and a happy ending.

A letter I received late last Spring from the good folks at the Chicago StoryCorps booth alerted me to yet another change to accept here in Chicago.

That’s Wanda Bridgeforth and me after recording our StoryCorps conversation. The two of us are always happy to be together, can you tell? Photo courtesy StoryCorps.

Dear Beth,
We’re writing to share that after eight years at the Chicago Cultural Center, this September we will be ceasing operations at the Chicago StoryBooth.

Since we first opened in 2013, StoryCorps Chicago has recorded and preserved more than 4,000 facilitated interviews, including yours.

We are grateful to the Chicago Cultural Center and DCASE; to our Chicago-based funders; to WBEZ, our local station partner, and producer Bill Healy; to the many organizations we’ve partnered with which have enabled us to preserve so many voices of Chicago; and of course, to the Chicago participants like you who have shared their stories with us.

With gratitude,
The StoryCorps Chicago Team

In the eight years that StoryCorps was located here in Chicago, three conversations I recorded in the StoryBooth aired on Chicago Public Radio. Two were conversations with writers who were in the memoir-writing classes I lead:

1. In 2017 I interviewed Giovanna Breu. a retired journalist who had a long career with Life, Giovanna had covered the funeral and burial of President John F. Kennedy for the magazine in 1962.
2. In 2019, StoryCorps recorded a conversation I had with Wanda Bridgeforth. Among many other things Wanda talked about during that interview, she outlined the boundaries she grew up with on Chicago’s South Side. “When I was a kid, if you crossed east on Cottage Grove Avenue, a policeman would come out of nowhere, ask where you were going and escort you right back across the street.”

And then in 2019, when StoryCorpscontacted my friend Nancy Faust, the renowned retired White Sox baseball organist to see if she’d be willing to let them record a conversation with her in the Chicago StoryCorps booth, Nancy agreed “as long as Beth Finke is the one who interviews me.” What fun that interview was, and what an honor to be the interviewer Nancy Faust insisted on. The conversations with Wanda Bridgeforth and with Nancy Faust are now featured in two separate posts on their StoryCorps blog.

But wait. There’s more! Yesterday I received additional good –and very flattering – news.Here’s their letter:

As you may know, the Chicago StoryCorps booth has now closed its doors for the public at the Chicago Cultural Center, and we’re moving on with a final listening event. We chose to feature your conversation with Wanda and other memorable stories for this closing virtual event on August 26th from 6:00pm -7:3-pm hosted by Nestor Gomez. Would you be available to join us for a Q&A for this event?

No specifics yet about how you can tune in to the listening event, or what I have to do to participate, but You know me: I said yes. I also mentioned that while I haven’t been face-to-face with Wanda since March of 2020, we do keep in touch by phone. You Safe & Sound readers already know I have Wanda to thank for us getting so much positive attention from StoryCorps –she’s a superstar!

My appreciation goes out to Amy Tardif, Regional Manager of the Chicago StoryBooth for listening, to Bill Healy, the talented producer and great guy who put together the StoryCorps conversations that aired on WBEZ, and to the entire StoryCorps Chicago team. Thanks for the memories!