As writers in the memoir classes I lead master the art of writing about their lives, they find themselves with a new challenge: assembling finished stories into book form.

Still time to register at earlybird rates.

Many of my students have met that challenge. Some collected their essays into self-published books for their families, a few worked with an online company called blurb.com to assemble their essays and photos into a hard-cover book, and one couple in class is combining the essays they’ve written for class with scrapbooks they’ve assembled in their 50+ years of marriage.,

And then there’s this: one of my writers, Anna Perlberg, had her memoir, The House in Prague published in 2016 by Golden Alley Press, an independent publisher in Pennsylvania. Now Regan Burke, a writer in another class of mine who many of you know from her guest posts here on our Safe & Sound blog, has arranged her work into book form, too. Her forthcoming memoir, How I Want to Be in That Number, will be published early next year by Tortoise Books, an independent publisher here in Chicago.

I am busy now combining all I’ve learned from the successes of writers in my classes with my own experience in memoir writing to put together a memoir workshop for The Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference this year on the university’s Chicago campus.

In its 15th year now, the Summer Writers’ Conference is a three-day extravaganza of workshops, panels, keynote speakers, networking events, and literary readings. One very cool thing about the Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference is the personal attention writers get there: as long as six people register for a workshop by the time registration closes on August 11, 2019, it’s a go, and each workshop is limited to 18 participants. “Learn how to escalate your plot, write a gut wrenching story, motivate your characters, and turn your nonfiction into narrative,” the web site says. “Hear keynote presentations from award-winning authors, including Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers) and get advice from publishers, agents, literary editors, critics, and published authors in all genres.”

The conference starts August 15, 2019 and runs until August 17, 2019. My 90-minute workshop, called Getting Your Memoir off the Ground meets from 2:00 p.m. To 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, August 17, 2019, and the web site describes it like this:

Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground
with Beth Finke

Attendees of this 90-minute workshop will take away something useful to help them start, continue, and finish their memoir project. We’ll talk about the benefits of getting personal stories down on paper, do a short in-class assignment, and discuss techniques to get past whatever it is that is stopping us from getting our work done–from finding time to write to facing issues that come with writing about people we love…and those we don’t! The overall emphasis will be on craft and on overcoming the barriers that keep us from writing and assembling our stories. The session will end with a Q&A session focusing on what to do when we feel ready to publish–everything from agents to marketing and the merits of self-publishing vs. finding a traditional publisher.

You can learn more about tuition cost and registration here, and good news: if you register before July 12, 2019 you’ll get the early bird rates!

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

So begins “The Adventures of Augie March,” the Saul Bellow novel. I listened to parts of it with Beth. But only smatterings—Beth listens as we fall asleep, but she also listens on her own, so I get bits and pieces.

This blog post at Court’s web site is a great read whether or not you’ve seen the play.

We saw the play based on the novel yesterday on its final performance at Court Theatre in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago. My, my. This NY Times review is solid and fair, but I came to the play not having read the entire book, and I think when judged in its own right, the play is brilliant.

The Playbill—and the Court’s blog on the production—provided historical background that is particularly poignant in these times. Saul Bellow came with his family to the United States from Canada. He only learned he had done so illegally many years later when he tried to enlist in the armed forces. He’d been born in Canada, but his parents came to Canada from St. Petersburg, Russia, to escape persecution of Jewish people. They didn’t come to the United States until immigration policy had been dramatically tightened.

From the blog:

The Bellow family arrived on American soil two short months after the U. S. Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, a drastic and sweeping revision of federal immigration policy. The new law slammed the door on a tide of humanity that had been flowing to America since the late 19th-century, ending the greatest era of mass migration to the United States in its history.

Nora Titone, Resident Dramaturg at The Court’s, did a great job of providing historical context on Bellow in the program. It’s a worthwhile read in its own right. Meantime, see if any of this passage sounds familiar:

His whole life, Bellow retained a vivid impression of the first day he spent in America: July 4, 1924. He recalled his nine-year-old self thinking the fireworks, flags, bunting and parades of Independence Day were for him, meant to hail the promise of his new life in America.

But the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act told a less welcoming story. The law was informed by the burgeoning eugenics movement, which maintained that peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa were genetically inferior to those from Northern and Western Europe. The 1924 Act accordingly slashed immigration rates from targeted nations by 98%, barring admission to Russian Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Turks, Armenians, Lithuanians and Africans, among many others. Conspicuously, the 1924 Act left the door open to migrants from Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

All this reminded me of a germ of a thought that had randomly occurred to me earlier: In America, our views are necessarily tinted by our proximity to our immigrant forbears. My identity has always been tied up with my maternal grandparents having immigrated from Italy, and my paternal grandparents having come from Serbia. (Neither pair would’ve been admitted after the 1924 legislation. Phew.)

My immigrant lineage always has been a source of pride. These people bravely came to a crazy new world, without the language. And they made it. And their kids made it—they fought in WWII, they became teachers and steel workers and engineers.

But it’s more than that. If I’m honest, in the back of my mind, immigrants didn’t just make it here—they more or less saved the country from its staid anglo inertia, and made it great. I confess, it’s kind of a reverse snobbery.

I think for people whose families have been here much longer —say, since before the Civil War—that kind of narrative, is, well, foreign. America is their narrative, and they were nice enough to write the rest of us in to bit roles.

In terms of the outsized political divide between rural and urban America today, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people in cities tend to have different views on immigration than non-urbanites. Again, from the Playbill:

From 1880 to 1924, waves of newcomers, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe. powered the rapid growth of Chicago. The city’s population quadrupled in thirty years’ time, growing from 500,000 residents in 1880 to over 2 million in 1910. By 1924, when Bellow took up residence with his family in the Russian Jewish enclave of Humboldt Park, 70% of Chicago residents were foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents.

I don’t believe in open borders—in a perfect world, that could work, but we have a little work to do first. Immigration needs to be regulated and enforced in a humane way. But the motivation for that regulation can’t be fear and xenophobia. It can’t be based on the fantasy that there has ever been a way it should be.

A better approach: We’re always trying to get to the way it should be. And we probably need some outside help to get there.

Warning: Teaching memoir-writing is a gateway drug. I started leading a class 15 years ago. By 2011 I was leading two a week. In 2012, it grew to three. I’m up to five now.

How do I keep up the habit? By taking breaks in-between the six-week sessions. I don’t edit or give writing prompts or assignments during those breaks, but I do encourage writers to write on their own and bring those essays along to read out loud when the next six-week session begins. The class I lead at The Admiral at the Lake started its six-week summer session yesterday, and writers wowed us with essays they’d written during break about everything from skinny-dipping to weed! Writer Bill Hinchliff generously agreed to share his essay with you Safe & Sound blog readers. “I may have overused capital letters when writing it.” he warned me. “But it felt right, and it was fun to do!” Hmm. Maybe he was chewing gummi bears as he wrote this? You be the judge.

Pot Pourri

by Bill Hinchliff

As the once-great state of Illinois inches toward legalizing recreational marijuana, I recall my last summer’s experience in Colorado. Yes, the Rocky Mountain State has gone the Full Marijuana Monty — medical, recreational, customer- friendly dispensaries, giant pot farms. In short, very big business!

My own history with weed? I smoked once or twice in college and didn’t like it. Of course, had I not gone into the Air Force in the nightmare year of 1968, I might have become a true pot-head…or worse.

So, I was ready to make up for lost time in the summer of 2018 — at age 71 — while visiting my cousins in Salida, Colorado.

Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but I was certainly curious about this New World of Weed.

What kind of place is Salida? Located at 7,000 feet along the upper reaches of the Arkansas River, it really is God’s country — but also Liberal Democratic and Aging Hippie Land, at least among the most recent residents. This store window notice captures the place well :

A call to all spiritual hikers who would enjoy a 10-mile hike in the mountains.

We will stop along the way for 20 minutes to honor the Spirit of Nature with meditation, mindfulness singing or journaling.

Though I skipped this walk, the more I absorbed the Spirit of Salida, the more I felt tempted by The Call of the Weed.

I knew the slogan of the local dispensary (“Keep the Greed out of Weed”) was baloney after we drove by an enormous “Grow Facility,” or, in plain English, a marijuana factory. Huge white-fabric-covered greenhouses stretched for blocks on open land in a town that used to smelt silver and gold. Did I react with horror? Not at all. I am a red-blooded American who yearns to join the pot-rush. Hence my proposal to the weed moguls that they adopt my catchy slogan: “We’ve Made of Pot a Gold!”

And now it was time to visit one of Salida’s two dispensaries. May the euphemisms roll on: The dispensary I chose billed itself as “The Tenderfoot Health Collective.” In the first room a cheerful young woman greeted me, asked to see an ID, and invited me to check out the displays. A few minutes later she ushered me into the Inner Sanctum, where another chirpy young woman explained the merchandise: candies, cookies, pot cigarettes etc. When she learned I was a novice (almost a virgin!) she cautioned me to avoid the most potent stuff. I chose a $25 bottle of moderately dope-infused gummi bears. When I asked if I would have trouble taking it home on the train, her expression darkened. “I have no idea,” she said “You are on your own.”

I am happy to report the train posed no problems. Back home I offered a “bear” or two to selected friends, some of whom reported blissful experiences. I am already taking orders for this summer’s visit. One friend calls me the “Windy mule!”

As for the effect on me, the “bears” tasted good, and I think I noticed a mild buzz. But the earth did not move.

I was out with a friend last week who takes a healthy interest in exactly what makes people tick. She didn’t know me earlier in life, when I could see, and said she couldn’t help but wonder. “Do you think your personality changed when you went blind?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t find the question offensive, I just didn’t have an answer, so I brushed it off with a laugh. ”You should ask Mike that,” I said, certain he’d know better than I would (Mike and I celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary this year, and I lost my sight a year after we got married).

The question has been on my mind off and on since then. What does personality mean, exactly? What would you say if a friend asked you to describe your personality? Would you keep it simple, use words like shy, ambitious, angry, pleasant, that sort of thing? If I could only use one word to describe what my personality was when I could see, I’d say I was “outgoing.”

I’m still outgoing now, but to be that way when you can’t see other people, say, at a crowded party (where it’s hard to move around to schmooze), or out with friends at loud restaurants (where it’s hard to know if someone is talking to you without seeing their lips moving) I need to be resourceful. So did blindness change my personality from outgoing to resourceful?

Contemporary personality psychologists believe there are five core personality traits. Researchers don’t always agree on the exact labels for each personality trait, but I’m going with these five. Why? Because you can use the acronym OCEAN to remember them:

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extroversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Using those words, I suppose I displayed more extroversion when I could see, and I display more conscientiousness now. But then there’s this: Can we really determine what our own personality is? Maybe that’s better left for others to judge.

Years ago a local newspaper reporter at an event I was doing at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn discovered that one of the workers there, Jenny Fischer, has been friends of mine since high school. “Was Beth funny when she could see?” he asked her. “Or did she get a sense of humor after she lost her sight?”

My sister Bev is the one closest to me in age, and she marvels at my ability to get around on my own in Chicago. “You were scared of everything when we were little, “she says, describing the little Beth who wouldn’t swim in deep water, didn’t climb trees, wouldn’t play on the schoolyard jungle gym and was too scared to go down the big slide at the park. “One winter I tried to teach you to ice skate backwards, You wouldn’t even try,” she said. “And now look at you.”

Jenny told the reporter I was always funny in high school. That means my personality didn’t change. But Bev says I’m fearless now, so maybe my personality did change when I lost my sight.

I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

One of the first ride-shares I ever used picked me up near the University of Illinois-Chicago Hospital west of the Loop. Destination: 401 N. Michigan. The driver slavishly adhered to the GPS directions. And he took us into hellacious traffic that I calculated to have been pretty easily avoidable, and lacking that, escapable. Finally, he said, “It says we’re here.”

Well, kind of. We were at LowerWacker Drive and Michigan. For non-Chicagoans, that’s a cave-like intersection below anything you see on The Magnificent Mile. He didn’t know the difference. From there I opened the door and got out of the ride from hell, gladly taking the rusty old stairs up to daylight.

I drive pretty infrequently these days, and it seems like it’s getting more randomly dangerous out there on the road virtually each time. I lay part of that on Ubers and Lyfts—when someone does an ill-advised U-turn without realizing I’m driving right behind them, it most often is a ride share car. Ditto vehicles stopped in the worst possible places to stop—their drivers are looking for their next customer, oblivious.

But the robotic adherence to GPS directions is hardly only an Uber/Lyft phenomenon. Everybody’s doing it, doing it. And apart from triggering bad driving behavior, it may be making us stupider.

A little while ago, the Washington Post ran an article headlined “Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain.” The writer does a great job of explaining and summarizing a very sophisticated research paper that was originally published in the journal Nature. (That one is titled Hippocampal and prefrontal processing of network topology to simulate the future. Phew.)

It seems that when we navigate without the aid of GPS, we’re stimulating, exercising, and even growing the vitally important part of our brain called the hippocampus.

From the Post article:

The hippocampus is crucial to many aspects of daily life. It allows us to orient in space and know where we are by creating cognitive maps. It also allows us to recall events from the past, what is known as episodic memory. And, remarkably, it is the part of the brain that neuroscientists believe gives us the ability to imagine ourselves in the future.

Studies have long shown the hippocampus is highly susceptible to experience. (London’s taxi drivers famously have greater gray-matter volume in the hippocampus as a consequence of memorizing the city’s labyrinthine streets.) Meanwhile, atrophy in that part of the brain is linked to devastating conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. Stress and depression have been shown to dampen neurogenesis — the growth of new neurons — in the hippocampal circuit.

We apparently hit our peak of navigation skills at 19 years old (what’s new!). But wait, there’s good news:

“…neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot has found that using spatial-memory strategies for navigation correlates with increased gray matter in the hippocampus at any age. She thinks that interventions focused on improving spatial memory by exercising the hippocampus — paying attention to the spatial relationships of places in our environment — might help offset age-related cognitive impairments or even neurodegenerative diseases.

At some intuitive level, it seems reasonable that by routinely ceding one of our brain’s activities to our tech gadgets, we could be getting dumber.

Now obviously, GPS can be extremely useful. But maybe after I do my crossword puzzle each day, I’ll start studying maps, too.