In the Chicago area? No big plans tonight? Come to Access Living (115 W Chicago Avenue) at 6:30 pm for a book presentation. Regan Burke, one of the writers from my memoir-writing classes whose stories intertwine with mine in my latest book, Writing Out Loud, will be interviewing me on stage about teaching and writing memoir.
Access Living is a leading force in the disability advocacy community, and Regan, a lifelong civil rights activist, is a proud supporter of those efforts. She was Bill Clinton’s scheduler during his presidential campaign and left Chicago to work in his administration for a few years. Back home and retired now, she’s been taking memoir-writing classes nearly five years and is working with a publisher to compile her colorful — and moving — stories into a full-blown memoir.
Our goal tonight is to keep the conversation short, sweet, and lively — Regan and I are the warm-up band for renowned disability advocate and writer Riva Lehrer. Riva works at Access Living, is an adjunct professor in Medical Humanities at Northwestern University, and was born with spina bifida. Her work focuses on issues of physical identity and cultural depictions of disability, and she’ll be reading from her memoir, Golem Girl, which will be published by Penguin/Random House next year. The event is free, and the space is accessible. Come on down!
Greetings from Milwaukee, where Beth, Whitney, and I have just boarded Amtrak’s Hiawatha, which will begin rolling toward Chicago any minute now.
We had a good visit with our son Gus at his group home in Wisconsin in a town called Watertown. The home is operated by Bethesda Lutheran Services, and it houses eight people, with a split floor plan where four live on one side, and four on the other—it’s like a connected duplex. The residents have varying levels of developmental and physical disabilities so the staff has its hands full but, valiantly, they manage.
People in show biz unions practiced a little polka before the parade began.
Gus’ birthday is actually today, but we celebrated during our visit yesterday. As is our custom, we ordered a boatload of Chinese food to be delivered for the residents and staff to share—it gives the staff a break from cooking. In the past, while Beth’s mom Flo was still here, she’d mail us a card with money to help pay for the meal as a birthday present—it’s a tradition that Beth’s sister Cheryl has continued. Somewhere Flo smiles about that.
Gus turns 32 today—something of a wonder considering that on the evening of the day he was born his doctor told us Gus had a 50-50 chance of making it through the night. I’m awfully proud of our son.
Our typical visit starts with a walk to Union Station, boarding the northbound Hiawatha, grabbing a nearby Zipcar when we arrive in Milwaukee, driving to see Gus, returning to Milwaukee to drop off the car and checking in at whatever hotel we can get a good deal on.
It’s sort of automatic now, and we’ve come to know Milwaukee pretty well—it’s a great break from Chicago. But there was something different this time when we got out of the train station. It was a nice day, and on nice days it’s routine to see a lot of motorcycles, and especially Harley-Davidsons—Milwaukee being the company’s headquarters and all.
But they were everywhere. They swarmed to roaring stops at intersections. Above the roar, some—with giant rolling sound systems—blared music. Well, it was Harley-Davidson’s 115thbirthday celebration. Dozens and dozens parked in front of coffee shops and watering holes. Dozens constantly roaring and whooshing by us. Who knew? We didn’t, obviously. One hundred fifteen doesn’t seem that significant, but apparently they do this every fifth year.
After we checked into the hotel, we collected ourselves and walked to a local restaurant to meet a friend who’d traveled on our morning train to go to the Milwaukee Art Museum for the day. As we sipped our drinks, we learned that because of a Harley parade’s route, getting to the museum became such a hassle that he gave up on the museum entirely. Instead he visited some familiar haunts to fill the time before meeting us.
Just walking to and from the restaurant was unsettling because of the constant roar of bikes—often in groups—rolling by. (Of course Whitney was unfazed.) It had a little Mad Max quality. And that quality ran through our hotel lobby where tattooed, bearded, and let’s say, husky people waited in the lobby for friends, checked their cell phones, or carried on in the lobby bar. Among them, for certain, were doctors, lawyers, dentists and computer programmers carrying on their version of cosplay.
At one table sat eight or nine people who looked especially gnarly. Sleeveless leather vests, weathered faces, long white hair and ZZ Top beards, women who looked like they could kick ass, tats and piercings everywhere. When one guy came up to the bar to order, he had an Australian accent. The whole table turned out to be Australian. And completely, utterly civilized. I guess characters from Mad Max wouldn’t be staying at the Intercontinental Hotel.
On our walk to the train this morning, the roar of Harleys was mostly gone, but we did encounter an encampment of what looked like every labor union in Milwaukee passing out literature, playing bags, getting ready to embark on a Labor Day parade route. Teachers, electricians, plumbers, hotel workers…you name it. It was pretty cool, especially if, like me, you are by heritage friendly to organized labor.
I would’ve like to stay awhile but we had to make the train.
Thanks for the adventure, Gus, and happy birthday.
The Chicago Tribune interviewed three Chicago-area memoir-writing teachers for an article they published last week called A story to tell: Memoir writing unlocks family life and times. I haven’t yet met the other two writers, but when reading the article it came as no surprise to me to learn we all have one thing in common: We all love our jobs.
Memoir classes become thick as thieves.
Virginia Gibbons, a professor at Oakton Community College who teaches classes at Chicago’s Irish American Heritage Center, points out in the article that “memoirs can be a way to understand what happened.” Cathaleen Roach, senior outreach coordinator at suburban River Forest, leads writing classes to community groups there and told the Tribune how much joy she sees during classes. “I don’t want people to be afraid of looking back.” My quote in the article advocates for taking a class rather than writing in isolation at home:
Finke’s classes run for six to eight weeks and take a break before another session begins. “A lot of the writers don’t like the break. They get so used to being with each other week after week and sharing their stories,” she says. “It’s one place you can go and people are going to listen to you.”
The best quotes came from the experts: people who take our memoir-writing classes. Bindy Bitterman, Wanda Bridgeforth, and Annelore Chapin — three writers in memoir classes I lead here in Chicago — are quoted.
Bindy takes the class I lead at a senior living center called The Admiral, and the Tribune mentions a 500-word piece she wrote for class about meeting Sen. John F. Kennedy at Oak Street Beach in 1956 (JFK was here to attend the 1956 Democratic Convention). Bindy credits memoir-writing classes for giving her the discipline to write as she’s always wanted to do. “I just enjoy it more than anything I’ve done these last years,” she says.
From there the article quotes Wanda, a writer you Safe & Sound blog readers know very well. She told the reporter that her 12 years attending memoir-writing classes has been a way to reconnect with her relatives and stay engaged in life. “It’s just helped so much,” she says. “It took the cobwebs off the brain.”
The story ends beautifully with a quote from Annelore Chapin, a writer in Wanda’s class. Annelore was a toddler when World War II was ending, and after a few weeks in class she worried her innocent stories of growing up in Germany might make Jewish women in our writing class uncomfortable. She talked to the women privately and offered to leave. Instead, the writers gave her hugs. “All of us learn about tolerance and accepting each other,” she says. “To me that’s a wonderful benefit.”
After a rugged spring—or the absence of a spring, more accurately—we’ve had a wonderfully mild summer here by Lake Michigan. Until a couple days ago, anyway, when the steam bath arrived. But it’ll be gone in a day or two, and not long after, summer will be gone, too.
How does this happen? Wasn’t it just May? This time thing gets weirder as I get older. As in, it seems to go faster. Of course, it’s not. But certainly the perception of time passing changes with age. Some would say that when you reach a point where you know there’s more behind you than ahead, that’s a game-changer.
I kind of think it’s a little more nuanced. Perhaps it’s that a given chunk of time, a day, a month, and a year—gets more and more diluted in importance as we age. At least in terms of subliminal perception.
That is, on a five year old’s birthday that fifth year constitutes 20 percent of their lives. What happened over that year—it was all a bigger deal to that five year old than say, my 60th year on earth was to me.
Or maybe not.
But it’s pretty fascinating how we process time. Beth has the thing—both maddening and fun at times—where we’ll hear a song and the radio announcer will say, “That was from 1978!” After we both sigh, she’ll say something like, “That’d be like listening to the radio in 1978 and the DJ spinning a tune from 1938. You know, like big bands and stuff.”
Sometimes I get a little headache trying to wrap around her little time warps, but it is fascinating to ponder my parents hearing punk rock while remembering Glenn Miller.
I’d love to talk to them about it, but that time thing got in the way.
I have mostly sworn off TV news. Every once in awhile I’ll watch a local newscast but am always disappointed that there’s very little local reporting about stuff that matters. The producers never miss a chance to run some freakish footage—violence, animal antics, etc.—from San Diego, Florida, wherever.
And national cable news is a wasteland. Regardless of the network’s ideological leaning. They’re in business to keep you tuned in, and if that takes keeping you angry, appealing to your fears, or tickling your voyeurism, that’s what they’re more than happy to do.
That’s because all that is cheap. Literally. I am a student and sometimes practitioner of journalism. And you can bitch about the news media but good reporting is hard, hard work, and it costs real money.
But good reporting is still around. The Economist. The NY Times. The Wall Street Journal. BBC. NPR. The Atlantic. The National Review. And a ton of smaller, specialty pubs. All of the above have at one time or another infuriated me. But you don’t have to be in love with any of these entities’ editorial stances or love all of what they contain to learn a lot from their reporters’ work.
The problem is that consuming flashing images on narcotic phosphorescent screens full of freaky weather or crazy angry people yelling at each is easier than reading even the best-reported and well-written news article.
There’s lots of talk of how polarized we are these days. I’m convinced a lot of it has to do with screens. TVs. Tablets. Phones. To me it’s really all TV. And TV is fine for entertainment. But I still don’t count it as a serious news medium and I never will. Oh it’s fine for following breaking stuff—it just isn’t anything I’d base my opinions on.
Remember when the USA Today first came out? And how the vending boxes resembled TV sets? That was the product of a really bad trend: print news trying to emulate TV news instead of the other way around. Color images. Breezy tones. “What we eat” pie charts. Fluff.
It was, in my opinion, precisely the opposite strategy traditional print news needed to take. When TV was dumbing down, it made serious coverage more valuable, not less. But lots of print took the dumb-down route.
The Internet just accelerated that trend. Again, when there’s a ton of bad information floating around, reliable reporting becomes more valuable, not less. Most print operations made the same mistake they did with TV—emulating the worst the Internet had to offer.
Thankfully, more and more traditional news outlets have learned that people are willing to pay for a good product. And the 2016 election seemed to be a kick in the pants—the kind that good-faith news organizations needed in order to energize their reporting.
There’s a lot of good journalism out there. You just have to turn off the TV to find it.
