Teaching a class on digital and social media, let alone a graduate level class, was not on my to-do list. The more I try to distance myself from social media, it seems, the more its claws dig deep, puncturing skin,…
"How do you know all this stuff?" The question always give me pause. The "stuff" depends on the group inquiring. Most recently, it was one of my grad students during class. I was in the middle of showing how the…
Know the Theory of Threes? Or the Rule of Three? That things tend to happen in threes, whatever they may be. Birth. Death. Weddings, though I will argue weddings happen in sixes, not threes. Compliments, it turns out, also follow…
StoryStudio has these "In a Year" classes, and I have been selected to be part of its Memoir in a Year class. Truth be told, I'm still shocked. It being a memoir class, I chose a piece that started from…
I’m taking a class, Writing the Other: The Power of the Profile, through the University of Chicago’s Graham School of Continuing Studies. Fiction and nonfiction classes at the Graham School are workshops, or what you’d expect if you were getting…
Tucked away around the industrial section of Elston Street and the north branch of the Chicago River, across the street from the complex that houses Chicago’s Department of Fleet Management, is The Hideout. Given its location it is not a…
Here it is, the second Saturday of September, complete with that sense of Fall with an early touch of winter. There is a crispness to the air that I had forgotten, and a sense of slowing down to recalibrate for…
Back in March, I gave a presentation at LexThink called “What Strawberry Pop-Tarts and Your Law Firm Data Have in Common.” I still think it was a fluke, but I’m learning that flukes are a method employed by Fate for…
A couple weeks into the Live Lit class, the instructor took us out into the hallway where he set down four pieces of paper: two labeled "AGREE" and two labeled "DISAGREE." He put them in separate corners so that no…
The second descriptive exercise, also two minutes. For this one, we had to pick one of three things, and I choose a weather event. The first descriptive exercise is here. I hugged the Starburst tightly to my chest as we…