Authors

Writing Baseball: The First All-Star Game – American Writers Museum – June 6, 2026

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I wasn’t sure about the logic behind the American Writers Festival pairing journalist and author Randall Sullivan with comedian Joe Kilgallon, but baseball is baseball, and, unfortunately, it’s often funny in Chicago, as witness the Cubs 18-3 loss the day before.

Unbeknownst to me, however, was that the full title of the book was The First All-Star Game: Babe Ruth, FDR and America at the Crossroads. Not really a baseball book. In fact, the speakers mentioned Babe Ruth only briefly and then only in connection with his popularity.

They named only two other players, Al Simmons and Bryce Harper, the latter not having been born yet in 1933, when the first all star game was played, but apparently named by ESPN in 2022 as the 94th greatest player of all time, which the gentlemen took umbrage at, particularly given the omission of Simmons (who played in the 1933 game) from the list.

That said, it was an interesting session, with FDR; former Chicago mayor, wrong place, wrong time Anton Cermak; and the Depression being prominent in the discussion, which ended 10 minutes earlier than I thought it would, perhaps to allow time for a nasty phone call to ESPN.

An Evening With Bill Kurtis – American Writers Museum – June 4, 2026

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AWM President Carey Cranston interviewed Bill Kurtis about his new memoir Whirlwind: My Life Reporting the News. Kurtis was prone towards rambling and losing his train of thought, but eventually always found his way back to his point.

The only downside of taking the train, instead of Cranston driving, was that Cranston ran out of time to ask about Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (he told me later), instead concluding with a question about “the elephant in the room,” meaning the apparent demise of 60 Minutes. Kurtis was quite frank in his assessment of the damage being done to the freedom of the press.

In regard to his coverage of the Manson trial, Kurtis kept referring to the cult leader as “Charlie,” or I guess it could have been “Charley,” but in either event it seemed a little odd to me.

Kurtis spoke of the advantage of being a lawyer in covering trials (though he never actually practiced law), but I felt like his insights as to gag orders missed the mark.

I liked his insights about television reporting vis-a-vis newspapers, and even early television, especially when he noted editing for time constraints by removing adjectives and adverbs because the viewer themselves could see the video, and thus many of the qualities the reporter might otherwise feel the need to describe.

Kurtis will be on a panel discussing memoirs at the upcoming AWM Festival on Sunday, June 7 at the Harold Washington Library.

Nicholas Meyer – American Writers Museum – September 18, 2025

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Nicholas Meyer came to discuss his new book, Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing, his seventh based upon the remembrances of John H. Watson, M.D., the first having been the highly successful The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which also led to Meyer’s Academy Award-nominated screenplay of the same name.

Meyer is equally, if not better, known for his involvement in three Star Trek movies – The Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country. Coincidence? I think not, as the following exchange from the BBC show Sherlock might suggest –

Mycroft Holmes: “Oh, Sherlock. What do we say about coincidence?”
Sherlock Holmes: “The universe is rarely so lazy.”

To confirm, in season 3, episode 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Mr. Spock says “Well, as my ancestor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would write, ‘The game is afoot.’”

Based on his work, it was no surprise that Meyer came across as an extremely well-read, engaging and amusing speaker. Here come a few quick highlights.

The new book throws Holmes into the world of art forgery. Meyer’s discussion of copying versus forging versus plagiarizing was thought-provoking.

It led to a mention of the aggressive copyright action Doyle’s descendants have taken against various authors. Meyer suggested that his payments to the estate regarding his first three Holmes books (and none others thanks to the 2014 case of Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd.), exceeded a seven-per-cent solution.

His recap of Edgar Allen Poe’s case study of The Raven in The Philosophy of Composition was a terrific presentation that added another layer to Poe’s intriguing, alleged methodology of writing.

When asked about Holmes depictions in the movies and on TV, Meyer allowed that he hated the Basil Rathbone movies; liked the visual presentation style used in the Robert Downey, Jr. movies, but didn’t think much of the stories therein; and very much liked the aforementioned Benedict Cumberbatch BBC series, which employed an actor who has crossed over into the Star Trek universe, portraying a character (Khan) that first appeared on the big screen in a movie directed by Meyer. Coincidence?

Printers Row Lit Fest – September 6, 2025

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I originally intended to go to the Lit Fest program featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Maureen Dowd speaking about her most recent book – Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech – but decided that the subject wasn’t serious enough and the title wasn’t long enough, so, instead I went to the stage featuring sports historian Don Zminda talking about his book – Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Miñoso and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams.

If nothing else, I learned that, as of August 2023, there is a Chicago Public School named after Miñoso, a childhood favorite of mine, even though he once turned down my request for an autograph, thereby traumatizing me to the extent that I never again asked for one from an athlete.

Zminda also, as promised by the publication’s title, spoke about some unheralded players, but I’ve already forgotten their names, so they have maintained their status with me.

The blocks-long fest was jammed with a crowd that seemed larger than I can remember from past years, apparently undeterred by any possible threat of National Guard troops taking any prisoners or burning any of the thousands of books on display.

Author Talk: “The Invisible Spy” by Thomas Maier – American Writers Museum – July 29, 2025

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Having enjoyed listening to Thomas Maier at the 2024 Printers Row Lit Fest, I looked forward to hearing about his new book. He did eventually get around to discussing it, but first I had to sit through 20 minutes of the same things I heard about last year.

The Invisible Spy is the moniker he gave to Ernest Cuneo, who played 2 years in the NFL before becoming a lawyer, a congressman and a liaison officer between the OSS, British Security Coordination, FBI, the U.S. State Department and President Franklin Roosevelt.

One of his close connections was with Ian Fleming, who credited Cuneo with the basic plot for Thunderball, which he dedicated to Cuneo as his muse.

Maier discussed the work of Fleming and other Englishmen in the U.S. in 1940 and Cuneo’s interactions with them and Walter Winchell and Drew Person, both of whom he fed stories to.

What wasn’t clear to me was why, other than for marketing reasons, Maier refers to Cuneo as a spy. As far as I could tell, none of the presumably confidential information he leaked was inherently damaging to the U.S. Nonetheless, Maier made it clear that Cuneo led a very interesting life before, during and after the war.

Get Lit!: Game Changers – American Writers Museum – July 8, 2025

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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a trivia star.

I have written about trivia contests in a few different contexts over the last several years – at bars, at New Faces Sing Broadway performances, at the Chicago History Museum and, of course, at my computer as part of my decades-long quest to qualify for Jeopardy (I took the online test again recently), which, if I did, I would, following in the declared footsteps of William Tecumseh Sherman, not accept, in my case for fear that I would totally embarrass myself and possibly become the worst contestant since Cliff Clavin.

In a less pressure-filled atmosphere, I went to the American Writers Museum’s Get Lit!; Game Changers event last week, where sports was the topic. My teammate and I correctly answered 11 out of 15 questions, unfortunately only good enough for third place (perhaps tied) out of six teams, all of which were comprised of at least four people (sour grapes).

I think my responses were ill-served by the three sips of a foul-tasting non-alcoholic beer that I took prior to the contest. Next time I’ll go with the night’s specialty cocktail (this time it was the MVP, described as “a sporty-twist on a ranch water cocktail.”)

Easing the pain of defeat was the evening’s speaker, who discussed three sports-related books related to game changers, one being Kathrine Switzer’s memoir about being the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.

August’s program – Get Lit!: Drawn to Life – is set to “celebrate the colorful world of animated movies and TV” with another “night of trivia, art-making, and nostalgia-packed fun.” I don’t know what the signature drink will be that night, perhaps the Flaming Moe from the Simpson’s or Blue Milk from a galaxy far, far away.

Writers on Writing – The Newberry – January 23, 2025

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Hernan Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author, despite the fact that he says  he has met with universal and enthusiastic rejection about his writing for most of his life.

Diaz was in conversation with Ananda Lima, herself an award-winning author of poetry, who also has had real writing published.

Lima was excellent at eliciting interesting conversation, including her perspectives, but Diaz was the star of the program with his unique, entertaining articulations.

He’s all about words, saying that a book is only as good as its worst sentence. He calls his books syntactical events, He likes to write longhand, describing his typing as reminiscent of a praying mantis, and preferring not to be constrained by layout designs dictated by Bill Gates.

Trust, his second book, is four novels in one, each written from a different perspective, based on four style guides he fashioned in advance, creating what he called a stratified, polyphonic structure.

His mention of that led him to tell us that his procrastination time is spent looking at the Chicago Manual of Style, where he loves taking their quizzes. I bet he’s fun at parties.

What he doesn’t do, is research. He says that term should be limited to the sciences, where emotion isn’t allowed. He prefers to say he reads.

He describes genre as writing’s built-in device to help form a meeting of the minds between the author and the reader and a reason why he doesn’t worry about whether readers will “get it”, as he also assumes the readers are smarter than he is, which is a cause of his constant state of writing terror, the state of mind, not the genre.

Bears vs. Cardinals: The NFL’s Oldest Rivalry – Chicago History Museum – December 2, 2023

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Had I known a few months ago that I would be attending this program, I wouldn’t have thrown out the autographed Charlie Trippi football I’d been saving for most of my life after having determined that it had no intrinsic value and was taking up valuable space that some equally worthless keepsake might be afforded.

I’m pretty sure I could have found a home for it with the speaker/author Joe Ziemba, who brought along some other memorabilia and made reference to the treasured boxes of related materials he had been gifted prior to writing this, his latest book.

Ziemba’s biography noted that, because of his knowledge of the early days of the professional game, he has been a resource for articles or reports in a number of well-known publications, including Sports Illustrated. In regard to that attribution, I can attest that it was, in fact, a real person standing before me, and not the avatar of a computer in the back room.

Ziemba covered the time frame from slightly before the 1920 founding of the NFL through 1959, after which the Cardinals started their westward trek that ultimately led to Arizona, a retirement exurb of Chicago.

The already obviously well-informed audience was treated to numerous interesting and humorous anecdotes, along with digs at Packer fans, player photographs and pictures of contracts and ledgers from the less-affluent days of the NFL, when players might make $75 a game and no one had ever heard of CTE.

Printers Row Lit Fest – September 10, 2023

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Among other things, Jena Friedman has been a field producer at The Daily Show and written for Late Show with David Letterman. She was at the Fest promoting her book, Not Funny: Essays on Life, Comedy, Culture, Et Cetera.

She actually is funny, but the most interesting thing she had to say about her book was that you can find a couple publications on Amazon that appear to want to steal her thunder, including Jena Friedman: The Biography of Jena Friedman and Her Rule to Success, which was written by someone (something) named Justice Wall, who supposedly has written 107 biographies, all published in 2023, sold by Amazon Asia-Pacific Holdings Private Limited. According to Bloomberg.com, that company’s line of business includes providing computer programming services, which provides some insight into how it can be so prolific.

When it was suggested to Friedman that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, she countered that, in fact, payment is the sincerest form of flattery, and so the writers are on strike over, among other things, the threat posed by artificial intelligence.

From a discussion of AI’s potential for taking bread from writers’ mouths, I went to a program on Taking a Bite Out of the Heartland, with Monica Eng and David Hammond, (Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites) and Big Jones Chef Paul Fehribach (Midwestern Food: A Chef’s Guide to the Surprising History of a Great American Cuisine, with More than 100 Tasty Recipes).

They discussed pizza, ribs, and tamales, but most importantly, when questioned about hot dogs, the chef voted for Super Dawg (also my pick).

On my way out I paid my annual visit to the popular Vintage Graphic Art vendor and did a 10-second sound bite for this week’s Get Lit Podcast, my first radio appearance in years.

Coming Attractions (or not) – September, 2023

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I was berated today for not telling people about events before they happen. So, for all of you out there who haven’t yet learned how to use your computer, and since I have a little time to kill, here are some ideas for things to do in September.

First, and foremost, and before you tire of my sarcasm, you must go to the Porchlight Music Theatre’s Icons Gala on the 8th at the Athenaeum Center. It will, as always, be a very entertaining evening and, if you buy one of the top-tier tickets, you get to mingle with me at the pre-show cocktail reception. Also, the guest of honor, Ben Vereen, will be in attendance.

As I alluded to in an earlier post, the Chicago Jazz Festival comes to town the first few days of the month. You’re on your own as to which acts might interest you. I stopped going years ago, as I tired of the modern, atonal nonsense they inappropriately call music, but there are a few acts on the calendar this year that I either have seen before and liked or am confident enough about to risk a trek down to Millennium Park or the Cultural Center for a look-see.

The Fourth Presbyterian Church takes its Noonday Concerts indoors starting this Friday, which seems premature to me, but allows them to put to use their big honking organ, though, fortunately for my tastes, not until the end of the month, so, again, why not keep things outdoors until then.

The Harris Theater for Music and Dance is celebrating its 20th Anniversary (seems like 40 years taking into account having to traverse all those stairs) on the 9th in Millennium Park. The unprecise schedule makes it hard to know when I might want to drop in, though the likelihood of families attending the afternoon sessions is fair warning to avoid those.

The Printers Row Lit Fest is that same weekend (both days). It always presents a plethora of interesting exhibitors and programs, if you can find them in the event’s labyrinth (watch out for the Minotaur).

And, not finally, but I’m tired, the American Writers Museum is hosting Get Lit: Grown-Up Book Fair on the 12th, which will feature refreshments, carnival games, and an Adult Spelling Bee, which, I assume, means either dirty words and/or easier ones than the obnoxiously well-prepared kids at the real one have to tackle.