Growing Bolder Community

Here's a link to an interview I did by email recently with Victor David Giron of Curbside Splendor Publishing in Chicago. http://curbsidesplendor.com/curbside/readings/interview-mary-t.-wagner If you get all the way to the bottom, you'll find a very old photo of a very small "me" as a little girl sitting on a park bench with my father in Chicago's Humboldt Park.Victor is a wonderful template...

One of my very best friends, journalist Liz Welter, and I made an impromptu dash to Chicago to check out the seventh annual Printers' Ball at the historic Ludington Building on July 29 to see what all the advance hoopla was about. I've been doing a lot of literary things in my home town in the past few years, such as reading essays and giving presentations, and this just floated across the radar...

I never thought I'd write these words but...c'mon, follow me on Twitter! http://twitter.com/runswstilettosI just spent the weekend at the posh and historic and lovely Union League Club in Chicago where the National Federation of Press Women held their annual conference. I was there as a speaker, and as a conference "first-timer," and to have a great time networking and learning.I started off by...

Chicago--my home town--has always been known for producing a splendid crop of writers. Just think Saul Bellow, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, Edna Ferber...the list goes on and on. So an idea whose time has come is the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame . The Hall of Fame, which has been the brainchild of some very talented people in the Chicago Writers Association, will be having its inaugural...

Photo credit by Robert Vrshek of Chicago Anybody's who's spent much time writing knows that it's a pretty solitary pursuit. Just you and the keyboard, or the typewriter, or the legal pad and a sharpened pencil or fountain pen. Sometimes stuff absolutely flows, more often you have to drag it out of hiding, from under sofas, the backs of closets, the deepest recesses of your brain where it digs in...

Writing essays and posting them on line was certainly a stretch for me when I started blogging right before New Years in 2007, but never in a million years could I have predicted that I'd be reading them in front of an audience in Chicago. But welcome to Essay Fiesta, which is a monthly reading series of extraordinary talent and energy. Chicago's my home town, and it finally gives me a reason to...

Rhonda Williams recently hit the jackpot! A few weeks ago, the Fairburn, Georgia resident was cleaning out her purse and discovered a lottery ticket worth a hundred eighty nine thousand dollars! A month prior, Irving Przyborski came across a lotto ticket that he’d bought and misplaced a year ago. The Chicago cab driver’s find was worth nine million dollars! Heartwarming lost and found...