Memoirous

Now is your best chance to find my book, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady, available for HALF OFF at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer Sale! Find my book and many more at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/chicagojane      all month!  Review "A homeless woman's story reminds us of the need to consider the suffering of others. Hertenstein's narrative . . . is a gift to us." Chicago Tribune, Sunday Book Section, March 15, 1998 From the Author I had known Marie for about ten years before I did her story. She was a bag lady--not homeless as she had an apartment she shared with a number of cats. Marie could be seen daily pushing her cart around the neighborhood picking up stuff put out for trash and giving items away to people who needed them. Whenever she saw me she'd say, "Jane, someday I have to tell you my story." And I'd say, "Sure Marie, someday." Well, during one of those exchanges we actually set up a...

  You’ll likely see this plea for the month of December. My books are available for download through Amazon Kindle and Smashwords (click on either to go to those pages). Also through Amazon you can order paperbacks of most of my titles. Through month of December Smashword downloads are 25-50% off. Highlight of this post: Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady Review "A homeless woman's story reminds us of the need to consider the suffering of others. Hertenstein's narrative . . . is a gift to us." Chicago Tribune, Sunday Book Section, March 15, 1998 From the Author I had known Marie for about ten years before I did her story. She was a bag lady--not homeless as she had an apartment she shared with a number of cats. Marie could be seen daily pushing her cart around the neighborhood picking up stuff put out for trash and giving items away to people who needed them. Whenever she saw me she'd say, "Jane, someday I have to tell you my story." And I...

 Eugene Update #7 Heat Dome Or as I lay panting So even as I emphasize: Check on your loved ones, even as my mind flashes back to the heat crisis of 1995, I rode my bike back from Portland under a historic heat dome. First the bad news. Even as I write now, the county is tallying up the additional deaths that may be a result of the heat dome. I quote from a news article: Friends and relatives are still walking into houses/apartments to find their loved ones deceased. It’s that easy to die from heat. Here in Eugene hardly anyone has AC. If it’s hot you open the window. But, under the heat advisory we were told to CLOSE the windows. It was important to keep the heat out during the hottest part of the day—about from 3 – 7 pm. So in the a.m. or over night keep doors and windows open for the expected cool air. But, under the heat dome, there was little relief at night. For example, in my room it never got below 85. Typically, the weather in Eugene is a bit like the desert....

Available from Amazon CreateSpace and as an eBook Tens of thousands of homeless people walk the streets, forgotten, yet each with their own story to tell. Marie James, a 69-year-old bag lady, and a frequent guest at an inner-city mission in Chicago, sat with Jane Hertenstein through the summer of 1995 and recorded this shocking and moving story of life filled with sorrow, loss, mental instability, and hope. Her memoir will break one's heart, yet encourage and inspire. -- "Harrowing inside view of homelessness", -- Publishers Weekly, August 11, 1997 The link takes you to Amazon, but also available through Apple Baker & Taylor Blio Baker-Taylor Axis360 Barnes & Noble Diesel Flipkart Gardners Extended Retail Gardners Library Inktera (formerly Page Foundry) Kobo ...

It has been 20 years since the infamous heat wave of 1995 where over 800 Chicagoans died over a 4 – 5-day period of extreme temperatures and humidity. Mostly the marginalized: the homeless and the elderly succumbed. It was also during this same time that Marie James and I sat down to record her sad life story. Here is an excerpt from Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady. Nineteen ninety-five was the hottest summer on record in the city of Chicago; ­nearly eight hundred people died in July. The air was heavy, foul with the stench of rotting garbage coming in from the alley. You couldn’t find relief anywhere. Into the lobby of the inner-city mission where I live and work came Marie James—white haired, with blue sparkling eyes set in the midst of a wrinkled and dirt-tanned face. She had been coming to the mission for twenty years, looking for food and friendship. The mercury was already past 105 degrees, and I had no energy for giving. I wanted to be left alone and not...

That’s how it felt yesterday when I learned the news that Roger Ebert had died. I was shocked because just the day before I’d heard on the radio that he had decided to slow down—yeah, but not die. He told his fans and blog followers that with the return of cancer he would not be checking in as frequently, that he was going to spend his time and limited energy on other projects and Ebert Digital . Now to be fair—I wasn’t a fan of many of his reviews, but I’d always appreciated his writing. And his courage.  He was able to pick himself up and write on! He lost his jaw, his voice, but never his ability to communicate. At his blog he wrote what has got to be the most loving appreciation of a marriage I’ve ever read—it actually made me jealous as I wonder if anyone would ever think of me as highly as he thought of his wife/partner Chaz.  "Wednesday, July 18, is the 20th anniversary of our marriage. How can I begin to tell you about Chaz? She fills my horizon, she i...

Readers of this blog (and the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune ) have been aware of a kind of class warfare taking place in Uptown. It’s no secret. Articles have been appearing in the media for about three weeks. As someone who has written for and about the homeless and under-housed (See Orphan Girl ) I am very sensitive to this issue. The issue of zombie-fying the homeless. And, to be fair, not all those targeted are actually homeless—maybe they’re characters, troubled, alcoholics—they are, for whatever reason, poor people. They are the OTHER. They remind us that we have a comfort zone and we better retreat back into it. I understand. But I also believe that these individuals are human and have rights. Lately I’ve been reading about Vivian Meir and Henry Darger. Both artists, both truly “different.” Vivan Meir was a nanny on the North Shore who often after the kids boarded the bus to go to school took off with her camera, making forays into downtown Chicago or out on he...

could you please go to the Amazon page where Orphan girl (Kindle edition) http://www.amazon.com/Orphan-Girl-Memoir-Chicago-ebook/dp/B0065LVRXC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1321628773&sr=8-2 and click on the tags. What I mean is: scroll to the bottom to Tags Customers Associate with This Product agree with these tags Heard this type pf action HELPS my book. Of course this is all voodoo. 

We've all heard that catch-phrase: Learning Curve. I just climbed a Learning Mountain. I won't go into details, but to get my 2 books Orphan Girl and Beyond Paradise turned into e-books has been one long haul. But TODAY I can announce that ORPHAN GIRL IS AVAILABLE AS AN E-BOOK. For this e-book edition I’d like to thank author Megg Jensen for her tremendous help. Megg offered advice and tips on e-book publishing. Check out her books at Dark Side Publishing and at www.meggjensen.blogspot.com .  In addition Mary Jo Guglielmo was the one who told me to get my butt in gear and 1. get a blog and 2. get in on this e-book thing. I know this is the current of publishing today, but I tend to resist and go against the flow. Definitely having a blog has helped to generate interest in my short stories, books, and memoir seminars. Lastly, I am grateful to the final contributor to the Marie James’ story. The last piece of the family puzzle fell into place when I got an e-mail from Ma...

Hi! just back from www.cornerstonefestival.com where I attended a seminar on blogging led by Andrew Jones who writes for a variety of blogs. Here is a couple of things gleaned from the three sessions I sat in on: 1. short posts vs long ones considering that many people now read from hand-held devices, posts ahould be on the shorter side, or if you have a lengthy topic break it into 2 or 3 posts 2. titles and I'm still working on this ARE IMPORTANT, that's why I titled this one Tall Skinny Kiwi because that tag alone will direct traffic to my blog. I really am looking for ways to drive traffic here. I've joined Jacketflap to see if my blog will come up and looking into TUMBLR to see if my stuff can also be included in a larger blogging community 3. tags, for the above reason, linkable, so maybe I should randomly tag something PORNO and see how many hits I get 4. also images, and giving them captions, so if I took a picture at the festival and posted it here, I shou...