“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” ― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web Welcome! I’m Phyllis Mindell, and you can call me “Word Grandma.” For more than 40 years, I’ve worked with young women as a language consultant, providing expertise in reading, writing, speaking, and […]
Note: Phyllis Mindell, of blessed memory, passed away on October 21, 2022. She is survived by her sons, Joe and David Mindell; their wives Ossie Borosh and Pamela Mindell; and grandchildren, Arye, Samuel, Lucia, and Clara Mindell. Phyllis was predeceased by her beloved husband, Marvin. Gifts in memory of Phyllis Mindell may be directed to […]
James Joyce’s The Dubliners tells tales of loss of love and failure to love. Two stories from the 1914 collection, The Dead and A Painful Case, explore the loss and failure of love but also the failure of language and literacy. It is a supreme irony that the world’s master of language should be so […]
Bronia’s Album Phyllis Mindell’s journey through family letters, photos, and other original documents. Published online at broniasalbum.wordpress.com When my mother left the shtetl of Jaworow in 1925 to go to America, her family and friends gathered for a farewell event at which they signed a blue velvet autograph album and added their names to a list of […]
It was the early ‘60s. They were the last group of American adults who were illiterate simply because they hadn’t gone to school. And they worked as domestics in an affluent community so their ability to attend classes varied: some were off every Thursday and Monday evening, some only Thursdays, some every other Monday evening. […]
Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice has been stilled for too long, yet his ideas live on in the multitudes of ages, races and religions who took to the streets, peacefully acting together in revulsion against the murder of George Floyd. King (as well as the nonviolent warriors we lost this month: Congressman John Lewis, Professor […]
Dr. Phyllis Mindell’s five published books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide and been translated into several languages including Chinese, Arabic and German. You can order them at your local bookstore, or find them online at Amazon or Alibris. Words: Connect, Clarify, and Lead, by Dr. Phyllis Mindell and Erica Bryant 24 steps […]
Thank you to Johns Hopkins for this lovely article about my family’s tradition of giving. Below is an excerpt, and you can read the article in full in the Johns Hopkins Department of Surgery’s winter newsletter, Cutting Edge. Phyllis Mindell, 81, still recalls the coats her father Sol Gross made out of remnants of Persian […]
So there I was, unpacking mementos of my 76 years as an unsentimental minimalist, when I happened upon a tiny coin-mounted silver llama which has traveled with me for six decades, mostly tucked away in kitchen drawers. In Scott Fitzgerald’s words, I was “borne back …into the past” and stopped polishing the silver to think […]
My five-year teaching career began in 1957 at the Stewart Manor School on Long Island. I had the good fortune to teach nine-year-old Thomas Mallon, though neither of us imagined that he would become a major American writer, nor did we imagine that our paths would cross occasionally for the next half-century. His New Yorker story […]