Joni Hirsch Blackman can’t remember not writing — she was the high school yearbook editor, a college newspaper reporter, a lifestyles reporter for a small daily paper in Texas. A stint at Denver’s Associated Press bureau preceded 5 years as a general assignment and city hall reporter for The Denver Post. A move to Seattle created opportunities to work for several national magazines and to begin to write a few columns. A goodbye column about her Seattle cul-de-sac sparked a desire to write more like those. Settling in Naperville a few years later, Joni noticed her local newspaper lacked... Read More
Cul-de-sacs
September 30, 2026
Trade Paperback
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$25.00
The best of Joni Hirsch Blackman’s entertaining Cul-de-sacs columns for the Naperville Sun and the Daily Herald.
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Joni Hirsch Blackman
Author
Summary
After years of being a newspaper reporter keeping herself strictly out of every story, the challenge of writing a lifestyle column in and about her new hometown was a bit daunting. Though she’d written for newspapers and national magazines, she remained fairly invisible in her regular life. But writing about families in Naperville opened her up to questions from grocery cashiers, other parents on the bleachers, her kids’ teachers and others: “Are you that columnist?” was a question she didn’t love to answer, but she got used to it. Writing Cul-de-sacs was a great job for a “Naperville mom who lives on a cul-de-sac with her three children and dogs” and a wonderful way to spend more than a decade staying up way too late writing 500 or so weekly columns. Turns out it also was a kind of journal of living and raising kids in “the number one city to raise kids” at the turn of the last century. These are some of her favorites.