1 Publishers’ summaries are promotions for readers looking for something new. You find them on Amazon, Audible, Goodreads and most other bookseller websites. Their most notable characteristics are cliches, exaggeration and urgency—altogether,
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The Only Time I Ran for Office
Darien High School’s chess club, of which I was one of seven members, met to elect a new president. I'd begun at the club two years earlier by beating another new member twice in a row. My opponent, Jeff, now a senior like me, turned out to be our
Monty
As a wedding gift, Grandma Spratt gave my parents a cat from a litter born in her backyard. He was black except for a white stripe on his chest, and Mum and Dad named him Monty. They said that when I was born two years later, they’d worried they’d
A Time for Euphemisms
Toward the end of eighth grade, when kids turn fourteen, a girl I’ll call Delia volunteered to visit my home one afternoon a week to read class assignments to me. I was new to America and to blindness. During our reading sessions, work gave way to
Bullying: What’s a Parent To Do?
1 My most painful experience of bullying occurred in a taxi. Each day for two years, from the age of eleven to thirteen, I shared a taxi with three or four other children to and from school. Why the taxi? We were in the first group of partially
Moral Compass
1 The subject that afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Slater, told us, would be how to play chess. "Chess is about checkmate, about trapping your opponent’s king,” he said from the front of the classroom. “It isn't about taking pieces. Only mediocre
What Elise Stefanik’s Inquisition Actually Revealed
Freedom of speech is essential if sound ideas are to be promoted and flourish and if terrible ideas are to be exposed and wither. It can be a difficult freedom to defend. At a Congressional hearing last Tuesday, following the terrible events of
Gratitude for My Violent Act
1 From the age of four until around my tenth birthday, my commute from the suburbs to my London school was at least an hour and a half each way. The coach, meaning a single-deck bus, ground through stop-and-start traffic along the non-postcard
Gender Tags
In the past few decades my name, Adrian, has become androgynous. The distinction used to be between my spelling, which was for boys and men, and “Adrienne” for girls and women. Often this distinction is maintained today, but often not. Combine the
If You Are Having Thoughts of Murder…
We live under such a barrage of public service announcements that they have become white noise. When a train comes to a grinding halt or my plane stands idly by the runway, I may hear an announcement only if I’m annoyed by the “any” in “We
Monkey Business
Here’s something I wrote when I was seven in one of my class exercise books that have miraculously survived the years: I have been to the seaside, Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight. We stayed there for a week. We saw the only traffic lights on the
Sisyphus
Something terrible is always happening around the world. Many of us living in peaceful places can’t help but wonder at our good fortune while we seek to understand what has gone so wrong elsewhere. 1 Two mornings a week on my ninth floor terrace,
Theories and Other Whims: Eleven Poems
Here’s the last group of poems I expect to post. As always, the date is that of original composition, while the poems are presented in chronological sequence with the one exception of the last. 1. February 12, 1974 Although dated in the depths of
Kindness
The other evening, our building’s doorman announced that someone had dropped off the dehumidifying case for my hearing aids. This post is an attempt to explain why a normally unmemorable act was poignant. In the 1990s, I resisted an
Love’s Vagaries: Nine Poems
Here are some poems centered around love that I wrote four or more decades ago but didn’t include in my previous poem collection posts. Once again, the date is that of original composition. 1. February 21, 1975 Long after I wrote this poem, I
An Anthology That Leaves the Best for Last
For Artificial Divide, (2021) Robert Kingett and Randy Lacey collected sixteen stories by visually impaired and blind authors. As I lament in my essay “Twilight of a Stockbroker” (2017), there is almost no fiction created by blind authors in which
Lines from Experience: Twelve More Poems
This is the fourth collection of poems I’ve recently posted. All poems surely come from experience, but usually not in any obvious way. Each of these has a connection with a specific moment or time. Once again, the dates are those of original
Neely and Penny: What Do We Know?
The other day, a friend was sitting in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park with a friend when a friend of the friend appeared. Somehow a recent incident came up. On May 1, a 24-year-old, white ex-marine named Daniel Penny put a thirty-year-old black man named
Crossings: Eight Poems
Here are eight poems I wrote between 1974 and 1981. Unlike the poems in the two part-series I published a couple of weeks ago, which had never seen the light of day, I shared these with friends and others, and I revised them from time to time. They
Can We Talk, Please?
The only way we will stop being a nation torn apart is to find humility in ourselves. That word, “humility,” jumped out at me last Wednesday evening during a Zoom discussion held by my Amherst college classmates and Professor Austin Sarat. The topic
Poems Salvaged from 1975 and 1976: Part II
For the introduction to this two-part series, please go to https://adrianspratt.com/poems-salvaged-from-1975-and-1976-part-i/ 19. July 13, 1975 I wrote this poem during my summer working for a community action agency in rural North Carolina. As far
Poems Salvaged from 1975 and 1976: Part I
I wrote poems all the time from adolescence on until, in the spring of 1976, a widely respected professor assessed some samples as “un-illusioned,” which was good, but lacking “music,” a death knell. I still wrote poems into the 1980s, but few and
What Is It With the Apocalypse?
Why do I have such a visceral aversion for dystopian fantasy and apocalyptic fiction? After a friend convinced me to read Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), a debut novel that has lately garnered a lot of renewed attention, the reasons for my resistance
To Complain or Not to Complain: Ten Considerations
When do we choose to let bygones be bygones? How do we decide when to let go and when to pursue? I’m unhappy with one of the lawyers who handled my father’s estate. In deciding how to proceed, I was aided by conversations with several friends and
Fairness in Love and Death
On April 12, the Washington Post published a questionnaire designed to show readers if they hold ableist assumptions. However, the questions reveal their authors’ own prejudices about matters of love and death. Throughout, for reasons explained in