A member of my writing group recently sought to defend a character for blaming his bad behavior on a woman character’s provocative clothes: “He’s obviously mad at her for the sequined dress stunt, but shouldn’t he be?” "That doesn't justify rape,"
Censorship
Disability and Censorship
Advocates for people with disabilities believe that central to the fight to end so-called ableism is the censorship of words that could cause offense and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. I’m already risking controversy with the phrase “people with
Righting the Wrong Word
A few months ago, drafting my response to a questionnaire in advance of an upcoming interview in connection with Caroline, I wrote the phrase “fiction’s ghetto.” Here’s the question and my original answer: Q: Do you have a target reader? A:
Do I Even Exist?
Do I Even Exist? I do not have numbers for physically disabled students, and I'm not sure if the College makes that information public. Amherst believes that the number of students with physical disabilities is small enough that providing a
Snowflakes at Amherst
Amherst College is withholding important information about its disabled students by claiming a statistic has a right to privacy. 1 I recently wrote to Amherst College, my alma mater, to inquire how many blind and otherwise physically disabled
Tribalism in Amber
1 When we look back at a long-ago era, what wasn’t obvious to the people then can be plain to us today. As with a tree’s hardening resin, an era’s scurrying, uncertain lives eventually become fixed like insects in amber. It used to be in Europe