Wordgathering has published my story, "Accommodation," in its current issue. Here's the link: https://wordgathering.com/vol14/issue1/fiction/spratt/
Charity
Party Quandaries
To his surprise, my friend Neil was recently invited to a former neighbor's housewarming party at her new home. Neil's vision, never great, has deteriorated in recent years. He took a taxi there and was greeted at the door by the host, his former
Dad: My Memorial Speech for Harold Anthony Spratt
Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “The medium is the message.” My own experience suggests that theater can compete with the message. When a talking head appears on a political show on television, a viewer’s reaction might be less to the words they
Journalism and Disability
Media coverage of visually impaired people can distress their subjects. One reason might be that visually impaired people disagree among themselves about the best ways to write and talk about their experiences and how they feel they’re perceived by
How Can We Talk About Race? Thoughts Based on How We Talk About Disability
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is quoted in the December 10 edition of the New York Times as saying: “I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.” He went on to say
Compliments
It can be hard to take a compliment gracefully. Sometimes we feel undeserving. Other times we wonder if we are being manipulated. There are times we feel a compliment is discordant with our actual achievement, such as when veterans of recent wars