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Disability

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Chair/Body/Home

What would it take for me to no longer want to leave my body? What would it take for me to see my body as my home? I don’t know, really, except perhaps more exposure to different ideas about disability, different ideas about beauty and worth.

By Hannah Soyer June 2023
The Dog-Eared Page

On Seeing A Sex Surrogate

Pounding the keys with my mouth stick, I wrote in my journal as quickly as I could about my experience, then switched off the computer and tried to nap. But I couldn’t. I was too happy. For the first time, I felt glad to be a man.

By Mark O’Brien March 2023
Poetry

Preparations

You can prepare for some things. / Others fall on you like / meteors ripping open the sky.

By Bill Glose September 2022
Fiction

Took Us All Like We Was His

Before we was married, we rented a little townhouse in Dallas. My girls was with us. They from my first marriage. Nate come to us when my baby girl was barely a year old. He latched on and took us all like we was his, and I didn’t see all the love in that.

By LaToya Watkins June 2018
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Stray

One winter, years ago, a stray cat lived under my rear deck. He was long and skinny and had a tattered gray coat, a whip tail, a block head, and a set of elephant nuts that hung low off his hind end. He survived by eating scraps of leftover food my mother threw to the birds. The sight of him disgusted me.

By Stephen A. Waite February 2018
Readers Write

Perseverance

The North Tower of the World Trade Center, the Kona Ironman race in Hawaii, a four-door Plymouth Reliant

By Our Readers December 2016
The Sun Interview

Beyond Their Years

Linda Kreger Silverman On Understanding Gifted Children

We say children are gifted when their intellectual ability is advanced beyond their age. A four-year-old girl who can pass all the items on an IQ test that an eight-year-old is expected to be able to do would obtain an IQ score in the 200 range. Children who are developmentally advanced are out of sync with their peers, and also out of sync with the expectations of teachers and parents, which leads to vulnerability. They need individualized education and counselors who understand how to work with these children.

By Mark Leviton May 2015
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Almost Unendurable Beauty

The plastic prescription vial contains thirty doses. I press the cap down, twist it counterclockwise, and shake a cylindrical pill into my hand. It is an ugly gray, like dryer lint, like newly poured concrete, like a bullet. I know my daughter will notice this.

By Jocelyn Evie May 2015
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The R-Word

When he diagnosed my three-month-old, Fiona, with a chromosomal disorder, the redheaded, cherubic medical geneticist did not use the phrase “mentally retarded” — thank God, or the gods of rhetoric, or just the politically correct medical school the young doctor had attended.

By Heather Kirn Lanier May 2015
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Anything For Love

When I was eight, I was so obsessed with Erich Segal’s novel Love Story that I memorized the first few paragraphs and recited them at every opportunity: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she loved Mozart. And Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”

By Ruth L. Schwartz March 2014