Bottom-Feeder: Notes on the Ecology of Negotiating Accommodations
It happened when I was traveling from New Orleans to Dayton via Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport. The day began with carefree dancing in the street at the French Quarter Festival, and it almost ended on the tarmac in Atlanta in the middle of a terror
alert. When I look back now I realize there were portents of this trajectory. It was the peak of "major combat operations" in the current Iraq war. The top news story that day - the story repeated over and over again as I passed from airport to airport on my journey home - was the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad. (2005) This talk was presented at the 2005 conference on Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability at The Ohio State University.

Not This Pig
I have spent most of my life trying to understand my own relationship with the genetic imaginary. I've spent a long time imagining what Oliver Wendell Holmes's "&c." might mean. I admit, I have an overactive historical imagination. In the 1920s I could have been labeled "hereditary defective." Today we use kinder and gentler euphemisms. I am the carrier - some might say the victim -- of two genetic diseases. A third "affliction" may be waiting in my genes. If there is an emerging genetic underclass, as Dorothy Nelkin predicted, I could run for class president or class clown. (2003) The Ohio Arts Council awarded the author an Individual Artist Fellowship for this essay in 2004.

Big Water
I couldn't ask Brendan to push the limits had I not asked and done so myself hundreds of times before I ever brought him to big water. I have canoed solo on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I have been losing eyesight. I have returned to the immense lake year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call "going blind." After 25 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. (1998) The Ohio Arts Council awarded the author an Individual Artist Fellowship for this essay in 2000.

Whooping Cranes, Family Values, and the First Amendment
Whenever I hear a sanctimonious debate about censorship and family values, I think of Whooping cranes. In my family, the gawky, audacious, elusive and endangered birds are synonymous with the First Amendment. My parents never read the eloquent Supreme Court opinions penned by Holmes and Brandeis, but they believed in the First Amendment freedoms, and would have welcomed the Great Dissenters to our dinner table. After I became a parent, our family values about obscenity came to be codified as the Grandma test: if you would feel weird saying it in front of Grandma at the nursing home, you shouldn't say it in public in front of strangers. (1994)

Literacy without Limits
The essays gathered here were written between 1994-98 for a series of graduate seminars in rhetoric and composition. They document the evolution of my own thinking about literacy as a blind reader and writer. Mine is a multi-textured literacy that could be characterized by what anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath called ever-shifting, protean shapes and modes. It is motivated by an ongoing struggle for a literacy without limits, a literacy unbounded by social, political, and economic constraints.

Osip Mandelstam

A Word is the Search for It In the autumn of 1933 Osip Mandelstam wrote a seditious poem that sealed his fate. He composed it on the elusive plane of thought and language that psychologist Lev Vygotsky called inner speech. Mandelstam never committed the poem to paper. He recited it aloud to only a handful of friends. But it quickly burned the ears of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The head of Stalin's secret police knew the poem by heart and recited it with sadistic relish. Vygotsky may have heard it, too, although there is no evidence that he betrayed his friend. Using the "enforced subtlety" of subtext and secret writing, poet and psychologist shared a proscribed life of the mind in the shadow of Stalin's Great Terror. This essay is a search to recover something of that life: the knowledge that a word removed from motive is a dead thing. (1998-2001)