August 2015 - Reiter's Block

Guidelines for Writer Care: Teen Writer Maggie Marsden-Sparrow Explains It All

August 25, 2015

An artist friend sent me this hilarious and spot-on list of things you need to understand about writers, by her friend’s 14-year-old daughter, Maggie Marsden-Sparrow. She is an aspiring author who shares her work in online forums for youth. Maggie and her mother have kindly given me permission to reprint it here. She’s certainly got

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August Links Roundup: Content Warnings and Disability Activism

August 13, 2015

Understanding PTSD as a variety of neurodiversity has helped me feel less isolated and medicalized by the “survivor” label. I’m grateful to discover the work of disability activists and theorists who are radically re-imagining a world without rigid norms for how everyone should think and feel. My recent drift away from organized religion owes at

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The Non-Personhood of Children in the Bible

August 9, 2015

The Daily Office, the Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy and Bible readings for morning and evening prayer, provides some uncomfortable juxtapositions with current events. Shortly after watching the first TV debate among the Republican presidential candidates, I was presented with this reading from 2 Samuel 12:1-14. King David has just arranged for his loyal soldier

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Two Poems from Arthur Powers’s “Edgewater”

August 5, 2015

Award-winning poet and fiction writer Arthur Powers’s work is informed by his Catholic faith and his concern for the dignity of the common man and woman. His profound short fiction collection, A Hero for the People (Press 53, 2013), drew on his activist work on behalf of subsistence farmers and workers in rural Brazil. I

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