If you’re a human being, you’ve got habits. Actually, if you’re a living creature, you’ve got habits. I’m not sure that non-living creatures have habits, unless you want to call a rock’s sitting there on the ground as the rock’s habit and water flowing in a river as the water’s habit. Wait, let me rein…
Author: J. Parrish Lewis
J. Parrish Lewis was born and raised in Maryland. In his youth there, he and his brother had many adventures in the dogwood forests near his home. His nostalgia for these adventures has strongly influenced his characters, their relationships, and their perspective on the world they inhabit. He moved to California’s coast to earn his degree in communications and now lives with his family in the San Joaquin Valley. Lewis is profoundly deaf and uses American Sign Language to communicate. He enjoys hazelnut coffee, captioned movies, and walking his dog.
I got this little blank journal on Christmas as one of my stocking stuffers, and last night I labeled each section with something good I wanted to be practicing in 2016. Then I made sloppy little calendars in each section, with the goal of counting all the good stuff I do. This is one of…
Here’s the good news: change is possible. In 2015, I managed to kick my 20+ year addiction to sweet sweet coffee. Frappuchinos, mochas, or “coffees” that were more sugary creamer than coffee. I still have them, sometimes, but barely. This year, I’ll probably try to stop altogether since I want to do with sugar what…
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I can’t change your mind
Like a lot of people, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to change the minds of people I know. When I was 12 years old I tried to convert everyone to vegetarianism. I also tried to convince Christians that we descended from apes. I’ve tried to get people to see things my way about…
It almost seems dangerous to say that I love music, because not everyone will understand and I will be judged. While the majority of the Deaf Community will say they don’t enjoy music at all, there are plenty of us that do love music. Even when we cannot hear it. From hearing people who have…
I have a reputation, somewhat deserved, for being a kind person. The truth is that, while I do try to be kind, I have never really lived up to my own expectations of how kind I want to be. When I was a kid, there were times I felt like my kindness was a weakness.…
I would love to be proven wrong, but deaf education, as a whole, seems to have fallen apart. Not swiftly, and not recently, but a decade or two or three ago, and it’s seemed like a dismal decline since then. I have some words to say on this topic, but I want to be clear…
There’s this book I wrote that I never expected to write. Years ago, I woke up with the lingering memories of fresh dreams, which bordered on nightmares, still rattling around in my thoughts. The story interested me, and I figured I’d write it down. As I wrote, I decided I’d create a hero character to…
Today in explaining the value of learning American Sign Language to hearing family members of deaf individuals, I used this imagery to give them a sense of what it means, to a deaf family member, when they make the effort: Imagine you see your family, not too far away from where you stand. There they…