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The Suspect Speaker
There are fifteen short short stories in this volume.
All the stories are about people who have difficulty in spoken communication.
People with aphasia.
Aphasia is the loss of a previously held ability to articulate ideas or comprehend spoken or written language, resulting from damage to the brain caused by injury or disease.
Rather than a biography or an academic text, these stories reflect the everyday experience of people with aphasia, their supporters and carers. In these tales, they will see themselves or their loved ones.
These stories contain a taste, an inkling, of what it is to have aphasia: the frustrations, the anger, the acceptance and the blessings.
People with aphasia have individual communication difficulties:
Some can't read very well, or their attention span is fatigued.
Some have lost some vision.
Some can't write but their vocabulary is adult.
Some can't find the sense in syntax, or they lack context or comprehension.
Most understand the words, but can't pronounce them.
Each story here has three versions: A, B and C.
The A version is for people who have aphasia that have difficulty in reading. The sentences are compact and descriptions are sparse.
The C versions is for people with aphasia who can read, or who like to be read to, by their supporters/carers.
The B versions are in-between - a therapeutic 'sandwich'. People who have aphasia can get the gist of the stories from the A version, and in recovery, over time, can extend their reading ability for the B or C stories.
About the author
James Stephens was an Irish author and artist who lived from February 9, 1880, to December 26, 1950. Stephens' father died when he was two years old, and his mother remarried when he was six. For begging on the streets, Stephens was sent to the Meath Protestant Industrial School for Boys in Blackrock, where he spent most of the rest of his youth. Before he became a solicitor's clerk, he went to school with his adopted brothers Thomas and Richard (Tom and Dick) Collins. They participated in and won a number of sports events, even though James was very short. People loved him and called him "Tiny Tim." He became very interested in military bravery after hearing stories about his adoptive family. He would have become a fighter if he wasn't so tall. Stephens became more interested in socialism and the Irish language in the early 1900s. By 1912, he was a committed Irish Republican. He was good friends with the leader of 1916, Thomas MacDonagh. At the time, MacDonagh was editor of The Irish Review and deputy teacher at St. Enda's, PH Pearse's radical bilingual Montessori school. Later, he became manager of the Irish Theatre.
