【推荐2】In August 2005, at the age of 14, Kristin Beale, together with her friend, was riding on Jet Ski on Lake Gaston, along the Virginia-North Carolina border, when another ran over them, killing her friend and making Beale suffer a brain injury and a spinal cord (脊髓) injury.

Previously, being a Henrico’s Deep Run High School student, Beale took part in the competitions of cheerleading and hockey. Afterwards, she had to relearn how to perform daily tasks. “When I was in the hospital, doctors told my parents I’d be a vegetable, not being able to breathe or swallow. I wanted to disprove everything they had on their list,” she said. “I told my parents, ‘I’m going to work and do more’.”

Her parents discovered a hospital in California for people struggling with spinal cord injuries and flew Beale there to spend four hours a day for more than a month relearning tasks and strengthening her muscles. She traveled to California nine times for this.

To process her thoughts, Beale began writing about her experiences. By the time she finished, she’d written32 stories. She then gathered them into her first nonfiction book, Greater Things, which was about how people react to her and how she has overcome her injuries. “I never thought it’d become a book, but that’s how it all started,” Beale said.

Now in 2023 working for her publisher, Morgan James Publishing in Hampton, Beale continues to write. Another nonfiction book, A Million Suns, details her journey “from the darkness of disability into the sunlight of circumstance” and how she has found happiness. In her new fiction offering, Wide Awake, she assigns names and personalities to 12 objects belonging to a young girl, Madison.

Additionally, Beale has created the first episode (集) of a YouTube show based on her book Date Me,   medaled as a wheelchair fencer and finished 16 marathons with a wheelchair since 2011.“I’ve worked hard to get to where I am,” she said.

【推荐3】My earliest memories are of having two very old parents. My mother was 42 when I was born, which back then was seriously old to have a baby, and a little risky too. My oldest brother was 14 years older than me and the middle brother ten years older. When I was quite small they had both left home. I grew up almost like an only child. I tended to amuse myself and play in the garden and draw and paint and shoot. I suppose you do learn as an only child that you’re going to have to get on with life by yourself. You’re going to have to find things that excite and move you.

I was shipped off to Sunday school in Edinburgh when I was seven years old. I felt a proper Charlie, because I was the only little boy among the Sunday school children who was wearing a kilt (苏格兰短裙). I also felt rather threatened by the stories we were taught. Old-school Christianity was filled with punishment and anger that I didn’t really enjoy. For the rest of my attendance at Sunday school, I didn’t get closer than climbing a tree outside the church and hiding in the branches, waiting until the children came out, then dropping down to join the school team and walking out of the church to be met by my parents, who were then reassured that I’d been to Sunday school as I was supposed to.

When my parents moved to Blackpool, my aunt, who came to live with us, took me to two or three concerts. I got to see Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and the early Rolling Stones performing at Blackpool’s ABC Theatre-which, when I was 12 years old, was an important moment of recognising that that isn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because the music they played was not what I was enjoying. I was drawn to the blues and Black American folk music. It felt very real and human.