[stylist] Daniel Simpson (The Trouble with I)

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

I agree that we often read subtext into writing believing we have an
understanding of the meaning. I know people have interpreted my writing
to mean something, and I had no intention of this. I once wrote a piece
about how much I hated winter, and that's literally all it was about but
to this day, people think it's about God and religion. So I wonder how
much literature is given interpretations the author never intended.

The great thing about literature is that, much like any art form, the
interpretation is up to the reader. People will bring their own personal
knowledge, opinions, experiences and anything they know, or think they
know, about an author to writing. This is how we interpret what we read.
No matter what we do, this often happens to writing. Most scholars,
writers, publishers and others in the literary world will tell you the
Lord of the Rings is laden with Christian allegory and Catholic dogma,
but J. R. R. Tolkien said he had no conscious intention of doing this
when writing the trilogy.

Poetry can be an animal all of its own. Some poets like to create poems
with esoteric meanings. Most poets create emotional word-pictures
intended to draw a response out of a reader. In general, poems utilize
strong verbs and nouns to rely on imagery and metaphor. Because of this,
a reader often interprets a poem based on their knowledge and
experiences. Someone once said poetry means something different
depending on the reader.

People will do the same when it comes to disability. As most of us know,
many people have pre-conceived notions about blindness. Through the
course of history, literature hasn't always been a great ally in our
efforts to depict blindness accurately. This gives readers a concept of
disability regardless if they actually know anything about the
disability. Like any topic, it's our job as a writer to develop a piece
that allows people to reconsider what they know about blindness.

Has anyone ever told you they forget you're blind because of how you do
things? I've had people tell me this often. Recently, when my son was in
the NICU, the nurses told my husband and I (both blind) that they would
forget we were blind because we were doing all the things the other
parents were, and because we managed to get to the hospital every night
by ourselves, and we didn't ask for help with tasks like changing
diapers, bathing him, feeding him and other things. My point is that we
did things just like anyone else would. Our blindness stopped being the
white elephant in the room. I think this is how we need to approach our
depictions of disability when writing.

Our characters need to be three-dimensional and complex. If blindness
over-shadows a character, we need to revisit our writing. Think of how
you live your life as a blind person and bring that to a blind
character. Most of us don't go around everyday thinking about our
blindness, and despite what some think, many, many things we do, whether
it be work, school, interacting with family and society, etc., are done
in a "normal" way. Just as we don't want to be thought of as blind
people but simply people, do the same for a character.

I have the opposite challenge because I lost my vision later in life as
an adult. I have difficulty developing blind characters despite the fact
I've been totally blind for ten years. I'm still a very visual person,
and I have a visual understanding of the world, so my writing is often
very visual. I once wrote a story with a blind character, and I told the
story in that character's point of view- this means there were no visual
descriptions. This was a huge challenge for me. It took a lot of
revising.

At my first NFB national convention, during a Writers' meeting, a young
girl felt her writing was lacking because she had never been able to see
and therefore rarely used visual descriptions in her writing. I don't
believe our writing lacks anything if visual descriptions are absent.
First, good writing uses sensory descriptions of all sorts, not just
visual. And second, we write from our experiences and point of
reference. We have a unique point of view in which to tell stories.
Don't view this lack of a sense as a, well, handicap to your writing,
but instead relish your ability to craft a unique POV.

We need to stop viewing blindness as a barrier to life, and we need to
stop thinking of limitations. Most limitations are perceptions of
reality but not necessarily the truth of reality. Based on my own
personal experience and that of others, I don't believe in limitations;
I don't believe in entering situations thinking I can't already do
something before I've even tried. Instead of living life considering
what you can't do as a blind person, consider how you can do something
in a new way. Very little is impossible for those with disabilities
nowadays. We are discovering new methods and tools every day to
accomplish a myriad of things. I think we need to bring this attitude to
our writing.

Okay, enough pontificating, sorry, grin.

Sincerely,
Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter, editor, Slate & Style
Read my blog at:
http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
 
"If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can
satisfy, we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for
another world."
C. S. Lewis

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:56:13 -0500
From: "Chris Kuell" <ckuell at comcast.net>
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] Emailing: Daniel Simpson (The Trouble with I)
Message-ID: <E443849E98D4483A810C22CD64119AB4 at ChrisPC>
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	reply-type=original

I'm forwarding a note from Aine, who is on holiday and having trouble 
sending an email to the list from her braille note.

I found this really interesting.  The below sentences reminded me of
how, 
when studying a selection of W.  H.  Auden's poems this year, I
sometimes 
had a sort of niggling sense we were reading perhaps a little too much
into 
the autobiographical nature of all the poems, especially with regards to

Auden's homosexuality.
It's no secret that Auden was gay and of course I had no issues in 
considering that with regards to his poems, only that sometimes with
poems 
that worked perfectly well without trying to find a deeper meaning
within 
them (which may or may not exist), it felt like we sort of jumped to
Auden's 
personal life as a starting point in all the first person narrative
poems, 
which of course as Daniel points out is only natural, paradoxically
enough. "Once you've outed yourself as having a particular disability,
you can't 
very easily direct the reader not to read that into every poem you write

unless, perhaps, you make the speaker so obviously not you as to 
figuratively hit the reader over the head.  [...] Perhaps the question
boils 
down to this: Should the reader be expected to read each poem as a
discrete 
piece, or do you want poems in your book to "talk to each other?"" I'm
guessing there are at least a handful of people on this list who are 
blind either with some minimal useful vision, or who used to be able to
see 
(or see a bit more).  Would be interested to hear your perspectives.
And 
everyone else's, of course.  :)
Like Daniel, I was born with just light perception.  I remember when
doing 
descriptive writing in English at 12 or 13, struggling with the dilemma
of 
whether to leave sight out of the equation altogether, and whether that
was 
even possible.  I also was a bit   scared of writing something about a 
sighted perspective that was  sufficiently obviously not true to make it

clear I didn't know  what I was talking about.

Just some musings ...


Aine