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Dr. M. Leona Godin talks about her new book, There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. Gives advice to new writers and talks about her personal journey through Blindness and how her book and people’s actions today can begin to change the perception that the sighted have for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
M. Leona Godin (pronounced like French sculptor Rodin) is a writer, performer, educator, and the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural history of Blindness(Pantheon, 2021). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, O Magazine, Electric Literature, Catapult, and other print and online publications. She produced two plays: “The Star of Happiness” about Helen Keller’s time performing in vaudeville, and “The Spectator and the Blind Man,” about the invention of braille. She is currently working on a forthcoming feature-length documentary about blind culture directed by Max Lewkowicz for American Foundation for the Blind. Godin holds a PhD in English, and besides her many years teaching literature and humanities courses at NYU, she has lectured on art, accessibility, technology, and disability at such places as Tandon School of Engineering, Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the American Printing House for the Blind. Her online magazine exploring the arts and sciences of smell and taste, Aromatica Poetica, publishes writing and art from around the world.
Follow on Twitter @drmlgodin.
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Full Transcript
Leona:
You’re either kind of a super blind person or you’re kind of on the other end of the spectrum, kind of a pitiable blind person, and a lot of what I try and do in the book is kind of looking at the middle, you know, the vast middle ground of most of us who are just living our lives, you know, as mothers and people who work and teach and all those sorts of things.
Jeff:
Please welcome M. Leona Godin, author of the new book There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness.
Leona:
And whether somebody is smiling or not, I mean, it’s amazing like how obvious it is.
Jeff:
Leona is also an actor and an activist.
Leona:
What’s making this audio description thing really on steroids, as you say, is because we’re getting involved, right, we’re getting involved with actually writing it, creating it, making sure that it’s as good as it can be. I finally sort of made a decision to move to JAWS and it was amazing. It was one of those moments where I was like, oh my God, like, why have I been struggling for these years? You know, to see these giant magnified letters when I can just listen to them. And that was a major shift.
Jeff:
And now here’s Leona Godin. Hope you enjoy.
Leona:
It’s having a very harsh effect on our ability to live our lives the best that we can, you know, if we’re constantly having to prove that we can do these things.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson. Today in the studio, we have M. Leona Godin. She just wrote a book, and it’s called There Plant Eyes. And I read the book and I was really interested in it. And it really goes into the personal and cultural history of blindness. And that’s probably where I got my interest because it was on blindness and some of the depictions, or the way people perceive or cast a blind person for sighted readers to understand. And it’s been throughout history, as your book illustrates, but you also put in your personal journey in there too. So I think it’s a great book and everyone should check it out. We’ll put a link in the show notes to find it. Leona, welcome to the show.
Leona:
Oh, thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you.
Leona:
What inspired you to write such a book? And can you explain the title?
Leona:
Sure. There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, the there plant eyes part was completely stolen from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Some of your listeners may know that John Milton is sort of the blind poet extraordinaire. He was a 17th century poet who went completely blind a little bit later in life, like in his early 40s or so. And then he would compose sort of in the darkness at night when everything was quiet and then he would wait in the morning to, what he liked to say, be milked by an amanuensis, who would write down 20 to 40 lines in the morning. And this quote “There plant eyes” comes from a pretty pivotal moment in the poem where the narrator is kind of moving from the darkness of hell to the brightness of heaven. But it’s sort of this metaphorical turn where he says, well, you know, I’m blind, so I’m not actually seeing these things, but this is a sort of metaphor of seeing with the inner eye, the title There Plant Eyes comes from this idea of sort of planting the inner eye, right, into the mind or into the heart and kind of seeing with an inner vision, that’s kind of what the inspiration was there. And of course the book itself kind of plays with those kinds of tropes, right? That a big part of the book is kind of wrestling the metaphors of blindness with, you know, sort of the realities of blindness. And that’s really been kind of my MO, I don’t know, ever since I was an undergrad student, I suppose, kind of dealing with these metaphors that we have of, say, the blind poet prophet, that they don’t seem to translate into the reality of being a blind person kind of walking around the world, you know, that we seem to have these kind of extremes, I think in a lot of sighted people’s minds, where you’re either kind of a super blind person or you’re kind of the other end of the spectrum, kind of a pitiable blind person. And a lot of what I try and do in the book is kind of looking at the middle, you know, the vast middle ground of most of us who are just living our lives, you know, as mothers and people who work and teach and all those sorts of things.
Jeff:
Exactly. I picture, you know, the superhero and then the person with the cup on the street corner, you know, those two extremes, yet I don’t read or see too much on TV about that middle ground. Like you said, just the average blind person living life. It was really interesting to read about Homer and the history as you go through and it really came to light that, hey, she’s right. You know, we’ve always had these seers, you know, these people who like, even in the Apple TV plus series See, there’s the people who just listen and you hear the winds and the chimes, they make those little mystical things and they say a few words and that’s wisdom, like they’re seeing beyond.
Leona:
Yes. Yes, definitely. So there’s, and you know, that show is interesting too, because I kind of take issue with it in terms of this idea that if suddenly the whole world was to go blind, that we would suddenly be thrown into this primitive state of existence, you know? And it’s sort of like, wait a minute. You know, most of the blind people I know are the most sort of technologically savvy people I know, you know, there’s no, there shouldn’t be an assumption that, you know, blindness equals this kind of push back into this world of kind of foraging for existence, you know. But they’ve got some blind actors in there, so that’s good.
Jeff:
Yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean. It’s like, what, 2000 years forward, but it’s 2000 years back.
Leona:
Yes. Yeah. At least, right? Yeah. Absolutely.
Jeff:
Capturing this and the perceptions that sighted people have of us, it’s a daily thing for me, no matter how much training I get, no matter what I do to better myself. I think the only thing I gain out of it is how to handle the situation when I come across someone that may think all blind people- like the scarlet letter B is written on my chest or something like that.
Leona:
Love it.
Jeff:
No matter if you’re the most ninja, mobile person with a cane in the world, all they see is that blind person. And I think your book is reaching out to the sighted people and saying let’s find a new- I think you used the word ground, to start with, of who blind people are.
Leona:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, kind of one of the buzzwords from the book has been this word ocular centrism, and now that we’re all sort of living in this ocular-centric world and, you know, I try and make the distinction in the book about the difference between being a visual person and being an ocular-centric person insofar as it’s kind of the difference, I don’t know, very loosely, between being a white person and being a racist, right? Like you can’t help using your eyes if you happen to be sighted, right? You just can’t help it, but you can help feeling like that’s the only way to be, right? Or that’s the best way to be, right? That when you start to say, hey, I wouldn’t be able to cross the street if I were blind, I would be scared if I were blind, I wouldn’t be able to read or write or work if I were blind, right? All of those notions are very much an ocular-centric bias, right, that says that just because you can’t do it then nobody else can. And I think that that’s one of the things that we’re constantly faced with, as you say, you know, just walking down the street, the fact that people feel the need to kind of ask questions or tell us that we’re an inspiration ‘cause we’re just trying to, like, get to work in the morning or something, you know, is something that I am absolutely trying to dismantle. You know, that bias, those preconceived notions that really affect us, because when the person who is doubting our abilities is the person who’s sitting across the desk from us, you know, as a potential employer, it’s having a very harsh effect on our ability to live our lives the best that we can. You know, if we’re constantly having to prove, as you say, that we can do these things, it’s really hard. I do feel like my book is sort of doing two things, you know, on the one hand, trying to change perceptions of sighted people and realize that there are as many ways of being blind as there are of being sighted. But then it’s also for us, I think as blind and low vision people to feel like we have a culture, you know, to feel like maybe we don’t always need to be clamoring for inclusion, but that we can make our own culture and not constantly be needing to be more sighted-like, you know, trying to pass as sighted or trying to act as close to sighted as possible, to really think about things like blind pride and blind culture, and think about what that might mean and how it could orient mainstream culture in our direction.
Jeff:
I asked a question about 15, 20 years ago, somewhere around there, about blind culture. And at that time they said there is no blind culture. And these were people who were in organizations, groups, associations, well-known, and they said, there is no culture. So what you said there about trying to be part of the sighted world, trying to fit in, to make perfect eye contact, all these rules that you’re taught and stuff, but I was a breath of fresh air, open-minded, I thought there is blind culture.
Leona:
I think there is too. And I’ve heard that resistance before as well. And it mystifies me, you know, it mystifies me, like, why would we not want to celebrate others who are accomplishing wonderful things in a blind or low vision-centric way? I mean, that to me is what blind culture is all about, right? Is like, not always trying to kind of, again, clamor to be, you know, look at me, mainstream sighted world! No, actually, saying, look at what, you know, like, I like to say, my blind brothers and sisters are creating in this world because we can create things that are different, you know? I mean, it’s not as if we’re not also a part of the world at large. I mean, I think that’s the beauty about culture, right? Is that you’re, you can have multiple cultures. You know, I think of myself as a Greek American, you know, I feel like I’m part of Greek American culture. That doesn’t mean that I’m, you know, I have to choose, you know, I mean, the beautiful thing about culture is that you can involve and celebrate lots of different kinds of cultures, but yeah, to deny that there’s such a thing as blind culture seems to me, dare I say, quite short-sighted and counter-productive to allowing us to be the best blind people we can be.
Jeff:
In today’s world, it seems like there’s always some new words that are opening doors in a sense, like inclusion. I remember when to be inclusive, you know, corporations, everybody, it seems like they grab onto some of these words and said, oh, we’re inclusive, we’re, you know, everything. I think sometimes words, I don’t grab onto them that harshly, or I think it’s the general feeling I get, the atmosphere, the aura that comes from it all, like when you go to their website or the doorperson at the front door of that corporation, how does it transcend, how does it reach the person walking into the place? How does it reach the top floor? All that stuff. Yeah. They might put out a little white paper that says they are now inclusive or, you know, there’s other words out there too, but it just bugs me sometimes, I guess.
Leona:
Yeah. Because the feeling of inclusivity, I think, as you’re getting at here, is the problem is the assumption that sort of sighted people that dominate culture are the ones that are letting us in, right? So that means that they’re always going to be sort of in the position of power, you know, is the feeling there. And that’s why I kind of feel like, man, we need to be our own bosses, you know, in a lot of ways and being part of, how do I say it exactly. I get a little tangled in myself of what I want, but as a writer, you know, I think about this as being kind of the crux of the problem is that, you know, we have so many novels with blind characters and almost no blind novelists out there, you know? And I think the problem starts all the way from the publishers that are not blind or low vision to the marketing people, to the writers themselves, right, that are feeling like they’re constantly being told no, that’s not the right blind story to tell, right? Just tell your own story, just write a memoir, right? And I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a memoir, they’re beautiful, and I refer to many of them in my book, but I think that sometimes, you know, dominant culture says, oh, well, you can be included if you tell your own story, you know? And so we’re constantly in this position of being told how to tell our stories, how to create culture in a way that’s kind of palatable to sighted people. And that’s really where I get a little nervous about inclusivity, because then it seems like the only kind of things that we’re allowed to create and to write are things that kind of fit in with the sighted people’s ideas about what a blind person is. And that’s why we have so many of these kinds of messed up images of blind people that we all kind of, dare I say, roll our eyes, right? We’re like, oh my God, that is not a realistic blind person, blind character, blind, you know? And that’s because they’re not being created by us.
Jeff:
And that inclusivity is something, they build a window so big and they sleep well at night, because they got that written down or that opening, that’s interesting. You’ve written a few theatrical productions and acted in them as well. I mean, this is an area that, you know, usually you see people put on a play or a TV show and people talk about, well, why don’t they use someone with a disability in that movie? Why don’t they- CODA is a great example of people being involved in it that are from that disability group or- but here you’re writing theatrical, and you’re acting, you’re putting yourself right in it almost without thought of not being in it. I think that’s awesome.
Leona:
Oh, thank you. Yeah. You know, it’s funny because I was, you know, doing my PhD in English Literature and I came across this little quote in The Radical Lives of Helen Keller about Helen Keller performing in vaudeville. And I was like, whoa, how did I never hear of this before, you know? And at the same time, I was kind of like, I like to say kind of falling off the grad school rails. And I was performing in these little basement open mics in the lower east side in New York City. And so those two things kind of combined for me to think, to say to myself, well, when I finish this PhD, you know, I’m going to write a one woman show about, that’s inspired by Helen Keller’s performing in vaudeville. ‘Cause I just thought it was so fascinating. And so it was so much for me about getting the word out about this interesting moment, four years of her life, that I feel like people didn’t talk about because they were a little bit embarrassed about it. You know, it seemed a little bit tawdry that she should be performing for, you know, the masses, you know, she was supposed to be writing books and lecturing and things like that. And so I kind of researched it and learned about it. And so for me, it was never a question of, should I, or am I allowed to do this? It was more like, man, this story needs to be told. And like, I like a joke, kind of, not the greatest actor in the world, but you know, the cheapest actor I know. So you know, why not? Why not go ahead and do this? Again for me, it felt kind of performative and educational in kind of equal parts, which was perfect for my background.
Jeff:
How did the people around you feel? They all participated, you wrote it, you put it together. Did you surround yourself with people or did people just accept being part of it?
Leona:
You know, what’s funny is that at that time when I did- so I’ve written two plays and one was a solo performance, that’s the Helen Keller in vaudeville one called The Star of Happiness. The second one was, I think you mentioned before, the spectator and the blind man, that was kind of this, like, series of monologues that included both blind and sighted characters, that kind of led to the creation of Braille. So Louis Braille is kind of the culmination of that play. In both cases, you know, people just completely accepted it. And I didn’t have a lot of blind friends at that time. I didn’t, I actually wasn’t super involved in blind culture. I mean, there’s probably a lot of reasons for that. But man, you know, the much maligned Facebook and social media and things like that have done an amazing job of connecting me with so many blind and low vision artists. I just, my whole kind of, I don’t know, reality has shifted because at the time when I put on that play, I think Facebook was just kind of getting started and I just really wasn’t connected with a lot of other blind people. So I had a few friends through the music school in New York City and some of those people came to the show and stuff, but sighted and blind audiences alike just sort of accepted it as something that was interesting. You know, we did our best to make it an interesting show. I must say that one of my big embarrassments is that we had like all these really beautiful images that my friend who’s a photo archivist at the New York public library kind of put together and stuff. And I never did figure out a way of like, sort of integrating image description, which is you know, my bad and someday, if I ever do this play again, that will not be the case. But it wasn’t really an integral part of the play. I mean, you didn’t really miss anything. I have these photos, but that is not a good enough excuse, but interestingly, yeah, people accepted it, they felt like it was quite moving. And I think it was surprising to both blind and sighted audience members. I mean, most people just didn’t know this part of Helen Keller’s life. And it was interesting to sort of see my take of it as a blind performer myself.
Jeff:
As someone who is part of the blindness community, as someone who has lost sight, as an author, as a creator, do you describe things differently than you would, as you remembered, like when you were sighted, do you approach it differently at all? Like a little more description, or the adjectives, or does it play a part today?
Leona:
You mean like, as a writer?
Jeff:
Yeah. As a writer- like some people say they went outside, you know, is it important to describe anything? Do you, does your blind- well, it’s you though? Do you feel that it’s changed a little bit from something you wrote 10 years ago to today?
Leona:
Yes, I do think so. You know, I started losing my vision when I was 10 and it was really gradual. I’m sure some of your listeners can relate to this, right? It’s sort of like, I couldn’t tell the difference, you know, from month to month, sometimes not even year to year, it would sometimes be sort of clusters of years where I could really see the difference in my vision, but I was a low vision person for many more years than I have been a blind person. And I was a fully sighted person, really just as a child, right, where I saw totally normally. So I think all of those positions on what I like to think of as the sight-blindness spectrum have, I think informed how I write and how I describe the world both to myself and, you know, as a writer publicly. I would say that the most significant change that has happened over say the last 10 years of total blindness, is that I have become very interested in my sense of smell. And it’s something that I’ve thought quite a bit about, it’s kind of the direction that the book ends up going, because it’s so interesting to me, you know, Helen Keller, you know, a hundred years ago was complaining how people kind of made fun of her for getting a lot out of her sense of smell. I mean, she writes beautifully about her sense of smell in In the World I Live Inand, you know, people dismissed it as being unimportant. And I think it’s one of those things that’s so interesting, again, going back to this idea of ocular centrism, right? We don’t think a lot about our sense of smell. We don’t train our smell, our sense of smell as children. Right? Think about how much time we spend like learning colors, right, and designating colors in school and things like that. And we don’t spend any time training our sense of smell, right? And so we don’t think about it. We don’t train it, we don’t write about it. And it becomes a thing that becomes unimportant because of those reasons, right, there are kind of cultural reasons why smell is not important. It’s becoming more important these days and now more science is being done about it and stuff. But it’s one of the biggest kind of shifts that I’ve noticed that I feel like is kind of a cultural shift as well as my own personal shift.
Jeff:
One of the biggest things I noticed as, you know, my transcending towards blindness, the journey that I’ve been on is when I couldn’t see facial expressions. And what I really found is I could hear them. I could, the way someone’s talking or, you know, just a sigh like that, or just the rolling of the eyes. There’s- so much body language can be in someone’s voice. It carries through sometimes.
Leona:
It’s amazing, right, and whether somebody is smiling or not. I mean it’s amazing like how obvious it is once you start orienting yourself towards the voice. It’s so obvious, or even whether they’re sort of looking in your direction, right? I mean, I think that that’s one of the biggest- oh god, it just drives probably most of us crazy, right? The whole kind of not orienting your face towards another person’s face as if you can’t tell like where the voice is coming from, right? That, you know, many times in the movies, you know, a blind person is looking clear in the other direction from the person who’s talking. And it just seems like, wow. You know, we know where the voice is coming from, you know, it’s pretty obvious. And even whether it’s kind of facing in our direction or looking down, I mean, those things are, are very clearly heard through the voice. And I think that’s true. And whether someone has kind of a furrowed brow, I think even that comes out in the voice, I like to also call it, like you suggested, you know, sort of the audible eye roll, you know, you can kind of hear it in people’s voices as well. So I think you’re right. And, you know, that’s one of the things that I think is so interesting is like, you know, that’s wonderful that, you know, more blind people should be on the radio and doing radio. It’s like, why would we not take advantage of the fact that we have, you know, that we have a mindset that is kind of oriented towards listening? I think that’s kind of part of that whole blind culture thing, you know?
Jeff:
New speakers come out, it seems like the blind community is like all over it. You know, audio, audio, audio books. And as you went from sighted to total blindness, you’ve probably had quite a journey of what, how you- you probably have quite a journey of what tools you’ve used and migrated to, or had to resort to reluctantly, and to where you are today, you said you’re using JAWS on your computer. Were you an audio book reader at one point?
Leona:
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the journey that I’ve taken in my, you know, several decades of existence has been with technology. When I first lost the ability to read normal print, which was quite early for me because I lost my central vision first, I had kind of a weird conal dystrophy. So for many, many years, I didn’t quote unquote look blind, right? I didn’t need to use a cane or anything like that, but I couldn’t read from a pretty early age. So there was almost nothing for me at that time. I mean, finally, I got hooked up with books on tape and as a- as somebody who wanted to be a writer from a very young age, that was so frustrating to me, you know, to have to wait for weeks and weeks to get books, and oftentimes the books that my friends would be reading weren’t even available at that time. So once I got my first computer, you know, and was able to scan books, I mean, that was huge. And I kind of came up with this, I should say like grew up with a lot of this technology, you know? And so for many years, yes, what I would do is kind of listen to books. And then I used a CCTV for many years and I used zoom text for many years and at a certain point, oh gosh, it was probably 15 years ago now I just realized that I was struggling so much to see these giant letters on the screen, you know, for, for writing purposes and for being on the computer purposes. Again, I was listening to audiobooks, but doing my writing with zoom text and I finally sort of made a decision to move to JAWS, and it was amazing. It was one of those moments where I was like, oh my God, like, why have I been struggling for these years? You know, to see these giant magnified letters when I could just listen to them. And that was a major shift, that was sort of like, gosh, why was I fighting it for so long? And now I really, my newest kind of excitement about technology is really the Braille display. And that’s really been game-changing for me in terms of provoking me to finally get as good at Braille as I possibly can as an adult, you know, learning it because, again, you know, there were so few books that were available in Braille, but now that I can basically get any ebook, I mean, it’s, you know, immediate, you know, the book is published and I read about it in the New York Times and I can get access to it. And I kind of, at this point kind of go back and forth between my Braille display ‘cause I’m still quite slow and audio using usually more electronic books again so I can kind of go back and forth. I don’t listen to audiobooks much, because I do feel like audio books are kind of an interpretation, although for memoirs, I think that they’re great, right? If you get to hear the author’s voice, that’s magnificent. Again, I do kind of go back and forth between kind of electronic reader and Braille reading.
Jeff:
How about audio description, do you like those on movies or shows?
Leona:
You know, I am not a huge movie watcher listener, but I do definitely enjoy them when I get them. Again, I feel like, you know, a lot of mainstream movies have audio description, I feel like some of the movies that I, for example, used to kind of gravitate to when I was younger, the sort of more independent movies and stuff, we’ve got a long way to go, right? I think there’s so many movies that don’t have audio description yet, whether they, you know, people feel like they’re too sexy or what, you know, that’s a whole other conversation, you know, or there’s not going to be enough listeners or watchers. It kind of feels like still, we’ve got a long way to go to make sure that, you know, basically every movie has audio description and I think then I would probably do it more often, but I do enjoy it when I’ve encountered it. For sure. And I think there’s good audio description and bad audio description, right? I think it’s a new art form. So I think we’re still learning how to do it, right?
Jeff:
Yeah. I mean, being an author, you probably like reading, I’m guessing some people like reading books, some people read a book, then they see the movie and they’re always disappointed. Some people-
Leona:
Always disappointed, yeah.
Jeff:
Some people won’t look at the dictionary, they’re waiting for the movie. So there’s- but when I get something with audio description, I don’t consider it a book version or a movie version. I kind of, it’s kind of a hybrid, it’s a different category.
Leona:
Definitely. I think it has so much potential, you know, I think there are a few people that are just really trying to push that art form forward. Thomas Reed.
Jeff:
Thomas Reed. Yeah.
Leona:
Yeah. Yeah. He’s one of those people that’s really thinking deeply about what good audio description can be, should be. I think again, it’s still so new that we’ve got a lot to learn, which makes it an exciting kind of…
Jeff:
I put it in another category, like you know when those pulp fiction things came out, I think of cliff notes or something. You find them on a rack or something like that, but people were really into that type of stuff. And you know, so when audio description, it’s kind of gone on steroids for a little bit here, compared to how much progress it made over the last 20 years. These last few years, there’s lots of activity going on. And a lot of people becoming more inclusive and having audio description and stuff. So it’s another zone. You know? I don’t think if you have five people in the family over, you’re going to turn it on nice and loud. Some sighted people don’t seem to like it. Some people don’t mind it.
Leona:
Yeah. You know, I’ve been really lucky because when I first- watching movies with audio description, I was very lucky and my partner’s family were all for it. They were completely fine to have audio. I remember very distinctly, as a family, we all watched Titanic, you know, that was kind of one of their favorite movies and they were completely fine with having it on, perhaps because it was sort of a disability-oriented household, because the father of my partner, his father also is hard of hearing. And so he has closed captioning, so they were completely open to the idea of me, you know, watching with audio description. And my partner likes to say like, yeah, then I don’t have to do so much work, you know? So I don’t have to worry about describing things to you. We have the audio description on. And so I think I’ve been kind of lucky, but I could see how people would find it- well, I don’t know if I understand why people would find it annoying. It seems like, you know, either you’re going to have to describe it to your, you know, your blind loved one or you just listen to it and enjoy it with them, you know?
Jeff:
It’s so funny. You look up voiceover on Google and it, nine times out of- well, 99 times out of a hundred, I made that up, you’ll get, how do I turn this off? How do I turn this voice off?
Leona:
Wow, that is so interesting. Right? There’s some ocular-centrism there, right? A little bit of like, yeah, just to go on what you were saying too about inclusivity, I think what’s making this audio description thing really, you know, on steroids, as you say, is because we’re getting involved, right. We’re getting involved with actually writing it, creating it, making sure that it’s as good as it can be. ]
Jeff:
Oh yeah. Like Lachi, she’s a musician and she’s with the award shows, she’s been on there as an advisor for accessibility. I think it’s RAMP, is what they go by.
Leona:
That’s right. She is so great with her glamour canes and stuff. She’s just-
Jeff:
Oh yeah. Yeah. She decks it out. She decks it out.
Leona:
Talk about blind culture, right? That’s where it’s at, you know, embracing the excitement of what a blind artist can be, is very, yeah, that’s the kind of thing that gets me really excited.
Jeff:
This was a project from quite a while, of There Plant Eyes. What is in the works today? What are you thinking about? Where do you go from here?
Leona:
Wow. Well, I’m still on the There Plant Eyes journey, talking to you and still doing quite a few sort of guest speaker engagements and things like that. But the paperback edition is going to be coming out in August. So hopefully that’ll kind of keep the There Plant Eyes party going. A lot of opportunities have come from the book. I’m actually working on a film right now, speaking of blind culture, with the American Foundation for the Blind. It’s a film, who- actually, Lachi is one of the interviewees in that film. So I’m kind of helping with the script, which is kind of strange to say about a documentary, but basically we have like hours and hours and hours of wonderful interviews and I’m kind of helping to shape them into- 30 hours of interviews into an hour long coherent film. So that’s one thing that I’m working on. I am teaching again, back at NYU. Artistically, I have a novel in the works, which I really, I have basically a zero draft right now. So I have a complete novel, but it needs a major rewrite that I hope to get to this summer and slap it on my agent’s desk by the end of that. So I think those are the three things, sort of, teaching, novel writing and working on this script. I would love to get back to performing, but that’s a little bit on the back burner right now.
Jeff:
Yeah. That’s busy. That’s busy. That’s really great about the film, and exciting to see all these opportunities. I wasn’t trying to close the door on There Plant Eyes. I was just like, it must feel great when all of a sudden it got published, I mean, after all that work, and I saw this video where you’re talking about, and you said you got your first edit back and it was like, hmm.
Leona:
It was like, ouch. Yeah. It was like, ouch. Yeah. Yeah, you know, the publishing industry is such a strange beast, but I basically wrote the first draft of There Plant Eyes, again, I say write, but really this was kind of 20 years in the making. I mean, so many of the ideas that were in There Plant Eyes are from my kind of academic and artistic life. So things that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time and so writing it was really pulling together a lot of things that I had been writing and thinking about, but it took me about a year to write that first draft that I gave to my publisher. And yes, it was a very memorable moment where it was sort of like, we love it, this is groundbreaking, now rewrite it, you know, is basically the gist of the message. So I spent pretty much another, I guess, six to eight months kind of rewriting it and shaping it into what it is today. And then the last few months are kind of doing the smaller edits, things like copy editing and smaller edits and things like that. And just a side note, you know, working with an editor, I think a lot of people think that the editor’s like, right, you know, what does it mean, what does an editor do, and really, what they do is lots of comments, you know, using the comments function in Word, saying, why are you saying this here? What does this mean? You know, does this maybe belong somewhere else, or could you explain this a little bit more, or this is not working. So basically when you get that first edit back, it’s about you kind of dealing with their reaction to it. They’re really your first reader. You know, imagine being a reader and being able to at every paragraph say, oh, I don’t understand this. That’s kind of what the editor does. And then you have to kind of rework it and shape it, either based on what they say, you know, their suggestions, or you say, no, this is how I want it, but maybe it, you know, provokes you to kind of answer the difficulty in a different way. So that first major edit is quite a lot of work, I would say at least as much work as the initial writing of the book.
Jeff:
What advice would you give to someone who’s interested in going into writing a book today?
Leona:
Wow. Well, first things first, like, get your craft in order, right? I mean, I hadn’t taken a lot of writing classes in school because I was really writing like academic writing and stuff, but I started taking craft classes. So for example, there’s a lot of places now and they’re one of the few benefits of the, you know, the post-COVID era is how many things are available online, to take Zoom classes and things like that. And there are some really magnificent writing workshops with top-notch teachers that you can take that are maybe four weeks long or eight weeks long, things that are as good as, you know, a class that you might take if you were doing an MFA or something like that. So making sure that your craft is in order and then I would say, start writing, right? And have in mind the book project, but also doing smaller projects. So for example, I pitched an idea to an outlet called Catapult and they are kind of one of these hybrid places where they offer classes, they publish books, but they also publish things online. And so I offered them a column called “A Blind Writer’s Notebook,” and I was writing those pieces, and it’s really from those pieces that the style of the book came into being. And so far it’s kind of a mix of blended personal narrative, research, and a little bit of reporting, you know, talking to my friends as well. And that’s really where the style came from. And actually that’s how my agent found me. So in a very literal sense, that was the birth of the book. So I guess two, maybe three prongs, right? Making sure that your writing is as good as it can be, getting your writing out there in whatever way you can, if that means publishing articles or publishing on a blog or what have you, and then having in mind that book project, and working on that as well, you know, having it ready to go so that when an agent approaches you, you say, yeah, I have an idea for a book. Heck yeah.
Jeff:
You do have a blog.
Leona:
I do. I have actually too many blogs at this point. I have my, what I call kind of my personal website, which is really more informational. And a lot of times I’ll republish things there. I don’t have a time to kind of update that a lot, but it’s where you’ll find like my bio and things that I’ve published and things like that. Big newsy stuff, I’ll put on there. And then I have a magazine, this might interest some of your listeners, it’s called Aromatica Poetica, and I publish other people’s work there. So I publish poetry, fiction, non-fiction, all with a kind of a smell and taste-oriented interests. So I call it a sort of a magazine of smell and taste, of the arts and sciences of smell and taste. So I’ve published a few blind writers there, I would love to publish more. And then finally I have the book blog, which is the thereplanteyes.com. I’ve been very slowly putting the footnotes up and kind of auxiliary information, you can also find out about the book tour and things like that on there, and I’m trying to make accessible footnotes because I knew for me, that’s always been an issue of like getting that extra information is sometimes a little bit difficult as a blind reader.
Jeff:
Well, that’s awesome. I’ll get those links and put them in the show notes for people to click on and go say I got lost in the Aromatica, aromatic, I can’t even say it.
Leona:
Aromatica Poetica, I know it’s quite a, it’s a lot of syllables.
Jeff:
Yeah. I went in there and I started reading some stuff and all of a sudden, you know, the time was just ticking away and I go, okay, I gotta get out of here.
Leona:
Oh, I love to hear that. That is, can I use it as a tagline?
Jeff:
It was good. It was good. Like you said, some people don’t give credit to the other senses that we do, I don’t want to say enhance, but we do focus on sometimes, because it’s there and we realize it’s there, and yeah, so that’s good. I also want to go back to that Helen Keller story and take a look at that again, now that you mentioned that the vaudeville days or when she wrote about the senses, a lot of interesting stuff, because it really looks like you did a lot of research to get that cultural history part down, then intertwined your, bring on your personal, so great job on There Plant Eyes. I just, first thing I thought of when I was just, I said, how much research did she do? You were going back, way back in time. You know, I don’t know if you said Socrates, or Homer, and I was like, I never knew that stuff.
Leona:
Yeah, well, again, it was a long time in the coming, right? ‘Cause I was a classics major. So some of that stuff I’ve been thinking about for an awfully long time. I was not doing original research, you know, from the beginning, I couldn’t have pulled that off. It was certainly bringing together things, again, that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And I kind of joke that it’s sort of like my humble project of, you know, talking about 3000 years of blindness in Western civilization, you know, Western culture, but I felt like it was really important to have that long view to realize, like, how ingrained some of these ideas are. We talked at the beginning of when we were talking about this, these ideas of this, you know, oh right, you lose your eyesight and then you’re a poet, or you’re a prophet, right? I mean, like how that would be so wonderful if that was true, that would be fantastic if we were all super blind people as soon as we lose our vision. But these ideas are so ingrained in our culture and I felt like it was very important for me to make those connections. You know, that we just assume that it’s true from our popular culture. I mean, you can’t read a science fiction book without finding like a blind seer, or you know, prophet or, you know, kind of building upon those ideas, those tropes that are, you know, 3000 years old.
Jeff:
M. Leona Godin, thank you so much for coming onto Blind Abilities and sharing just a snippet of your life with us and your book.
Leona:
Oh my goodness. Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Jeff:
Such a great time talking to Leona. Be sure to check out her book, There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M. Leona Godin. A big shout out to Chee Chau for his beautiful music, you can follow Chee Chau on Twitter @lcheechau.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff:
For more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, download our app from the app store, Blind Abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.