Full Transcript
Lois:
I believe very firmly that I live an ordinary life. As a blind person my life is the same as anybody else’s, it’s just the tools and techniques that I use that differ.
Jeff:
Please welcome Lois Strachan: writer, speaker, singer-songwriter, musician, blogger, podcaster, and advocate for the blind.
Lois:
I believe that if sighted people were more aware of how we do things, that they would then believe that we can do more.
Jeff:
Her new book, A Different Way of Seeing: A Blind Woman’s Journey of Living an Ordinary Life in an ExtraordinaryWay, 2nd edition. Available on Amazon.
Lois:
But people are too busy wondering about how you achieve tasks, how you live your life, and because of that, they don’t actually hear your message. They’re too busy trying to get past that initial “Wow, she’s blind. I wonder who did her makeup,” or “Wow, she’s blind, I wonder how she got here.”
Jeff:
You can find Lois Strachan on the web at loisstrachan.com, L-O-I-S-S-T-R-A-C-H-A-N.com.
Lois:
Surrounding yourself with people to support, encourage, assist, and motivate, and help you when you have those blockages of what do I do next, is so important.
Jeff:
Please welcome Lois Strachan. We hope you enjoy.
Lois:
I have found that the writing community, the author community, the publishing community is one of the most generous communities that I’ve been part of.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson. In the studio today we have Lois Strachan, and she’s an author and has just published the book A Different Way of Seeing: A Blind Woman’s Journey of Living an Ordinary Life in an Extraordinary Way, 2nd edition. Lois is from South Africa, Lois, welcome to Blind Abilities.
Lois:
Thanks so much, Jeff, thanks for the opportunity to chat to you today.
Jeff:
Well it’s a pleasure having you back on, it’s been a little while.
Lois:
Yeah, it has.
Jeff:
Well, I think our timing’s just right, and thanks for taking the time, I know you’re really busy with publicizing your new book, and congratulations Lois, I remember getting new books, I’d always turn to that part, about the author, and just read about it, and so this is kind of neat, we get an audio version of that. So, let’s dig in, let’s open the cover. Lois, your book is now in pre-order, I just pre-ordered it, and this is the 2nd edition, why a 2nd edition?
Lois:
Oh, gosh, that’s actually quite a complicated story. I’ll try to simplify it. I published the book originally in 2016, and as soon as I published it, I started receiving requests for an audio version of the book,
and it took me a bit of time to get round to doing that, took me about two years to start planning to do an audio, so, before I went into the physical side of getting the recordings done and things like that, I thought well, I’d better check that the content is still relevant, and it was amazing how much had
changed from the time I published it to the time I was planning the audiobook.
So, not being able to do things simply, I thought I would update the book, and when I thought of doing that, I kind of assumed that I would land up with probably a few paragraphs of updated content for each of the chapters. Only, when I wrote the updated material, I landed up with about 100 pages extra.
So, it just seemed to make sense, since there was so much updated content
and that people were still buying the book and reading the book, that I should publish the
updated content as well, and rather than writing a whole new book and having two books and then confusing everybody, I thought let me just release this as a 2nd edition, with the updated content included.
Jeff:
Thus it’s continuing the journey.
Lois:
In a way, yes. In some ways, I’ve kind of realized that there are some things that I do now that when I originally wrote the book I kind of said were impossible, and I now do them just as a matter of course. There are a lot of things that have changed, I’ve become a lot more technology-friendly, I’m using a lot more technology that used to intimidate me, so all sorts of different things that have changed, and between the original book and now, I’ve also started working with a new guide dog, and I had a whole lot of new stories about Fiji that I thought would make great content to add into the book as well.
Jeff:
You lost your sight and what inspired you or who inspired you-
Lois:
You make it sound like one happened and then the book resulted immediately between the two. I lost my sight at the age of 21, and I’m now a whole lot older than 21, but the inspiration for the book came really through a number of different sources, but what it comes down to is that there’s so much curiosity about how we do things, the tools and the techniques that we use as the blind and visually impaired community, and the book is really a way of bridging that gap of understanding, because I believe that if sighted people were more aware of how we do things, that they would then believe that we can do more. Or if I can put that in another way, because they don’t understand the tools and techniques that we use to accomplish tasks, they think that it’s either really hard or impossible for us to accomplish those tasks. So the book is really a way of saying these aren’t the only techniques, these aren’t the only things that people do as members of the blind and visually impaired community, but it’s just to give you an idea of how I do simple everyday tasks, how I live an ordinary life, despite my blindness.
Jeff:
What was that like for you to review the book knowing that you wanted to update it a 2nd edition, and come across things that you were thinking “Oh, wow, I can do that, that’s not how it is today, the journey’s changed.”
Lois:
It was really weird, in fact, I was sitting, of all places, in a hotel in Kolkata, in India, when I was going through the book, and making a few notes on things that- well, I thought it was going to be a few notes, of things that I wanted to update, and it was only when I got to the end of that process and realized I had 22 pages of notes that I kind of realized that maybe I’d bitten off a little bit more than I originally anticipated, but it’s so interesting to see the change between December 2016 and April 2019, which is when I started writing the update. I’d actually realize and reflect on exactly how much had changed in that time. You’d think that, you know, two and a half, three years, is not a long period of time, yet so much had changed. It really got me to kind of pause for a moment and just reflect on the fact that we probably don’t recognize how much change is in our lives, and how much progress that we’re making because we’re so busy living out that life and experiencing that progress without acknowledging it and recognizing it. So it was a great experience from that perspective, I kind of patted myself and said “Hey,” you know, “Some things have changed, I have moved forwards.” But I didn’t expect it to be that much.
Jeff:
What was one of the most extraordinary things that you found in your book? It’s kind of like looking back at yourself, like you’re- Lois, meet Lois, three, four, three years ago, and what was one of the most astonishing things I guess?
Lois:
I guess the two greatest changes that I realized, one was about the technology that I’m using, things that I really avoided using three years ago because I was intimidated, and that I’m now using just as a matter of course. And it’s silly little things, I mean, now I can see that it’s silly little things, things like using Be My Eyes, using Seeing AI, using some of the text-to-speech, that type of app that I just avoided using, and just now it’s so easy to just pick up a phone and- I’ll give you a specific example, I love tea. I’ve never been a coffee drinker, but tea is just, I really enjoy different types of tea, but mostly tea comes in a box, and the boxes pretty much all look the same. So, beforehand I would just go “Well, I’ve got to wait for my sighted husband to get home so I can figure out which box to open next.” Now I just pull out my phone, switch on Seeing AI or one of the other apps that I use and go “Ah, it’s the French vanilla and rose. Okay, got it, I can open that one.”
Jeff:
And it’s teatime.
Lois:
Well, so that’s something so small, and yet so significant. So that’s the one thing, is about the technology that I’m using and how it’s added to my life, and the other thing was how much my life has changed since getting my new guide dog Fiji. Well, she’s hardly a new guide dog, I’ve been working with her for three or four years now, but I’d never really thought about how much of an impact that she had on my life, on my levels of independence, on the ability to get around and do things that I wanted to do, which I wasn’t previously.
Jeff:
A Different Way of Seeing: A Blind Woman’s Journey of Living an Ordinary Life in an Extraordinary Way. That’s quite the title.
Lois:
The title- it was the hardest thing for me to do, I’m really not good about finding titles for my professional speeches, and similarly for my book and for my blogs, but-
Jeff:
It spells it right out, though.
Lois:
Well, yes it does, and that was what I intended, because I believe very firmly that I live an ordinary life. As a blind person my life is the same as anybody else’s, it’s just the tools and the technology that I use that differ. So in that way I do see the world a little bit differently, just as any one of us does who has a vision impairment. The focus for me was on sharing stories about the small domestic things, the small stories, not the- I’m not a person who does huge adventures, like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, or anything like that. There are people who do that, and they do a fantastic job, and they do a huge service to the blind and visually impaired community in breaking down some of the stereotypes of what we are perceived to be able to do. But I’m not one of those people, I’m a much quieter person, although people wouldn’t believe that, but for me it was more about sharing the stories of how I live an ordinary life, even though being visually impaired or blind might be a little less than ordinary.
Jeff:
Mm-hm. And that kind of leads into who the book is aimed at. I believe it’s not just aimed at the blindness community, I think it’s aimed at those people who have all the questions for you.
Lois:
I’d love to be able to say “It’s aimed at everybody! Everybody should read my book!” Because I think every author does think that, deep down inside, that everyone should read their book. But I think any marketing guru would say “Well, if you try to market it to everybody you’ll end up marketing it to nobody.” If I were to try and distill down to who I feel my book is aimed at, who should read my book,
I think there are people from the sighted community and there are people from the blind and visually impaired community, and I think there are subgroups in each of those. So, in the sighted community it’s anyone who’s curious to know how I accomplish tasks, because I’m certainly not arrogant enough to say that my way is the only way of doing things, that there are multiple ways people can achieve and accomplish tasks, so this is about my way of doing things. And I think there are people who are sighted who are intrigued by some of the tools we have available, some of the techniques we use. But it’s also for sighted people who have a more direct connection to visual impairment, maybe they’ve got a work colleague who’s visually impaired, a family member, a friend, and want to know how that person does things, but are too nervous to ask. So I think those are two groups who can find benefit in the book, and the other group which I found wasn’t a specific group that when I wrote the book originally, that I was aiming for, but I found there’s been quite an interesting market in people who enjoy memoirs and stories of people overcoming challenges. So the narrative nonfiction readers, the inspirational memoir readers, so there’s been quite a pickup on that market as well. So that’s the sighted community, but then if I go through to the visually impaired community I didn’t really see that there’d be much of a market amongst other people with visual impairments, because we all know how we do things, until someone who was in the process of losing his sight mentioned to me that he read it and gained a huge amount of hope from what I shared in the book, and I think that’s a very important community that I can perhaps assist in a small way. Someone who’s going through the experience of losing their sight and is feeling very alone, feeling uncertain of what they’re going to be able to achieve, and do or not do, it just gives people a few ideas of what might be possible for them. So yeah, even though I might say, I’d love to say anybody can read the book, of course anybody can read the book, but I think that those are the main groups for whom it will have a particular interest.
Jeff:
You bring up a great point of someone who has a family member or a friend who is experiencing vision loss, I remember when I lost some vision I didn’t have any resources to go to, I was just told, you know,
from a doctor, you’d better check with the state, you know. That’s it. There was no book to read, there was no person to talk to or something, so this would make it a great gift to someone who knows someone is going through vision loss, that’s a great point. You really don’t think about who exactly it’s going to really affect, if anybody does know anybody that’s going through vision loss I think a book like this does give them that extra little bit of there’s someone out there in the world that’s done this before, and you can find more by reading this book. So that answers who should read the book, I think a lot of people would benefit, and I like that it’s not just directed at the blindness community, because you know, there’s so much more education to be done in the sighted community about visual impairment. Good job on that point.
Lois:
I think when I wrote it I really was aiming it at people who are sighted, to fill that gap of understanding. I wrote it as a professional speaker when one of my speaking mentors said “Your message is great, but people are too busy wondering about how you achieve tasks, how you live your life, and because of that they don’t actually hear your message, they’re too busy trying to get past that initial “Wow, she’s blind. I wonder who did her makeup,” or “Wow, she’s blind, I wonder how she got here. How is she writing her speeches?” So it really came out of that need, and I’m just thrilled that the value of the book has actually spread it to other groups as well.
Jeff:
This isn’t your first book, why don’t you tell the listeners the other books that are available from Lois Strachan?
Lois:
I have four illustrated children’s books called The Adventures of Missy Mouse, and they are written for children between the ages of three and eight, so in the younger area for parents to read to their children, and then as they start to learn to read themselves that’s where the kind of seven, eight-year-olds are able to still read the books. There are four books in the series at this stage, and they are written about a visually impaired mouse, who uses her other senses to engage with the world around her. So it’s a very similar theme, showing sighted children that someone who’s blind is just a normal person who uses different tools and techniques to accomplish tasks. And if anything, I think that’s kind of the niche that I’m most comfortable working in, is spreading the word about the tools and techniques that we use, because it is so frustrating as someone who is blind to be constantly facing the “But how do you do this?” “How do you do that?” I’ve had people who have known me for years, and only three, four, five years after I’ve known them do they go “We never realized you could use a mobile phone!” So it’s a way of answering questions, and the children’s books are a little bit the same, but just for a younger audience.
Jeff:
Aah. There’s the dog.
Lois:
There’s Ally! I don’t know what she’s having to say about this, but [laughs].
Jeff:
You make a great point there, because we’re always faced with that, no matter how much skills you gain, how much techniques you use to overcome the hurdles, the barriers, just to be an ordinary life, and then you run into someone that just has no clue, so you wish you could just, here’s your book. You know? Read it.
Lois:
Pretty much!
Jeff:
But a lot of people wouldn’t understand, if they listened to our first interview, when I first met you. You lost your eyesight and the first thing you did was you joined a rock band.
Lois:
I joined a rock band, yes.
[rock music playing, Lois singing]
Jeff:
Joined a rock- that’s not what I did, that, no, not at all. I went home and wondered what was going to happen, you just joined a rock band.
Lois:
Well, the process of accepting-
[rock music playing, Lois singing]
-blindness differs for each person, and I have always been someone who has been incredibly solutions-focused. I’ve built the skill of solving puzzles, solving problems has always been the way I approach a situation, and it really wasn’t even a question for me about what was I going to do, it was all about how was I going to do it. And it just so happened that a week after returning from hospital and yeah, I was offered a position as a backing vocalist in a rock band, and from there picked up keyboard as well, so I think it was a good thing, because I’ve always loved music, I’ve always played music, I don’t have any musical training, but I’ve always loved playing and being part of music, and because I was doing something that I was really passionate about it gave me a way to just take a step back from the challenges of learning Braille, the challenges of learning O and M and mobility and things like that, having to figure out new ways of doing things, it just gave me a few moments to gather my energy, gather my breath, and just be my old self. And that was such a good thing, such a necessary thing, because it just meant that I could gather my strength and go back to learning all those new, good skills that I needed.
[rock music playing, Lois singing]
Jeff:
That’s great. So, when and how can people get hold of your book?
Lois:
It’s available on Amazon, if you search for A Different Way of Seeing 2nd edition, it should come up. The pre-order is open to the public, and the book will actually be published on the 28th of October, so if you pre-order it now it’ll appear like magic on your device on the 28th of October.
Jeff:
I’m looking forward to that. I did my pre-order last night, and I got nothing!
Lois:
I’m so sorry!
Jeff:
But I did get the notice that I won’t be charged until it ships, so I’m looking forward to receiving your book.
Lois:
Yeah, that’s actually a change in the way that Amazon’s been doing things since the onset of the coronavirus, they’ve shifted that a little bit so it’s good to see that they’re taking that into consideration.
Jeff:
So Lois, what now? Your book is published, you’ve been working on this since, I believe, March, April? Well, it’s actually taken four years to get to this point for the 2nd edition, so now what?
Lois:
What I’m definitely not going to be doing is doing a 3rd edition and a 4th edition, I think it’s kind of reached the point where it’s a good time to stop and move on to new projects, but having said that, I am still busy with the audiobook, I’m working with a phenomenal narrator who has actually been a friend of mine since we were both three years old, so if anybody knows how to interpret my stories, Julie will, so that’s on the go at the moment. And there’s just so much going on at the moment. I’m trying to find time to plan the medium-term, kind of goals and targets that I want to work on. But I’m keeping myself very, very busy. In terms of writing projects, well, my guide dog Fiji, who I mentioned earlier, she writes a guest blog post for me once a month, and I’m thinking of co-authoring a book with her on her story, which I think would be a lot of fun to do. But I’ve also got a couple of other writing projects tucked up my sleeve, it’s just I so often get caught by so many great ideas for books but implementation becomes the problem, that I need to actually settle on one and sit down and start writing.
Jeff:
Mm. When you mentioned co-writing with your dog Fiji, I was thinking Paw Prints Publishing.
Lois:
That’s a good name for it.
Jeff:
It would! I was paying attention, my mind just kind of drifts sometimes, like, huh.
Lois:
Well, all of her blog posts that she writes are under a category called Paws for Thought, spelled P-A-W-S.
Jeff:
That’s clever, I like that!
Lois:
It is, except Microsoft Word keeps telling me that it’s a spelling correction.
Jeff:
Well, Lois, I’ve known you for four years? Is it-
Lois:
Something like that.
Jeff:
Three years, four years. Can you tell the listeners a little bit of your resume? Since you’ve lost your eyesight, you’ve done some, I’m gonna use the word, extraordinary things, they’re ordinary because you just went and joined a rock band, but you’ve also been a speaker, not just a speaker, but a leader and pretty much becoming an advocate for the blind in South Africa.
Lois:
I sometimes think that my journey has taken some rather unexpected pathways? And yet when I look back at them I can understand why I’ve moved from one steppingstone to the next. So, yes, when I lost my sight a week later I joined a rock band, and music has been and is still an important part of my life. I played a part of a show at the South African National Arts Festival last year, in 2019, and a featured artist at our state theater here in Cape Town, Artscape Theatre. They’re putting on a music festival in November that I’m one of the featured artists for, that we’re working on the content for that. Music has always been there, so I do a little bit of music now and then. I did four lockdown gigs over the last few months, which was a lot of fun, doing those on Facebook Live. So, yeah, the music is very important to me. Then, after joining the rock band, three weeks after losing my sight, I returned to university. And I lost my sight when I was halfway through my final year of my Bachelor of Arts degree, so it never occurred to me not to go back and finish my degree, and I completed my Bachelor of Arts 10 months after losing my sight, and then went straight on to do an honors degree, which I achieved cum laude. Unfortunately that was not in the most practical of topics, I did an honors degree in classical civilizations, because I’ve always had a love for ancient history and literature and mythology and things like that, but it’s not the greatest qualification to have to be able to get a job, so.
Jeff:
But it really does add to our coffee chats.
Lois:
Oh, absolutely! And it also gave me lots of content to write songs about, so there’s a lot of literature and mythological allusions in my songs, which people every now and again, “What, what did you just mention in that song?” So yeah, it’s not totally valueless to me. I started working, gosh, many many years ago I started working in the marine engineering field, working in admin, working my way up from the receptionist through to office manager, and somewhere along the line, primarily because I used to have this fear of answering the telephone, I joined Taskmasters International as a way of becoming a more confident speaker, learning the skills of presentation, and learning a little bit of leadership development. And because I don’t do anything by half measures, I jumped right into that and landed up working my way through the Taskmasters education programs, and the leadership structures to head up Tasksmasters Southern Africa, which at the time was leading a group of about 3000 people in nine different countries in Southern Africa. So, like I said, it’s some unusual directions perhaps, but everything does come together because after there was issues at work and a bit of job reshuffling and change of ownership, and I ended up without a job, I decided to leap feet first into the professional speaking world. And what I’m doing now is essentially motivational speaking, I’m an author, hopefully starting on my sixth book soon, I’m a blogger, I have a podcast on accessible travel called A Different Way of Travelling, you can see the theme in the names. Yeah, I do, where I can, I do work within organizations to raise awareness of the tools and techniques we use more broadly than just the blindness community but the disabled community generally. And of course, every now and then, I still am a sometime rock musician. So that’s really the nutshell, but of course there’s lots of other little bits that get involved in that.
Jeff:
I was saying, we may be oceans apart, but we have so much common ground that- there’s so much in the book, I read the 1st edition, and there’s so much in the book from a perspective that you had then, and now the second book, that’s why I ordered it, because I want to see the changes, and it’ll probably make me reflect in myself, a little bit of- sometimes we don’t do that enough, is to see where we’ve grown to, where we’ve come from, and it really helps me, like in Blind Abilities, to realize that there are people who are just entering this arena, the blindness community, or they don’t even know there’s a community at, you know, that level, so it just makes you step back for a second and rethink wow, it’s been a journey.
Lois:
I think so often in life, we are so busy living the journey that we don’t see the changes, the development, the growth. And certainly, I think that was one of the bits that I was very conscious of when I originally wrote the book. There it was 20 years worth of growth that I had to take a step back and go “Wow, I have learned a lot.” But then to have that same experience writing the 2nd edition, seeing how much had changed just in three years, I think it’s a very important thing for us to do as human beings, but not just in terms of our blindness skills, but just in terms of our life and in term of our development as human beings as well. Because we are so- what is the old saying, that you can’t see the wood for the trees? It’s very much that, that we can’t see the bigger picture because we’re so busy focusing on the here and now. The next challenge, the next problem, the next little bit of things that we have to do. And sometimes just taking that step back can be, excusing the pun, very eye opening. Mind-opening, perhaps, is a better term. Yeah, I think the other thing that’s important there is what you said, I mean, there are constantly people who are going through the journey of
losing their sight, their sight diminishing from fairly good sight to less sight, and it’s a very scary, very lonely place. And being able to provide a resource that maybe helps them, just a little bit, with that transition, to help that journey, to help their friends and family to understand, to gain perspective of that journey, I think that’s important. I have a speaking friend who’s a former world champion of public speaking, and he tells the story of giving a speech, and he didn’t think the speech had gone overly well,
but somebody came up to him and said afterwards “I needed to hear your speech. It was life-changing for me.” And even if a tool, a resource, a speech, a podcast, a book, a comment, changes one person’s awareness of what is possible, then it’s made a difference.
Jeff:
That’s great. I like that. A Different Way of Seeing: A Blind Woman’s Journey of Living an Ordinary Life in an Extraordinary Way. Lois Strachan, one more question for you: what advice would you give to aspiring writers, people who want to look into writing and maybe publishing?
Lois:
There are so many different reasons for writing. There is an incredible value to be gained from gaining healing through writing, that could be journaling or something like that, there can be a huge amount of
insight that one can gain from that. But if you’re wanting to actually share your story in a more public way, in terms of publishing a story, I think the biggest thing to know is not to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. Take it just one step at a time. And don’t expect your first draft to be perfect, you don’t have to get every word of every sentence wonderfully correct right from the start, that’s why there are people like editors. And adding onto that, I would say, I have found the writing community, the author community, the publishing community, is one of the most generous communities that I’ve been part of, and surrounding yourself with people to support, encourage, assist, and motivate and help you when you have those blockages of what do I do next, is so important. And if any of your listeners are keen to learn a little bit more, they can always feel free to reach out to me, and I’ll help where I can.
Jeff:
That’s great. Where can people find your blog?
Lois:
loisstrachan.com.
Jeff:
There you go.
Lois:
Simple.
Jeff:
Boom.
Lois:
Although possibly the best thing to do is just to probably to spell it, so it’s L-O-I-S-S-T-R-A-C-H-A-N. loisstrachan.com.
Jeff:
That’s great. People, go onto Amazon, go find the book. I did a search, I just put in your name, Lois Strachan, and it popped right up. And that was nice because then I was able to just click on it. A Different Way of Seeing: A Blind Woman’s Journey of Living an Ordinary Life in an Extraordinary Way,
2nd edition. Lois, thank you so much for writing the book, thank you so much for coming onto Blind Abilities and sharing your story, your book, and a little bit about what got you there, so thank you.
Lois:
Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to chat to your listeners, Jeff.
Jeff:
You bet.
[rock music playing, Lois singing]
Jeff:
Always a great time talking to Lois Strachan. Be sure to go onto Amazon and check out her new book A Different Way of Seeing: A Blind Woman’s Journey of Living an Ordinary Life in an Extraordinary Way, 2nd edition. Get your copy, share it with family and friends. It’s a great conversation piece, and it’s also a great read. And I also want to thank the multitalented Lois Strachan, for letting us use her music on this podcast.
[music playing, Lois singing]
And for more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, and give us a call at 612-367-6093. Leave us a message, and let us know if we can put your voice on the next podcast. Drop us an email at info@blindabilities.com, and download the free Blind Abilities app from the app store and Google Play store. That’s two words, Blind Abilities. And from all of us here at Blind Abilities, through these challenging times, to you, your family, and friends, stay well, stay informed, and stay strong. I want to thank you for listening, hope you enjoyed, and until next time, bye-bye.
[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.
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