Poured Over: Andrew Leland on The Country of the Blind

Jenna Seery

“I feel like I could actually follow you through this journey and come out of it changed rather than abused by my ignorance.”

The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland blends memoir, history and culture in a study of the experience of blindness and how it effects both the individual and society as a whole. Leland joins us to talk about the connection between blindness and literacy, the language around disability, the long process he took to write this book and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.           
    
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.        

Featured Books (Episode):
The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and I’m so excited to talk to Andrew Leland. He has written well, let’s call it a rather remarkable book because it’s really about the most liminal space you could be in as a writer, I mean, Andrew, you’re going blind. And you’ve written a book about going blind called The Country of the Blind. So I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself and the book before we really dive into this conversation.

Andrew Leland
I mean, Andrew Leland, the book is The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. And it is a memoir, as the subtitle suggests, but I use the occasion of my degenerative retinal disease, to explore not only my own foibles and experiences of vision loss, but also to do real reporting and history writing and a critical exploration of blindness, as a concept, as a lived experience through history as a political movement. You know, as a group of activists, a group of artists, you know, I’m really kind of deconstructing blindness and every angle that I could think of, not only for the purposes of writing a nonfiction book, but also really speaking to my own kind of urgent need to figure out where I’m heading, as I hurtle towards blindness, where I may have already arrived. And the ambiguity of that subtitle like a memoir, at the end of sight is useful for me, because it’s kind of like, still kind of confusing to me and others where exactly you might place me because I do have a solid little porthole of decent central acuity. And yet I do live my life by and large as a blind person.

MM
I’m pretty sure I’m never going to forget the opening line of this book. And as I’m going blind, as I write this, it feels less dramatic than it sounds. And I have to say, there are plenty of ways of experiencing books, right? You have audiobooks, you have ebooks, you have screen readers, which you and I are gonna get into obviously, because screen readers are sort of a little out of my purview. But as a bookseller, I happen to quite like words on paper, I had to stop and think so many times while I was reading your book simply because the way I experienced the written word and the way I experience language on the page, like I would have to stop and think what was I taking for granted? Right? Like, what was I just assuming? I could do like at one point in the book you’re talking about? So what is literacy actually, and I kind of want to start there, because you’ve been gradually losing your sight, over 20 years. But you do have technology to help you whether it’s screen readers and other pieces like that. So just wondering, can we start at like what is literacy look like when you can’t necessarily read on the page?

Yeah, that’s a good question. And one that I’m definitely still thinking through. And there is a divide among blind folks. And I think people who study literacy about this, you know, I think the classic sense that we have is that you don’t have the ability to read print, it gets complicated when you think about blind people, because sort of by definition, most blind people don’t have the ability to read print. And yet, then, so you have some blind people arguing that Braille really is the only way for a blind person to be literate. Because Braille offers you all of the trappings of print, you have punctuation, you have capitals, you have the spellings of words. And if you’re somebody who’s growing up blind, and you’re only ever reading auditorially, whether you know through audiobooks, or your parents reading to you are using screen readers, which is just a piece of software that reads any digital text out loud, you know, that person doesn’t know that pseudoscience starts with a P necessarily, right? Or they, if you ask them to type something on a keyboard, there might be either they can’t do it, or there’s a tremendous number of typos. And so that’s the sort of argument that blind people who don’t know braille are technically illiterate. But as I become blind, and I have, actually over the course of writing this book, retired from print, it’s not that I can’t read it, like I kind of, there’s a joke that I find myself making a lot where like, if you poisoned me, and then like, hid the antidote recipe, somewhere in Moby Dick, and like, the only way I would survive, so I had to like read Moby Dick in an enlarged print, like I would survive, it would suck, and it would take me a really long time to hopefully, I would say the poison wasn’t moving that quickly through my bloodstream. But, so all to say that, you know, I retired from praying while writing this book. So these were sort of urgent questions for me and, and I don’t, I don’t think I’m learning Braille, but I know plenty of blind like screenwriters, novelists who don’t know braille and I just so hard for me to conceive of them as illiterate and if It gets, it gets a little thorny. I don’t know how in the weeds you want to go but like, you know, are they not illiterate because they have a memory of print of visual reading and of spelling and their writing with keyboard. And so the fact that they’re only reading auditorially doesn’t matter as much as the memory of the way words are spelled or, or what you know, like John Milton, for instance, the English poet who wrote Paradise Lost. He grew up with sight was a writer and then went blind, and wrote Paradise Lost after that. So, you know, I was trying to think like, okay, so then, John Milton was illiterate when he wrote Paradise Lost, like, how does how is that possible? Those are the thorny questions that I have around literacy. I don’t know, what do you think? Where does your definition fall?

I didn’t really start really thinking about it deeply until I read your book. So I’m still deep in the weeds. But I’m with you the idea that someone isn’t literate, like the idea of home or not being literate, or like you kind of have this famous riff on James Joyce and writing Finnegans Wake and how he had to rely on Samuel Beckett to help them get words on the page because his eyesight was failing. It seems. So it seems like it’s along the lines of assuming that because someone is nonverbal, that they are somehow not intelligent. It’s strange, man. Also, audiobooks are their own art form. Right? If you think about the fact that probably telling stories is the first human thing we ever did, right? It’s not like someone was necessarily carving text into a piece of stone somewhere. I mean, someone’s sitting around telling you a story. And we kind of go from there. So I think we’re just limiting ourselves when we say that literacy can only be like, also, when I think of writers who got into poetry, or prose because of rap music or something like that, like, I just I think we’re limiting ourselves too much. If we say that it can only be this thing.

Yeah, yeah, it feels like a privileging of the visual. That is somewhat arbitrary. In the end, and but the culture at large, it’s not just print, right? It’s, we privilege in terms of documentary evidence, like the we think far more of eyewitnesses than we do ear witnesses, even if like, the transcript is just as important of a document of history as the photograph is.

And the thing too, is eyewitnesses are fallible, right, like, how many studies have we seen now where it’s just like, well, the human eye can only take in so much, but then you layer on our perceptions of the world, our social constructs, and then suddenly it all goes out the window? And yeah, very unreliable in a lot of ways.

Yeah, yeah. There’s, there’s a, there’s an attitude toward blindness in particular that I’ve encountered and that I’ve certainly recognized in myself as I become more blind, which has to do with the perception of blind people as being at a remove from reality really, because we think of visual as the sort of first order reality. And there’s a, I don’t really write about this in the book, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about more recently is that New Yorker writer, Ved Mehta, was blind and wrote during this sort of William Sean Golden Age and, and his journalism is incredibly visual. And I was reading a book of his, it’s all about Oxford philosophers. He was like, sort of one of the first guys to write a sort of like, journalistic piece that’s just about philosophers or academics, rather than, you know, sort of The New Yorker, we take for granted the New Yorker now, yeah. But you know, he was he was visiting Bertrand Russell and describe Russell’s eyes as wintry. And you know, vividly, really like a two sentence long description of Bertrand Russell’s eyes is like these like wintry, glistening whatever, and readers at the time and still just lose their minds over this. They’re like, how is this blind guy describing Bertrand Russell Russell’s wintry eyes and, you know, think the reality is Mehta when he was reporting would often have a friend with him, you know, or an assistant who would describe visual stuff for him so that he can include those details in his pieces. And I think to like deny Mehta, that ownership over those descriptions is a mistake. I think that the way that everyone gathers information, we’re constantly relying on other people, other technologies to help us access the world, whether you want to talk about like, you know, cars, or computers or microfiche machines, or it’s all technology, and it’s all interdependence of assistance. And yet, when disability enters the picture, suddenly it’s like, Well, okay, now you have a very special accommodation. It’s not exactly doing it in the real way. Like it’s not literacy, but it’s, well, like, you know, special ed, after school special give you like a little bit of a pass. But I think if you really like break down how humans access information, how humans engage with the world, we’re all participating in various ways in these highly mediated and interdependent ways of doing things that are the same structure as the way that disabled people do and that blind people do.

It’s wildly patronizing. too to say that Ved Mehta couldn’t make assumptions, creative assumptions. Like I mean, when he did that piece, famously, Bertrand Russell was not a young man. Like it is not necessarily a leap to suggest and I think Russell was in his 80s. At that point, it’s not a stretch to imagine that perhaps there are some cataracts have, you know, it’s just this idea that you cannot I mean, communicate any kind of communication, right is ultimately an act of imagination. Like in theory, yes, if you’re reporting, you should not be making up details. That’s not what I’m saying. But you should be able to have enough of an understanding of the material and your perspective on the material to be able to create context,

And nondisabled reporters do this all the time. There’ll be an adjective that is directly observed by them, there’ll be an adjective or a fact that they got from an interview with somebody else or from a historical record. But all of those things get woven together into the account. And that’s identical to the process that Mehta is doing.

The thing that I, I mean, I learned a lot from your book. But one of the things that really sort of shocked me out a little bit, honestly, is the idea that people feel free to move you around, because they see that you cannot see. And they’re just like, Well, I’m just going to move, you know, the idea of being touched by a stranger, because I’m standing in their way is deeply annoying and disturbing to me and to lose that sort of I don’t want to say control because you still ultimately have control over your yourself. But the idea that people feel like they can I just say, Well, you’re in my way, I’m just going to move you because clearly you can’t see where you’re going. Can we just talk about that shift? Because also, you know, you do have a chapter called the male gaze, this book and masculinity is complicated, even when you’re not blind. And I just want to sit with all of this for a second and walk through it. Because you also do have a son, like you’re raising a little boy. Yeah, very complicated world.

Yeah. I mean, really, this book began for me when I started using a cane full time in public. And the reason for that is because as soon as you produce the cane in public, you get marked as a blind person. And then what maybe it was an invisible disability as like somebody with low vision who didn’t necessarily need a cane or know when I should use a cane. It became abundantly visible. And overnight, people treated me in radically differently. Like, and like the example you bring up, you know, I’m standing in line, I don’t see that somebody is trying to get by. And so somebody, instead of saying, Excuse me, we’ll just like put lay hands on my shoulders and like steer me aside, which I think is something they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. If I hadn’t had that cane. And I thought a lot about what gives what gives people the sense that that’s okay. And I think it really is the status of the disabled person, even today, you get viewed as a second class citizen, or as really a child, there’s like a deep custodialist, paternalistic view towards blindness on the sort of stranger encounter level, but also you see it baked into institutionally the way that schools treat people with disabilities, the way that that businesses do, or employers. And it really, it’s like, kind of at every level of the culture, this sense that this person, by definition is somebody who needs help, who needs to be managed, who doesn’t have agency of their own and effectively becomes a dependent, you know, somebody who you use steer rather than somebody maybe who might have preferences or ideas, or agency of their own.

And one of the things you talk about learning in the book, too, and this was sort of new for me, because again, I’d never really considered blindness the way I will now because I’ve read your book, but this idea that, you know, the majority of people who are actually blind whether that’s legally blind, you know, physically, there are varying degrees of blindness, right. And that for the most people, it’s not just complete pitch black. No light whatsoever. Like it’s more degrees of shadow more than anything else.

Yeah, I think I think an analogy to other disabilities is actually helpful to understand that idea. Like, if you think about deafness, I think it’s very similar. Like there are people who are so called profoundly deaf. But even if you’re profoundly deaf, if you’re standing next to, you know, a plane that’s beginning to take off like you, those vibrations will reach you. And I think it’s the same thing with vision where they’re there. Yeah, I think the figures something like 15% of blind people have no light perception at all. But I found even in those cases, there was an account of a guy whose optic nerve nerves had been severed, so there’s like literally no information reaching his brain from his eyes. And yet he still described a kind of visual tinnitus, like swirling colors, because the visual cortices are still doing something in the mind, even if even if they’re not getting that that input. And so to call to think of somebody who’s blind as having, first of all, no visual input at all is, is at best of times erroneous, but also even conceptually, I think people have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that blind people might have a relationship with visual culture, which is real, regardless of talking about the physiology of vision. I think it’s even more important point actually, to you know, what, when I started to think about an encounter these people saying things like, Oh, why does Stevie Wonder have such beautiful partners? You know, like, what, and this is getting into the male gaze stuff, like, you know, and I sort of, in my first draft of the book, had to kind of strike out like, yeah, how dare they question Stevie’s right to have a beautiful wife, right? But then, you know, readers of that draft were like, okay, like that is that is harmful and obnoxious. But like, can you answer the question? Like, what does what does a blind person think about visual beauty? And I had to kind of pause and say, like, okay, I was mad at Jimmy Kimmel for asking that question. But like, what is the answer? And to me, it comes down to this idea that like, there are other ways of accessing the visual world, and just the world full stop, then directly observing them through photoreceptors, stimulating the optic nerve, you know, there’s, there’s the whole world of language for one and verbal description. And I know lots of blind people who like to hear description and visual descriptions of everyone from their partners to, you know, new acquaintances and get something from that. And that doesn’t have to be like a second class description, right? I mean, I think they’re the same way that like, Bertrand Russell’s eyes are wintry. Like, that’s his perception of them.

It’s interesting watching, you go through this book, because as you said, there is reportage here, you have gone to the Colorado Center for the Blind, to be trained, essentially, in how to move in the world. And you talk about how your gait changed, that originally, your gait had gotten a little awkward when your sight really sort of started to fail you. And now, you’ve not only have a sense of community, but your physicality has changed. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s really important to talk about how the community can reinforce that and also learning just frankly, learning new skills that some of us don’t actually have to think about, like crossing the street.

Right. It’s not infantilizing it. But there is a real, I had to summon some, you know, humility there to say like, Okay, I’m gonna learn to read again, to cross the street again, to cook again. And that’s real. You know, that mean? That is, that is a humbling experience. But the thing that I find powerful in it is that there’s, it’s also such a rich experience, and ultimately, like a normal one, like, that’s the thing like I’ve got the part of the part of the journey for me has been from the beginning. Like when I first started using a screen reader on my computer. It just felt like a cult like, you know, I was like learning this strange, new secret skill that only like a few people knew. And it was hard and weird. And then gradually over the course of months, it was like, Okay, now I’m just actually just checking my email now the way I used to, but I’m doing it in the way that if he showed me a video of me doing it 10 years ago, I would be like, Oh, God, what is that? But now I’m like, What? What are you talking about checking my email with my screen reader? It’s fine.

You weren’t originally enthusiastic about joining the community of the blind. I mean, you’re pretty honest. And some of your responses. I mean, you’re not glossing over, this wasn’t like, oh, yeah, I found my people. I’m ready to go. You were. I mean, you’ve also been through some stuff, though, with people who are just not understand there’s that dinner party thing, which I’m sitting here making faces that you can’t necessarily I didn’t get the inscrutable gene. And I just wow, like, again, this goes back to people outside of your community. Yeah, making assumptions. Just straight up making assumptions about who you are, and how you experience the world. And part of that, sure, that comes back to how our society responds, like blindness is the worst possible thing that could happen, or, you know, any kind of disability, but we do really use blindness as sort of the standard for oh, the terrible thing that might happen. And yes, then it pops up in bad poetry, but that’s a whole other thing. And we’re gonna let folks discover that part of the book too. Okay. But I want to sort of sit with this community, is because I mean, blindness can be genetic, it can be the result of an accident, or, you know, a physical thing. And there’s so many different ways of coming to blindness that can happen at any point. It’s not suddenly something that happens at this age or that age or what have you. And, you know, the technology certainly has gotten better. Over the course of the 20 years that you’ve been sort of wrestling with all of this. But I want to talk about the growth of the community though, because I didn’t know that disability rights as a discipline only dates back to the 1990s. For some reason, I sort of felt like it was happening in the 70s.

Yeah, I mean, I think disability studies as like an academic is more 90s. That’s when like, I think cultural studies in academia sort of opened up to include disability studies more legitimate or more institutionally accepted. But yeah, I mean, and even the disability rights movement that I think a lot of people point to from the 70s, like, I think a really awesome primer for it is the film Crip Camp on Netflix, that does a really good job of presenting some of like, the key moments and in in that history of activism. But you know, before that, of course, just as like, before, the civil rights struggle of the 60s, there were movements for African American liberation and activism, you know, there’s their disability activists stretching back to hundreds of years, people kept on asking me as I was writing this book, and even since I’ve come out, like, why is the Bay Area such a big deal in your book, and, and it’s interesting, because like, that is sort of the cradle of the disability rights movement, you have Berkeley and like the movement for Independent Living, and like Judy Newman, and Ed Roberts, and all these, you know, like that the introduction of Curb cuts in the city for wheelchairs to roll up and down. But it goes back even to like the 19th century, where you have like the the birth of the organized blind movement in Northern California also happening. And it’s interesting, because like, if you look back, you see, you can go all the way back to sort of like the first blind people in this country, organizing separate from sighted, paternalism, incited custodial realism, to really find self-determination. And then it also kind of zooms all the way forward to the present day where technology and Silicon Valley is the sort of beating heart of a lot of where blind people are interested in moving towards and sort of agitating. And I don’t know, so there is like, a kind of a funny shadow theme of this book, which is all centered around the Bay Area.

There are times where I love the amount of technology I have in my life. I mean, I carry two separate cell phones. And the idea that I’m walking around, you know, I went from a slide phone to a touchscreen supercomputer that I hope not to get wet, because, wow, that would be such a drag, but also, a lot of my life is on both. Yeah, two very large parts of my life are on two separate devices. But I’m gonna quote you for a second. Disability is not a design problem. Right? Like, it’s great that we have the technology, it’s great that, you know, you have mobility that you might not have had, say, if you were growing up in the 1950s, or, you know, even in the 80s, for instance, right, which is not technically all that long. But the idea that, you know, you have a screen reader that you can set to do whatever you need, like, I mean, you’ve worked as a book editor. Yeah. You know, you work as an audio editor and audio producer and a Podcast Producer. And I mean, there’s so many things that you can do, were there for a long time, there was this idea that if you were blind, you just kind of sat in the corner and hung out.

Yeah, I’ve talked to a number of older blind folks who really make no bones about it like this is it at least in that regard, this is the best time in history to be blind, because just thinking about literacy again, you know, the entire ecosystem of ebooks is, by and large, accessible to blind people, whether and instantaneously can be converted to a Braille format with using a refreshable, electronic Braille display. Or you can have a screen reader read it to you, or now like, there’s AI narrated audio books, not to mention human narrated ones with realms of mp3. In the old days, you know, if you wanted to go to college, and still there’s value for this for some blind readers, but you would have to basically hire somebody, you’d have to have the money to hire somebody to read you all your textbooks, where if you if you were doing research, and that book wasn’t in your available as a book on tape, you know, you’re hiring somebody to read it aloud. And not to mention the era before audio recording, or even the invention of Braille in the 19th century. That turn is huge. But I think as I was writing, I became conscious of my own privilege, in a way where it didn’t feel totally reasonable for me to say like, well, yep, and we’ve got all this great technology. So going blind today isn’t actually so bad. And I really kind of became a little obsessed with the idea of privilege as I was writing this book, because I think I came at it in this very naive sense of like, I am like a privilege guy. And now I’m becoming blind. And I’m going to be a marginalized guy. And this is a tale of my marginalization. And the more I researched, the more I realized that there are so many other factors beyond my disability status that contribute to the ease with which I can move through the world. And there’s a term that I learned recently that I think originally arose when blind kids were being mainstreamed more and more in schools, and the schools for the blind sort of started to fall away a bit and you would just see blind kids in public school classrooms and the term is vanilla blind. And they used it to refer to basically kids with blindness was their only disability because there’s a lot of a lot Kids with blindness plus cognitive impairment or hearing, hearing loss, whatever. But like the idea of vanilla blindness, sort of in the context of like identity politics is interesting, too. Like, I’m vanilla blind insofar as I have only one to only one disability, but also because I’m like a white cis, heterosexual, economically privileged man. And what does that do in terms of my experience of blindness? And I think it’s, it’s actually profound. The way that those other factors affect my experience,

when we talk about the word disability itself for a second, yes, this is something I do wrestle. I mean, clearly, blindness is a condition it impacts how you live your life, and you do have access, as you just said, to lots of resources that maybe not everyone does. But I mean, isn’t disability itself, isn’t that just patronizing and weird? I mean, don’t we need a new word? Or is that just a legal connotation that just makes it easier to provide services for certain segments of the population?

There is not a consensus on this, but I can speak for myself and I really love there’s a guy named Lawrence Carter Long, who has a hashtag that became popular called say the word and it’s basically like, I think his argument, if I can paraphrase it is those euphemisms like differently abled, or I’ve seen a really heinous one, which is handi-capable, they are there euphemisms, and they kind of try to cover over some discomfort around this category. And for Lawrence Carter Long, say the word is what it sounds like. It’s just let’s just say the word just own it. And like, yes, there is a negative connotation to the, you know, like, if you break down the word, it’s like, oh, okay, you, you, you’re disabled, but, but he talks about in terms of other words that start with this, I’m trying to remember, like, I don’t know, the weird one that I’m thinking of is dislodged, you know, dislodged is not an inherently negative idea, right? If you dislodge something, what if you dislodge a splinter from your gums? Right? That’s pretty good, right. And so I think that there’s a way that like, the DIS in disability doesn’t have to be a sad, bad, negative thing. It’s, it’s a different thing. And that I think, is like the core conceptual move that I am trying to make over and over again, in my own mind as I become disabled, and I tried to perform in the book, and that I hope readers make too, which is the idea that disability doesn’t need to be subordinate. It doesn’t need to be a diminishment. It is an alternative. It is another way of being like I want to get a tattoo of the Borges line from his lecture on blindness, where he writes that it’s one of the styles of blindness for him is one of the styles of living and I love that so much. Because that gets at that idea of disability, it’s like, an alternate ability you’re on, you’re a little off to the side,

You really should get that tattoo by you. Because you do, I mean, throughout the book, you’re talking about the difference between the biological facts of blindness and the social constructs. And it’s, it’s really the social constructs that I actually had more itchiness around, right. It made me much more aware of my own abilities and what I can do and also like, I live in New York, and I jaywalk, like a maniac. And I really probably should stop jaywalking, like a maniac. And for instance, I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, and really jaywalking in Los Angeles is the worst idea. It is absolutely the worst idea. And so if I can moderate that kind of behavior there. And this is a really, I realized this is a very simple, simple example. But again, like I don’t even really think about it. The things that I don’t have to think about on a regular basis, like I moved through an airport with no issue. Yeah. You actually had a little class in like, in travel skills.

Oh, yeah. Not a little class. That’s like traveling, I was a member. for blind people. I mean, that travel and information access, you know, like it basically those are the two big things I would say.

And then you hit me with this, you know, actually interacting with blind people is not necessarily part of a medical school curriculum where doctors don’t actually lately there have been pieces about aging, right? In America’s population, the world’s population is aging and whatnot, and like what happens to your body, right, like the lack, you lose some movement, you lose some range of motion, all this kind of thing. So you put someone in a padded suit and let them sort of walk through their lives and their eyes get really big, and they’re like, I do not like this. Because you just you don’t have a concept of what it means to be elderly. And in some cases, yeah, that is losing your sight losing your hearing as well. But even just simple things, like opening jars, yeah. Yeah, putting doors going upstairs suddenly becomes an issue like all of these things that we don’t necessarily have to think And here you are you spent a year you wrote a chapter a year, essentially. Right? You drafted like a chapter a month.

A chapter a month. So it was like the I wrote up full draft in a year, okay, and then took another two years to rewrite it a couple times.

Granted, this is your sort of daily experience, but you also are putting yourself in places where you are profoundly uncomfortable, you’re either uncomfortable with your own response to your community, or to your feelings about I mean, you talk about how you really did have some ideas about what it meant to be blind that had been blown up.

Yeah, that felt really important to me to kind of take those risks of making myself seem like a butthead in writing the book, because I just have this experience as a reader a lot, where, when I, when someone comes out of the gate swinging at me, in a book, like sort of like, you have all of these false ideas, and I’m going to disabuse you of them violently and you will leave this book, you know, having been through like the intense sauna and aggressive massage of my thinking, like, often I’m kind of turned off by it, or I don’t, like I feel bad about myself, but I’m not like changed as a thinker in my life. Whereas I think when I can start from a place of at least having when I feel like the writer has compassion for my ignorance, in a way and then will bring me out of it. That, to me, is a much more effective way to change someone’s mind. So I think, I think maybe I unconsciously adopted that, that technique of like, not only having compassion for a reader who hasn’t thought about blindness or thinks about it in a problematic way, but also the reality that I was that person and continue to be that person to a degree as I try to pull myself out of that ableist thinking that I grew up with, and I think that is one of the reasons why the book has gotten a good response from people I think, who feel like Oh, I totally thought you were just gonna, like, cancel me every 10 pages. And instead, I feel like I could actually follow you through this journey and come out of it changed rather than abused by my ignorance, if that makes sense.

Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. But how much of your experience as an editor? I mean, obviously, you’ve been with The Believer since what — 03? Yeah, there’s been audio editing. And there was the podcast with Casey and everything else. But editing story, right? Whether you’re editing in text or you’re editing audio, that editorial process it, like, it bleeds over into everything else. So how much of that sort of propelled you through the writing of Country of the Blind? And how much of it actually sort of got you a little stuck? Because you’re thinking, well, this is the thing I actually want to do. And you still have an editor who’s like, well, actually…

That’s interesting. I definitely think that like the years I spent at The Believer and like working with Heidi Julavits, Ed Park and Dave Eggers, and Vendela Vida, like that really was my MFA program, even though I wasn’t writing that much there. Like, just like, reading all the writers who came through the believer and just working really closely with those editors gave me such a strong sense of, I mean, it really formed my taste as a reader. I mean, my taste as a reader reformed before I got that job, but like, it honed them and my instincts as a reader, which, of course, become your instincts as a writer as soon as you start writing something. And part of it, I think, connects to what we were just talking about in terms of like, how I wanted to wield the subject, and not have it be in a super didactic way, but come at it kind of more obliquely, more literarily, I remember, I think it was Heidi Julavits, we would get pitches for personal essays and The Believer, published and publishes personal essays. But there was like a kind of personal essay that would like always be rejected. And, you know, I think it was a cover, I remember conversations about why they weren’t working. And often it was because they would sort of foreground the trauma and not really transcend it. And then we just sort of be like, this thing happened to me and like that, in and of itself should be interesting to you. And I’m going to narrate that in a vivid way. And like, that was never enough and had to also kind of, and this is just like the aesthetic of the magazine or the demands of the magazine, it would have to do more. And it would have to kind of what I think unconsciously noticed over the years was like, the more that the personal notes they would do would almost bring it into a different genre. So it’d be like, I’m going to write about this traumatic thing that happened to me as a vehicle so that we end up in an art museum writing about our history. And this is gonna turn into like an art piece of art criticism and like somehow bridging the personal narrative in art criticism, or historical writing or literary criticism of close reading a poem as a way to understand one’s life and something that happened. And so I think that was really the approach I took. And I never had an illusion that I was sitting down to write a memoir about me going blind and what that was like, I mean, I knew that that there was going to be that was going to be one of the colors on my palette, but I also knew that I had to close read historical texts and find weird poems and go on journalistic adventures and I wanted all of those things to be really tightly bound together in the experience of the book.

I mean, for me, that was part of the fun of reading the book is I didn’t always know where you were taking me. And also, I’m not really a science nerd. Like, I do appreciate some science writing. And then there’s other science where I’m like, I will get through this because it’s important. But science writing doesn’t necessarily sing for me the way maybe Beckett’s End Game does.

Yeah. Same.

So, sort of muddling my way through with you, right? And obviously, you’ve done all this research, you know what you’re talking about. But I could still feel like you were figuring out I mean, you’ve got this piece about Mass Eye & Ear and take your wife, because it’s pandemic and she’s like, Yeah, you could take the bus. But how about I drive you instead? We’re in lockdown. I’m going to drive you because, you know, a couple of hours from Boston. And her perception of your blindness changes after because she’s never really been in that setting with you. Specifically, your perception of your blindness changes, because you’re seeing it through your wife’s experience. It was that whole chapter to me is completely wild. In that you guys have been together for quite some time. You’ve been losing your sight the entire time. It was wild. It was really it was. It’s a great chapter, I highly recommend little book, but this, I really felt grounded in your story, in a way, because here are people who are deeply involved in your life. I mean, your wife? Yeah, she’s saying, well, so what’s that like for you, as you’re putting this all down on the page? I mean, obviously, she’s her own person with her own life, but you can’t leave her out. What is the how do you balance all of that?

Yeah, it, I didn’t set out to write a lot about Lily. But as I kind of broke down my experience of this, it became immediately apparent how important she is to the process. And like, that was one of the big revelations for me of reading the book was realizing, I mean, one of the revelations to me about, about my own life, and my experience of vision loss was how much I had kept it to myself, and even kept it from myself and just sort of compartmentalized it. And so there was this sort of multi layered process of like, figuring out how I felt about it, and then realizing how interconnected I was, I mean, it’s obvious when you when I say it, like, obviously, Lily and our son Oscar, are connected to this experience and going through with me, but it really took that level of introspection of like, banging out multiple drafts of this book to kind of like, appreciate how deeply interconnected those experiences were, and in sometimes tricky ways to like, thinking of, of the demands that are put on lily, you know, and the complicated ways that, you know, any relationship I think, has these negotiations that happen of like, how much are you responsible for in the upkeep of our life that we share together? And what excuses might you have to not hold up your end of the bargain? And like, what’s a reasonable accommodation? You know, I think we talked about reasonable accommodations in the context of like the law, right? Or, you know, somebody suing a restaurant for not having a ramp, but there is kind of a like, ADA of the heart. No, but seriously, there’s like an ADA of like, a relationship where it’s like, what is legitimate for me to just like, let Lily do because I’m blind and I can’t do it. And what do I need to like, figure out how to do anyway as a means of being an equal partner and not let it be an excuse. And that is far easier said than done that easy to say, but even harder to do.

And then a little that crosses the line too with gender politics, just because what we are as a country and culture, and it was really interesting watching you work through so many different levels of your own personality on the page. And I like you and I have never met until now. And we’re meeting over zoom. And yet I feel like I would recognize you like out in the world. Right? Like, I just I feel like you’re very sort of consistent in your presentation, and that you’re just kind of well, here I am. I’m a messy human being. And it happens that I have this extra piece of my experience.

Yeah. I’ll take it. That’s me.

All right. Fair enough. But before I let you go, can we talk about literary influences for a second? Because you sort of hinted at it with The Believer and yeah, your taste had sort of been built in before. I mean, because you do this very groovy thing where you can be very solemn, and witty, kind of in the same sentence. So clearly, you’re reading very broad like, I’m not even going to I can guess some of your influences, but I’m not going to throw them out simply because I really want to hear them from you. But I do feel like you are not just reading along one particular path.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, I think like, I remember my mom who’s a screenwriter whose father is Neil Simon, the Jewish American playwright. Like she, my mom wrote a play, and that was turned into a movie Moonlight and Valentino. And on her bulletin board when I was growing up in her office, it said, like another Simon smiles through the tears. And that was just like, you know, like a sentence that I read, like, every day as I walked by her desk, and you know, so I think that like, what you identify as, what did you say, solemnity with wittiness in there, like, that’s definitely like a Simon jam that I, I guess I inherited probably, or at least I valorized as a result of being in that family of writers. In terms of like me as a reader of prose and nonfiction. I mean, you mentioned Samuel Beckett and Samuel Beckett is another like, surprising thread through this book where he’s just he kept popping up and, and he’s the master of that, like, there’s a quote Stanley Cavell the critic on Samuel Beckett, describing his ability to glaze calm on to terror. But I would add, you know, the comedy of Beckett, that’s like, kind of like terminally bleak, but also somehow, like, utterly joyful and hilarious. That’s just like, why I read is to find that alchemy.

There are the people who get Beckett. And then the people who are like, Yeah, this is never happening for me. And I mean, I tend to gravitate towards the people who are like, oh, yeah, it’s totally weird, but I get it. What do you what’s next? I mean, obviously, you’re working in all of these different mediums. You’re writing articles for the Times, and The New Yorker. And, you know, obviously, this book has quite a set of legs to it. But what happens next?

I think it’s not a coincidence that I mentioned Mehta like I think his career, not exactly his career, like I don’t know, that I can’t like point to specific books of his that I want to write. But just the idea of like, being a blind, literary journalist, sounds extremely fun. And I feel like I could do it. You know, and I think there’s a way in which like, reading this book, and then also reading some of the other pieces that I wrote, while I was reading the book, like a piece about deaf blind communication for The New Yorker and a piece on, on blindness and performance and TV for The Times Magazine, and like a Radio Lab story about disabled astronauts, like, even if I’m not reading specifically about my experience of blindness, there’s a way that I feel like, and there’s a lot of other disabled writers and artists who are, there’s kind of a moment happening culturally, right now, there’s a lot of people but like disability, like other identities that I think are more widely acknowledged as working this way, like race, or gender, or, or sexuality, it’s like a perspective that is extremely powerful, and generative and kind of fertile, that I’m excited to explore more. So it’s to write about disability more, but even just to write about culture, through a disability lens, in a lot of different contexts, but like nonfiction, for sure, maybe radio, maybe magazines, or maybe another book, but just thinking about using disability as both like a passport, you know, I think it’s like, I think it gives me access to people and communities and ideas that other writers aren’t necessarily gravitating towards, but also as a subject, because I just think there’s a lot of really interesting people out there doing stuff in the world of disability that not everybody knows about in the world, they should.

There’s so much we can do with story, right? Like, it’s perspective, like a reader brings their own experience to whatever they’re reading. And so that means every book is different for every single person. And there’s something really powerful in that, right. And, you know, same can be said, though, for radio stories, or magazine articles, or whatever, like, whatever that piece of communication is, your response isn’t necessarily going to be the same as the person sitting next to you. I think that’s really where the power is. And so to have all of these different perspectives, right, and to really changed the direction of the conversation, like, I mean, honestly, how many people do you think really know, that bar has was blind, decided to learn, you know, another language? Because it’s like, well, if I can’t do this, I’m it. You know, I mean, there are all of these tiny, tiny pieces that add up, but like telling a story is the best way you have to communicate. Yeah, right. Yeah. It’s just whether the format is on paper or on the screen or in your ear.

I got an email this morning from a blind writer who was very psyched about my book, and he was saying, like, I don’t know how many blind people are gonna get all those literary references, you know, because he was sort of, he sort of had a little bit of a little bit of skepticism about like a certain, you know, subsection of blind folks who aren’t big readers, and but my thinking about that, I haven’t responded to him yet. But you know, going back to like what I learned from the working at The Believer, like I remember, I think it was, again, Heidi Juvalits who told me this idea of like, you know, the voice of the magazine. Could be like, if you’re at a dinner party, and to your left is like, you know, a Harvard geologist. and to your right is like a like a bright, first freshman in high school. And you have like, how do you talk about the fossil record in such a way that both the like tenured geologist and the high schooler are going to kind of be able to hang with you. And I feel like that is such a fun challenge for me as a writer is like, how do I write something that like, keeps both of those people engaged? And I think it’s not at all a paradox. Like I think there is absolutely a way to write where the, the career geologist is like, Oh, I never used that metaphor for the fossil record. But I’d like that, that kind of gets, you know, the you can, you don’t have to be a fancy geologist to like, get them thinking and then, but you can say that in such a way that the person has no idea and no initiation into this world except for like the barest of sort of like, you know, elementary school, junior high level baseline to kind of like, bring them up to speed to and to me, like, that’s just where my brain starts popping. And I just, I love it when I can feel like I’m in that mode, where I’m bringing everybody along, for the ride.

That joy of connection, like I can hear it in your voice when you’re when you just did that little riff, I’m like, Yeah, I get it, I totally get it. Like you get that moment. Right, and you just connect with another human being. And it is possible, I do believe in the high low thing. Like, I totally think you can do the high low thing. I think it’s just how much effort you put into it and how you want to connect with your audiences. I mean, it is absolutely doable.

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Because as a reader, I feel the same way. Like there are times when I like, I’m reading something really hard. And I’m like, Okay, I’m proud of myself and patting myself on the back for like rolling with this, like super high theory. I’m getting something out of it. And like times when I’m profoundly hungover and only want to read like, a board book. And that’s fine, too. But like, I feel like when there’s that sweet spot in between where I’m being challenged, but also I’m being like, held and cared for by a writer like, to me that’s just such a, a pleasurable experience and also a powerful one that that’s sort of what I aim for in my own writing.

Yeah, and you just described my experience of reading The Country of the Blind. Like I never once felt like I was going to be you know, stuck in a corner going I need a dictionary to understand 90% of what’s happening here. There’s so much that is relatable in this book. There is so much great storytelling, there are some really great sentences. If you listen to the show regularly, you know I’m a sentence person. But you’ve done some very, very cool things here. So I just want to say thank you for that, Country of the Blind is out, Andrew Leland, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. This was really great.

Thank you. This was super fun for me.

Poured Over