Interview: Naomi Cohn
Naomi Cohn was sighted until the age of thirty, when her vision began to decline. Now in her sixties, her pathological myopia has progressed to the point that she is legally blind. One of the ten percent of blind people literate in braille, she explores her sensual love affair with braille in her debut nonfiction book, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight. In her “Author’s Note,” she describes the ninety-six alphabetized entries in the collection—which vary in length and style—not only as “brief essays” but as “prose poems, lyric fragments, flash memoirs, or vignettes.” The experimental “encyclopedia” form allows her to explore disparate yet related subjects such as the science of blindness, synesthesia, society and disability in the United States, the life of Louis Braille, and a Johannes Vermeer painting, alongside her own life story and experience of “altered sight.” As an associate editor at CRAFT and a writer particularly interested in hybrid nonfiction combining memoir, research, and lyrical prose, I was immediately drawn to her project and excited to learn more about how The Braille Encyclopedia evolved. I was delighted when Naomi Cohn agreed to an interview by email.
—Jacqueline Doyle
Jacqueline Doyle: I love everything about your book, starting with the title and format. I grew up in a pre-internet household filled with encyclopedias (seven or eight sets, requiring several bookcases). An engineer and passionate autodidact, my father was undoubtedly drawn to the ambitious enterprise of encompassing all human knowledge in the manageable form of tidy alphabetized summaries. I was interested to learn that you treasured the twenty-volume International Wildlife Encyclopedia as a child, and that you actually worked for the grandfather of all encyclopedias, the Encyclopedia Britannica, when you were in your twenties! Did that experience influence your understanding of encyclopedias? How do you use and bend this genre in The Braille Encyclopedia?
Naomi Cohn: I love that you love the book! And I loved your thumbnail sketch of your father. Of course, any encyclopedia, especially the old-fashioned print kind, is destined to fail at housing all knowledge. One of the things I learned during my brief time as a copy editor at EB, as staff called Encyclopedia Britannica, was how quickly information goes stale or even rotten. Often this happened even before a volume got into print.
But my main takeaway from EB was that an encyclopedia entry leaves no room for feeling, poetry, or imagination. So it was fun, in writing the book, to play with that and lean into speculation and figurative language that would never have been countenanced in a real encyclopedia.
Also, encyclopedias, like dictionaries, lean heavily on definitions. I’ve played a lot with that as openings for individual entries. But in a way, definitions, in the broader sense of meanings, are central to the book. For example, what does “blindness” mean, to me and to the people I bump into in life? And how does my understanding of blindness evolve over time?
JD: You describe your abecedarian as a “love poem” not only to books, but also to braille. “It’s too much to explain,” you write in the “Braille” entry. “You know how love is.” What drew you to braille? Have your feelings changed over time?
NC: The physical experience of braille hooked me. When I completed vocational rehab, students were encouraged to at least try braille. I remember just being wowed by it. Not that I found it elegant or easy, but the whole tactile strategy was such a revelation. And then as I stayed with it, slow and cumbersome though my learning was, I realized it might be a way to reclaim keeping a handwritten journal—something that had fallen out of my writer’s life and that I found left a real hole in my process.
There was a slow, magical phase where writing in braille brought me into a present-moment awareness of the magic of learning to read and write. I don’t remember learning to read or write the first time, as a kid. But isn’t it an amazing thing, how this complex interaction—perceptual, cognitive, cultural—becomes invisible, automatic, to us? So in learning braille I was reminded how fundamentally amazing reading is.
As I’ve gained in braille fluency, I no longer experience that stoner awe. But I still love braille’s ability to ground and center me.
JD: In the “Voice” entry, you tell readers that writing in a braille journal has released a different voice. “Sometimes wild, sometimes catty, but more and more, a voice that does not pull punches. Not wrapping everything in endless modifiers. When it’s so much work to write a single word, it had better be worth saying.” You wrote The Braille Encyclopedia over a number of years. Was a consistent voice one of your concerns? Did your braille journal affect the voice in the book?
NC: Yes! Keeping a braille journal definitely shifted my voice. Or voices. I really resonate with Sonya Huber’s assertion in Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto that we shouldn’t be limited to a single creative voice, that we need a multiplicity of voices to accurately reflect the complexity of our experiences.
To say a bit more about writing in braille, for me it helps me connect to what I need to say and how I want to voice that in multiple ways. Because it’s more work for me than keyboarding, it encourages concision. As you’ve already alluded, braille’s obscurity invites more courage. And as I mentioned above, I find the tactile experience more contemplative than screen-time-based writing; on good days, this can translate into a greater clarity.
As to consistency, since The Braille Encyclopedia was written and revised over years, I definitely worked, in revision, to bring a coherence to the voices. But the goal was never to have total consistency, to have everything in the same tone, or using the same tools. Some pieces lean lyric, others more “fact-y.”
JD: I love your discussion of hybridity and the “poetic mess” in your essay in Poetry Magazine, where you suggest that writing does not need to be confined by genre: “A piece of writing can be all these things—sometimes memoir, sometimes a collection of individual poems, a single coherent long poem, a lyric essay. It can move back and forth, shifting form.” What possibilities open up for the writer who employs shifting forms instead of committing to one genre? What difficulties, if any, did mixing genres pose for you?
NC: Talking about voice above, I’ve already veered into talking about genre-bend, blur, shift. But to add to that, I think the possibilities are legion. Why should any of us, as writers, limit ourselves to a smaller toolbox?
As to difficulties, I dearly wish, some days, that I was one of those writers who could plan a piece and then just execute it. I use moving back and forth between poetry and prose as a process of discovery, to understand what a piece wants to be or do. But I often wish I was more efficient—that it didn’t take so many rounds, that I didn’t have to write a thing seventeen different times—as essay, prose poem, villanelle and back—to find the best form and content of a thing.
In terms of the outward-facing difficulties of genre-blur, if I’m putting a piece out into the world, I may be working athwart of a reader’s expectations of a particular genre. I don’t expect to satisfy every reader, but I do feel, if I’m publishing, some sort of personal contract to satisfy at least some readers. For me that means paying extra attention to what tools I’m choosing. Whether they lean toward language and image or story and drama—to be extra clear by that final version, what sort of shift or change or experience I’m aiming to deliver.
JD: In the essay in Poetry, you also discuss the evolution of The Braille Encyclopedia, which you originally envisioned as an essay. The temporary scaffolding of the encyclopedia form ended up becoming permanent. The text kept growing. Could you say more about how the book developed? Rose Metal Press seems the perfect publisher for an experimental text composed of short forms. You write in your “Author’s Note” that the Press “embraced the shift [from prose poetry] and the expansion of the breadth of the book.” Did you work with them on The Braille Encyclopedia after you were named one of the finalists in their 2020 Open Reading Period?
NC: Yes, I signed with Rose Metal knowing they were an ideal home for The Braille Encyclopedia. I also knew that they wanted additions and revisions and that the book wouldn’t be published until 2024. By 2023, I was leaning a lot more into prose than poetry. Rose Metal, to their credit, were game to let me make that shift. So we did several rounds of edits, starting in late 2023—from major developmental changes to line edits and copyedits. Along the way I generated many new entries. Some entries got tightened, others cut, others expanded or relocated. (Moving entries involved the sometimes fun, sometimes tricky task of finding new titles to respect the inexorable alpha order.) It was an iterative and intense editorial process, which made for a much more impactful book.
JD: In “Unlearning the Ableist Writing Workshop” (soon to be a book from Sundress Publications), Sarah Fawn Montgomery suggests that “work about disability does not need a triumphant recovery arc. Requiring disabled stories to provide a magic cure implies these stories are only of value if disability is eradicated.” While encyclopedias move from A to Z, encyclopedias also resist linear narrative and closure. How would you describe your narrative arc in the book? Was the arc shaped by your subject as well as your form?
NC: I cannot wait for Montgomery’s book! It was funny (eerie?) reading her piece in Medium, because she so concisely articulates experiences I’ve felt so strongly myself.
As to arc, when The Braille Encyclopedia was accepted in its earlier form of linked prose poems, it was slender and associative. It hung on the recurrence of Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. While she still has an important place in the entries, in revision a variety of strands emerged—not just my experiences with braille and blindness, but a bit of Louis Braille’s story, as well as family history and other topics. The various strands together provide some shift or movement. The narrative, such as it is, rather than any kind of triumph over disability, might be the evolution of my own understanding of disability in general and blindness in particular. I hope a reader has a sense of a satisfying read without forcing the telling of my experiences into too much tidiness or closure.
JD: You mention the inspiration of Rebecca Solnit’s alphabetical essay “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition” in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (Trinity University Press, 2014). Are there other works that you would recommend for writers pursuing innovative forms?
NC: I only recently read Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House so that is still reverberating top of mind. But looking back a little farther in time, I tend to think less about innovation than renovation. I remember being wowed by Vikram Seth’s novel in verse The Golden Gate decades ago. Seth was inspired by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Or Primo Levi’s memoir-in-essays The Periodic Table, wherein each essay explored a particular chemical element, an apt form for a professional chemist. Another book from decades ago that rattled my cage in a good way was Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River. Hell, I’d claim Dante’s Inferno and the rest of The Divine Comedy as an enormous innovation in the epic poem. I know it’s seven hundred years old, but it still feels radical in its renovation of the epic with elements of what we’d now call memoir and autofiction. I think it can still be mined for the ways it messes with the boundaries of form.
In a slightly more recent vein: Eula Biss, On Immunity; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; and Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping, continue to resonate. I’m grateful to many workshop and conference instructors including Rebecca Brown, Joanna Penn Cooper, Rochelle Hurt, Nancy McCabe, Paisley Rekdal, Caitlin Scarano, and others, all of whom opened my eyes to the possibilities of flash, hybrid, and other funky forms. And for a couple short pieces that really stay with me: Jessica Franken’s “My Sister Teaches Me How to Dice an Onion” and Lia Purpura’s “Augury.” To come full circle: I remember being astonished by “Augury” when I first came across it in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction.
I know I should stop, before this ends up the worst kind of encyclopedia entry. But there’s so much inspiring work out there. What excites me as a reader is when a writer finds the right form for their story or project. I don’t care if they reuse something a thousand years old or break a form to suit their needs, I love the sense of inevitability when the form and the work suit each other.
JD: I’d love to hear more about your current project and what you describe as your “obsession with birds”! What are you writing now?
NC: The birds are deeply entangled with my move into genre-blurring work. My first published piece of creative nonfiction, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird” back in 2016, explored my evolving fascination with birds. But as is so often the case, I had unfinished business. Not long after that essay was published, I started drawing again, something I’d largely abandoned, along with other art-making activities as my vision loss intensified. That sketching practice began revolving around birds, mostly from enlarged digital snapshots I’d taken over the years, the camera’s eye catching what my biological eye no longer clearly discerned. Today I have a stack of sketchbooks filled with hundreds of bird sketches, a very shitty first draft of a manuscript in the form of a birder’s life list of all the species I’ve encountered, and some weird visual essays. I’m still searching for the ultimate form for this project. I’m looking forward to an upcoming residency at Ucross, where I plan to get hands-on with a clarifying revision.
In the meantime, I’m just letting myself play. I go to my studio, stare out the window and let words just ooze into my journal. I do brief timed writings, seeing what emerges.
Another form of play I’m engaging with is cocreating broadsides that feature writing by longtime friends and poets I’ve recently crossed paths with. Inspired by Broadsided Press, I used to create poetry posters featuring the work of writers in my community poetry workshops. This time around I’ve invited poets to respond in some way to one of my bird drawings. I’ll be sharing finished posters on my website, first among them collaborations with Willie Lin and Meryl Natchez.
NAOMI COHN is the author of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press, 2024), which examines vision loss and relearning to read and write as an adult. Her past includes a childhood among Chicago academics; involvement in a guerrilla feminist art collective; and work as an encyclopedia copyeditor, community organizer, fundraising consultant, and therapist. Red Dragonfly Press published her poetry chapbook, Between Nectar & Eternity. Her works also appeared in the Baltimore Review, Literary Hub, Hippocampus Magazine, Ninth Letter, Terrain.org, and Poetry Magazine, among other places. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
JACQUELINE DOYLE’s essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Fourth Genre. She has published hybrid prose from her work-in-progress The Lunatics’ Ball in EPOCH, Passages North, Permafrost, and elsewhere. Her work has earned numerous Pushcart nominations and nine Notable citations in Best American Essays. She is a professor emerita at California State University, East Bay, and the associate editor for flash creative nonfiction at CRAFT. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her on Twitter @doylejacq.
