Where Writers Write: Naomi Cohn

 Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

 

Where Writers Write is a series that features authors as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Naomi Cohn. 

Naomi is a writer and teaching artist whose work explores reclamation. Her past includes a childhood among Chicago academics; involvement in a guerrilla feminist art collective; and work as an encyclopedia copy editor, community organizer, grant writer, fundraising consultant, and therapist. A 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow in Writing, her previous publications include a chapbook, Between Nectar & Eternity (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), and pieces in Baltimore Review, Fourth River, Hippocampus, Terrain, and Poetry, among others. Cohn has also appeared on NPR and been honored by a Best of the Net Finalist and two Pushcart nominations. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Visit her website here.

Where Naomi Cohn Writes

 

When I’m keeping my braille journal, my writing takes place in very small spaces. Specifically in the little windows on my metal braille slate. A piece of paper, firmly gripped between the two wings of the slate allows me to write in that little  space by pressing dots, in specific configurations, with a little awl-like tool that I use to press braille dots into a piece of paper clamped into the braille slate.

           

Those little openings are only a few millimeters across or down, but it took me years to find my way around in those small spaces, to poke the right configuration of dots to jot “bird” or “sky” or “train.” But all those years of learning were worth it to me, to reclaim a hand-written way of keeping a journal. While born fully sighted, I began to lose my central vision in my thirties. It was just a few millimeters of damage on my retinas. But over time, that translated to legal blindness, to not being able to read print or handwriting, among other things.  The journey of that vision loss, along with my unexpected fascination with braille, became sources of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press: October 2024)

 

But hand-punched braille, much as I love it, is not, percentage-wise, how I do most of my writing. I write most of my words elsewhere, not in laborious hand-written braille, but on the quick clack-clack of a laptop. But I love being able to carry my slate-and-stylus with me wherever I’m writing.

 

 

Whenever I get the opportunity, I love to write at an artist retreat or residency. This mossy haven was a favorite place to sit with my journal when I got to be a creative resident at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle.

 

Or at Monson Arts, where the writers studio building had this stunning view of Lake Hebron.  I love to write wherever there’s a view. This might, at first glance seem strange, since I’m blind. But blindness is a varied thing, and most legally blind folk have at least some remaining vision. So while I can’t read street signs or make out the details of  your face, or sometimes, tell you apart from a mailbox, I still love staring out at a moody lake and sky or any other vista.

 

But residencies are relatively infrequent. Most of my writing day, day in day out, is in my writing studio, a  space I rent in an office building about a half-mile from my house.

 

This is the view from my regular writing studio.

 

The street noise—the rush of trains and traffic, the clang of the train bell, people yelling at each other on the street—all bustles up from street level. It’s funny, because, at home, where in theory, I could be writing, I am bothered by the slightest noise or interruption.

 

Add to the street noise the thrum of the coffee shop, Workhorse Coffee Bar,  I feel the vibration of each espresso shot the baristas pull.

 

But this too settles me to  my work. I consider the Workhorse folks my coffee family. Their beverages have fueled so much of my writing.  And before i had my own writing space, I often wrote there. I can picture specific entries from The Braille Encyclopedia that I wrote at their tables.

 

I can’t explain why I can write in a noisy coffee shop, but not at home. It seems the public noise is more of a lullaby. It’s not my noise, not my problem, not the suddenly, suspiciously altered hum of the refrigerator, or a subtle dripping sound that might, or might not, be a plumbing leak.

 

The magic of the studio is that all the noise and bustle has the opposite effect of noise at home—it settles me to my work.

 

I don’t have a picture of walking to my studio, but I think a studio I can walk to matters in more ways than one. Being blind and thus not licensed to drive, being able to walk there matters. Being able to walk to my studio means I get there most days. It’s not the most aesthetically glorious possible space, but the patina of use is its own kind of beauty.

 

The other aspect of walking is that walking is where I do so much of my writing. Not the words on the page part, but the noodling, the pondering, the wrestling with puzzles part. At the desk I have questions. Walking I discover answers.

 

Speaking of walking, if you walk around the side of my building, you’ll find this bright, loud fantastic mural. It’s one of dozens commissioned by a group called the Creative Enterprise Zone. It’s by a Memphis-based muralist called Birdcap  and he painted it between showers this summer. It feels like another friend to my writing, an encouragement to fill my slate with braille symbols, supported by this very different sort of art-making on a very different scale.

 

And here’s my studio, Even with all the noise, and bustle and color of the streets around me, I always find it a cozy nest.

 

 

It’s not a big space, but big enough for a comfy chair to stare out the window, and a desk, and some bulletin boards I can clutter with unfinished sketches and marker doodles on old braille journal pages (which themselves were brailled on repurposed paper) and  pebbles from places I’ve been and things people have given me that support me in my work

 

Last, but not least. Every artist and writer needs a slinky.

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https://rosemetalpress.com/books/the-braille-encyclopedia/

 

As befits this daring exploration of a life that defies clear categories and boundaries, Naomi Cohn’s revelatory memoir The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight shapeshifts between lyric essay and prose poetry and traverses the divides between lived experience, history, and scientific knowledge. Told in the form of imagined alphabetical encyclopedia entries, this meditation on progressive vision loss examines and illuminates Cohn’s at first halting then avid embrace of braille as part of relearning to read and write as an adult. Using etymology, historical and medical research, and personal vignettes, this abecedarian collection of linked micro-essays and prose poems is both Cohn’s singular story of grieving and refashioning a life built around words and an evocation of the larger discussion of how our society views disability. The Braille Encyclopedia is poignant, playful, and wry, providing a literary reckoning of the technical and emotional aspects of facing the loss of sight.