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