LNP Alumni Feature: M. Leona Godin (’19)
This week we spoke with M. Leona Godin—a writer, performer and educator who is blind. Leona called in from New York, but she and her life partner, Alabaster Rhumb, have been ”vagabonding” for the past year, trying to decide where to settle next.
Leona Godin, Fall 2019
Writer, New York
@DrMLGodin
Leona’s book, “There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness,” is being released by Pantheon Books on June 1. Visit their website to learn more about Leona’s book tour.
The book comes out on June 1. How are you promoting it?
I’m doing about 10 virtual events; a couple in conjunction with some blind organizations, but mostly independent bookstores like Strand and Green Apple Books and Literati. I’m doing mostly conversations. I’m just afraid everything is going to open up just as I’m doing all that virtually.
Hopefully the virtual event is safe for a little while longer.
It makes things easier, although it would have been fun to do the travel and connect with people. It’s pretty cool to be able to reach a lot of different people and not have to worry about scheduling and things … people can join in from all over the world.
The book is about the history of blindness, so there must have been a lot of research involved.
I’ve been working on ideas you’ll find in the book since I was an undergrad. I’ve been calling it a personal cultural history of blindness, and it’s very much rooted in the Western tradition, so it’s like a “from Homer to Me” thing. My Ph.D. dissertation was a much less accessible version of a couple of the chapters in this book, and I wrote a stage play about Helen Keller’s time on vaudeville (“The Star of Happiness”) that got worked into the book. “The Spectator and the Blind Man” was another stage play, what I referred to (a bit tongue in cheek) as “the very sexy history of the invention of Braille,” that also got worked in.
How did it evolve into a book?
I had just started writing these essays that were part personal essay, part researched essay, for Catapult. A friend there hooked me up with her partner, a magnificent agent, and I sent a couple of ideas to him. Becoming a real book project really had everything to do with him. I knew I didn’t want to write a memoir, and he was down for me writing this cultural history type thing, so he helped me develop the proposal – you know, take it from a bunch of ideas into being a proper proposal – and we sent it out. And we got Pantheon, which is a dream publisher! So that’s what turned it from a collection of projects from over 20 years into a book.
I think what I really enjoyed a lot was bringing together disparate voices — what I call a cacophony of blind voices – so I quote from my friends’ casual conversations; news articles in the New York Times; Homer to John Milton; many, many blind memoirs. It’s the juxtaposition of a lot of kinds of texts that I think makes it special. I’m really trying to rub these different voices against each other to make something new and hopefully thought provoking.
It seems that throughout history the decisions about how to educate and create policy for blind people has been decided by sighted people.
In the book I talk a lot about cultural constructions. Basically, all of our cultural constructions, with a couple of exceptions, are created by sighted people, so in every novel that you read or every movie that you see with a blind character, every news story – those are the three realms that I deal with the most – we need more blind people creating these images. We need to have blind and visually impaired, and disabled journalists writing. Having that kind of level of understanding would really do a lot to help. There’s actually a disabled-writers organization I mention in the book, DisabledWriters.com, just to point out to news media outlets that they can hire disabled people to write the stories about disability. And then of course, artists, moviemakers, scriptwriters … just so there can be some recalibration and we can have real blind people telling their stories instead of making it up whole cloth by sighted people that think they know what it is.
You referred to yourself for a while as a punk, and it sounds like that’s still the case.
I am actually trying to tear down the ocular-centric regime and change the world! Yeah, there’s definitely some fight in there: fighting assumptions, fighting bias. I use the many blind memoirs that are out there to show similarities in terms of how much the biases and prejudices against blind people are worse, in most ways, than just dealing with being a blind person. How much the metaphors of blindness have affected the way actual blind people are treated in the world, that’s really what I’m trying to wrestle with. This book is about trying to unravel stereotypes and biases and prejudices that really make life as a blind person a lot harder than it should be.
You just recorded your book as an audiobook. Have you recorded your work before?
I’ve done lots of little performances and I’ve done audiograms for YouTube. I had never done anything as long or as difficult — if I would have known I honestly don’t know if I would have done it, but I’m glad I did!
Do many authors get to record their own audio book?
I have a blind friend who wrote a memoir and the publisher made him audition … and he didn’t get it! So I am lucky. It was really great. We did it in this weird way, though, because I’m so slow reading Braille that I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, so I used a Cyrano-like prompter, basically talking in my ear while I record.
What else do you have going on now?
I founded an online magazine called Aromatica Poetica, and it explores the arts and sciences of smell and taste. It’s like a lit mag with a smell and taste center. It’s exciting to be able to publish a lot of different kinds of voices from all over the world. I do try and support blind writers, and two of my editors are visually impaired, our columnist is sighted – we’re a mixed bag.
And I do have a novel that is the number one thing that I need to get out. But the benefit is I’m a better writer now than I was five years ago when I began it, so I actually can imagine actually finishing it by the end of the year.
What was your experience at the Logan Nonfiction residency like?
It was amazing because I don’t have writer friends so much in my personal collection of friends, and so that was really helpful to have a lot of people that were in various stages of book writing and proposal writing and all that stuff that was really new for me. The group continues to be really supportive, and every time anybody gets a little bit of media buzz we share it.
One big thing that happened while I was at Logan was that my acquiring editor left – I couldn’t take it personally because she actually left Penguin Random House and went to Beacon Press – but that was quite a blow. It was great to be in the company of fellow writers and be able to freak out with them!
(Editor’s Note: check out Leona’s Modern Love piece where she mentions LNP.)