An Interview with Naomi Cohn

Naomi Cohn’s book, titled The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, showcases Cohn’s experience with progressive vision loss through examinations of the definitions of words, personal childhood memories, observations of art, and the history of Braille itself. These perspectives intersect in the form of an alphabetical encyclopedia, the barriers between these forms disappearing as they all prove necessary in Cohn’s journey relearning reading and writing, and embracing Braille. She reflects on a shifting awareness of the world around her as her experiences changes in sight, reflecting on the influence of the past, both personal and historical. This encyclopedia includes over ninety words and phrases, and each entry provides a new facet of altered-sightedness, as she explores loss, love, and acceptance. Her essays reflect on grieving the loss of sight and the eventual reclamation of language through her unique blend of lyric essays and prose poetry, leaving the reader with a powerful message of perseverance.

Cassidy Rousseau: Your memoir takes the reader through your experiences and reflections on vision loss through such a unique format. What inspired you to write your memoir in the form of an encyclopedia?

Naomi Cohn: Thanks, Cassidy. I wasn’t originally planning to write a memoir. The book started as an essay.  The idea for the alphabet form came from reading Rebecca Solnit’s “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition.” Form’s always attractive to me as a way of organizing messy early drafts. It’s often a helpful tool to get me started and to discover what I’m writing about (something I’m very bad at knowing in advance.)

But often, as a project grows, the form becomes limiting rather than useful. When that’s the case, I’ve learned to discard the form, rather than limit the work by being too rigid about what helped me get it started. But The Braille Encyclopedia was different; at each stage of development and revision, the abecedarian encyclopedia construct continued to prove useful.

And now, with hindsight, I’m able to notice the obvious: that the encyclopedia form I’d chosen, without much deep thought, had a strong resonance with the book’s themes around love of words and language, so it ended up feeling particularly apt for a book about re-learning to read and write in adulthood.

Also, I’m not alone in playing around with the encyclopedia form. Beth Kephart describes quite a few of them (including The Braille Encyclopedia in this installment of her Substack, The Hush and the Howl.

CR: You provide several words under every letter of the alphabet, and sometimes the choices of words, such as “Knife,” “Obituary,” and “Quipu,” subvert expectations of the reader. What was the process of choosing the titles for each essay, especially when the order of the words plays such a strong role in conveying purpose?

NC: Yes titles do heavy lifting in this book. And yes, one of the pleasures of the encyclopedia entry as form was just that subversion you noticed. Sometimes it was sort of a game: just how hard a swerve an entry could take from the title.

The titles have all sorts of origin stories. Before I even began writing, I began generating lists of words. I went on a lot of thesaurus and etymology deep dives. Those lists became, in effect, writing prompts. Sometimes they generated gems; more often they bombed. So then I’d noodle on more possible titles or try a new version of a failed entry. Sometimes it went the other way: I’d have a piece of writing: a journal entry or fragment from a failed poem, that I wanted to bring into the book. Then I’d noodle on a title that could be an entry/entry point for that material.

In revision the scope of the book grew (morphing from mostly prose poem to mostly lyric prose). This meant a significant expansion of some aspects of the book. Also, the manuscript I sent to Rose Metal Press filled out the alphabet only haphazardly, and he editors advocated for a more complete and balanced approach. All this meant creating many new entries. 

 So more lists. I made lists of possible words for underrepresented letters of the alphabet (which is how something like “Zutz” came into the world. I made lists of words related to writing systems or typography (which is how I ended up with  “Quipu” and “X-height.” As you might notice from those examples, there was a certain selective pressure toward entries that could do more than one job: relating to one of the strands of the book and simultaneously helping flesh out the more rare letters of the alphabet.

As revisions progressed, it became more and more tricky to both “fill out” the form, use only the strongest “entries” and have the strands or arcs weave in a satisfying way. Title changes became an important tool. For example, a draft once called “Ambiguous Loss” turned out to  fit much better as “Kitchen Counter,” where it helped flesh out what had been a missing letter of the alphabet and where it worked better in ordering some of the family story parts of the book. 

I’ve talked a lot about the pragmatic role of titles. But I’d like to circle back to your observation about the way many of the pieces’ titles subvert reader expectations. For me, this ties into the interplay between definition and meaning. An encyclopedia entry often starts in the same place as a dictionary, defining what a word means. But the task of defining can expand into something more existential: Meaning. As in, what sense or meaning do we make out of experiences life throws at us? As I say of blindness in the entry “Diagnosis”—“It’s different for each of us.” So the titles tug on that, contradicting the supposedly factual, supposedly objective stance of an encyclopedia entry. Meaning is deeply personal, and the play between titles and their content is one aspect of showing that.

CR: Throughout the entries, you refer to a specific moment of Louis Braille’s backstory, which is the incident with the awl. What function does Louis Braille serve in your memoir, and what made you decide to include both the moment he injured himself to blindness and the events following his death?

NC: Louis Braille’s been part of the book since its very beginning. “Awl,” which imagines that accident that led to Braille’s blindness, was one of the first pieces I finished.

But Louis Braille grew as a presence in The Braille Encyclopedia in revision. His presence expanded for several reasons: the more I learned of the story, the more fascinating and haunting I found him. It’s not, socially, a cake walk being blind in present day global north, but many of the details of life for blind folk in his time and place are grim; his brilliance and perseverance in this context  are all the more astonishing.

When I wrote “Awl,” the information I had on him came from the internet and a few children’s books (all that was accessible to me at the time). But in revision, turning the pieces from prose poems into more memoir-adjacent creative nonfiction, I often needed to bolster my words with more research. In that process I came across Louis Braille: A Touch Of Genius, a deeply researched biography of Louis Braille by C. Michael Mellor. In looking for reputable references for existing pieces, I came across so many facts or stories that hooked me and made me want to share more of Braille’s story. (Even so, I barely scratched the surface. There’s so much more to his story; Touch of Genius is well worth a read.)

CR: While your personal anecdotes resonated with me greatly, the essay “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” struck me with its shift in tone and focus. I found it especially moving that, while others saw this as an image to simply glance at, you experience a reflective clarity when observing it. What does this painting hold for both you and the collection as a whole?

NC: I love that you picked out this piece. And the shift you observe might be, in part, because it’s a remnant of an earlier version of the book. When the collection was more prose poems and less micro memoirs, my changing relationship to visual art as both a maker and a viewer was a much bigger theme in the book. Vermeer and my opportunity to be in the presence of this painting, were an important spine for the book. I ended up paring this back quite a bit in revision. So on one level, “The Woman in Blue” is a bit of a vestige in the book, the way a whale still has a remnant hip bone, a indication of its long-ago origins as a land mammal.

But “The Woman in Blue” for me is also about attention. I’ve been told, “You register more than you see,” that I am still one who pays attention, who notices, even though, physically, I see less and less. And, perhaps, if I had better eyesight, I too would have moved on more quickly from the painting. So in the increasing “defectiveness” of my eyesight, there’s an opening to more genuinely spending time with the painting. By extension, that same slowing down and attending to the present moment is also still core to my experience of learning braille.

CR: “Zutz” concludes with the state of being “thawed out” after feeling that parts of you have been “put on the ice over years”. As the reader completes your final entry in The Braille Encyclopedia, is there an element of “Zutz” you hope they will take away from the collection and into the world?

NC: Hmm, I notice I get a little itchy about the idea of wanting a reader to have a specific takeaway. It’s a general feeling: any book or bit of writing gets to mean different things to different readers. but also, specific to this particular book: One of the joys of putting The Braille Encyclopedia out into the world was being endlessly surprised  and delighted by the diversity of what readers found in it. People also read the book in different ways—in order A-Z, or dipping in to entries randomly or being curious about a particular title, which also made me happy.

But to get back to your question: For linear,  A-Z readers, in “Zutz” I was aiming at a sense of closure, albeit a gentle, experiential one. For me, the book’s encyclopedia form was a way of rejecting a traditional narrative arc, of linear causality. (I find imposing dramatic structure or logic, or plot onto my disability experience feels untrue to many aspects of that experience.) But still I want a reader to have a satisfying read, some sense of movement or change.

Also, reading over “Zutz,” I notice I do seem to be making a bit of an argument or case for the value of a life that doesn’t fit able categories or norms. I don’t talk much, explicitly, in The Braille Encyclopedia, about ableism, or social vs. medical models of disability. I don’t focus much on countering, in a head on way, ableist expectation that an illness narrative has some sort of dramatic conclusion or cure or overcoming. But that’s certainly an undercurrent of the book, and perhaps “Zutz” is one of the places where it comes closer to the surface.

Learning braille didn’t, for me, fix anything. It doesn’t replace lost eyesight; it doesn’t in any meaningful practical way make my life easier. It’s not even my primary form of reading or writing. It doesn’t make living in a sight-focused world easier. But it has transformed my life nonetheless. “Zutz” perhaps offers a sense of possibility, that even with all this, it’s possible to have a meaningful, enjoyable life.

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Naomi Cohn is a writer and teaching artist. Her 2024 book, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, won the Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize among other recognition. Her works also appeared in Baltimore Review, LitHub, Hippocampus, Ninth Letter, Terrain, and Poetry, among other places. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Cassidy Rousseau is an English educator from the Boston area. She is currently a graduate student pursuing her MAT for teaching Secondary English at Bridgewater State University. After a long day of teaching and creating lessons that engage all types of learners, she enjoys reading a twist-filled mystery novel and failing miserably at knitting.