Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
January 1 LITM: Naomi Cohn
Naomi Cohn is a writer and teaching artist whose work explores reclamation. The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight is her full-length debut. 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. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Naomi Cohn: I don’t remember learning to read print. I wasn’t born with a book in my hand, but they were all around me, growing up as the child of academics in Chicago. I loved any book about animals: Beatrix Potter with her delicate watercolors, Pagoo, Misty of Chincoteague, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Incredible Journey, Watership Down, Ring of Bright Water. My father handed me Jane Austen (I think it was Sense and Sensibility) when I was twelve. I credit her with making me begin to be interested in the human animal.
Because I began to lose my eyesight in my thirties, I’ve had to learn new ways of reading. In my forties I got the opportunity to learn braille, a tactile reading system for the blind. I fell in love with it. The first book I read in braille was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. My teacher picked it, perhaps because it was comparatively brief. The play is based on Hansberry’s own family’s experience of battling race-based housing segregation on the Southside of 1950s Chicago. Hansberry’s powerful play, picked by chance for its brevity, literally made me a braille reader because reading it aloud (which took me months) was the final project, the victory lap, of braille class, proof of my new literacy. Lucky for me that the play, set very close to where I grew up, was so compelling.
As to recent reading, I just finished re-reading Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, 1,300-plus glorious pages of stepping into another time and place—post-Independence India in the early fifties. Sometimes I just need a really big book to hide in.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Cohn: I didn’t. Until my thirties, I was more interested in making visual art. I earned my living as a writer for nonprofits. But I didn’t realize—or admit—that creative writing was my calling until my midlife vision loss diagnosis made me aware that I needed to write. I can’t explain the exact relationship, just a sense that maybe life was going to be a little more challenging and I might have to start focusing on what really mattered to me. Not that it was all smooth sailing after that, but since then writing has been a north star.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Cohn: The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight is a memoir of learning braille, adapting to vision loss, and reclaiming a relationship with the written word. The book, which slides between brief essays and prose poems, takes the form of ninety-six alphabetical entries from an imagined encyclopedia—from Academia to Zutz. The book ranges over not only my own journey, but family history, and Louis Braille’s life and invention of a tactile writing system for the blind. The importance of letters, the kind we write to each other, is a touchstone in the book (just one example is from the one in Vermeer’s painting, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter), so it feels particularly apt to get to take part in Letters in The Mail.
I hope it invites readers into my world of altered sight, including the richness of the non-visual senses. I hope my love of braille, the writing system, and Louis Braille, the French musician and inventor who developed it, resonates with readers. More generally I hope the themes of curiosity, adaptation, and finding ways to reclaim what matters to us connect with readers.
I also hope, for readers who are also writers, that the book is a permission slip to tell their story or write about their life experiences in a way that works for them. As writers, we don’t need to fit our story into the tidiness of a single form, all poetry or all prose. We don’t need to shoehorn our experiences into a traditional narrative arc or conflict if that’s not true to the shape of our lives.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Cohn: I love “Story at the End of My Fist,” as well as the whole Parallel Practice series.
Rumpus: What is your best story that involves the mail?
Cohn: I find getting cards and letters complicated. I love the love that goes into sending a real letter through the mail, but because of my altered eyesight, it’s difficult to read what people write to me. Typed letters can be converted by optical character recognition programs into a mostly accurate transcript that a text-to-speech program can convert to computer synthesized speech, but handwriting is tough. I usually have to resort to my seeing eye human, aka my spouse.
So it was a real delight to get a couple of cards in braille from sighted, not-braille-literate friends, after they read The Braille Encyclopedia. They had found ways to get a note printed in braille. It was—pun-intended—touching beyond words.
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Author photograph by Anna Min
