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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

THERE PLANT EYES

Leona Godin

A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness

What happens when a scholar of literature becomes blind? She writes a book on the history of blindness in literature covering everything from Homer to pop culure!

"Blindness" is one of the most commonly used metaphors with which we describe a state of ignorance or (willfully) incomplete knowledge - and has been for as long as human culture has been recorded. This is a testimony to the degree to which sight rules over our other senses: 80 85% of our perception of the world is mediated through vision. But it has also obscured the non-metaphorical, literal reality of blindness, as a con- sequence of which many blind people have to deal with not just the actuality of their disability but also countless strange expectations of specialness on a daily basis. Leona Godin is one of them. Born sighted but diagnosed in her early teens with a genetic degenerative disease that over the next three decades would deprive her of her eyesight, she has a unique perspective on what it really means to go and, eventually, be blind. And as a Classics major, English PhD, actor, and educator, she's been studying how blindness and vision have been central to humanity's understanding of itself and the world from the days of Homer to the present (and the future: you'll be hard pressed to find a sci-fi novel without a blind prophet figure in it!) for decades. In THERE PLANT EYES, she combines the often surprising and always fascinating history of blindness and of the idea of blindness in our (high and low) culture with her own experience of, as it were, staring blind- ness in the face from a young age. It is a book that will, quite literally, change the way you see the world. Leona Godin is a writer, actor, artist, and educator who is blind. She received her PhD in Early Modern Literature from New York University and promptly turned around and wrote two plays: The Spectator & the Blind Man, about the very sexy history of the invention of braille, and The Star of Happiness, about Helen Keller's time on Vaudeville. Her writing can be found in such diverse publications as the New York Times, Playboy, O Magazine,FLAPPERHOUSE, and Catapult, where she writes a monthly column called A Blind Writer's Notebook. She lives in Colorado with her partner-in-crime-and-art, Alabaster Rhumb

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Book Published 2021-06-01 by Pantheon

Comments

I've been waiting most of my life for a book like There Plant Eyes to demystify what it means and doesn't mean to be blind. With eloquence and wit, M. Leona Godin articulates what our culture has gotten wrong for centuries. Blindness, she makes clear, is a feature, not merely a difference. I'll be recommending this book every chance I get.

By turns heartfelt and thought-provoking, this is a striking achievement. Read more...

Godin guides readers through the surprising twists and turns in Western blind history, from ancient seers to contemporary scientists. The lively writing style and memorable personal anecdotes are delightful. This book is a gift to both blind and sighted readers.

An insightful and wide-ranging book that asks sighted readers to examine the myriad ways in which our culture uses concepts of blindness as metaphor or morality tale while simultaneously ignoring the existence, insights, and experiences of blind people (...) THERE PLANT EYES speaks eloquently and urgently to the necessity of making space for blind thinkers within our ocular-centric world.

THERE PLANT EYES is so graceful, so wise, so effortlessly erudite, I learned something new and took pleasure in every page. All hail its originality, its humanity, and its philosophical obsession with diversity in all its complicated and messy glory.

As Godin wonderfully shows, we've come a long way in our quest to understand what blindness means.

We are inevitably blind to realities outside our own experience, and it takes a sensitive writer like Godin - with her poet's ear - to give insight into sightlessness.

Ms. Godin enlarges our understanding of the blind and sight impaired, and THERE PLANT EYES proves a landmark contribution to the literature of disability, comparable to Lucy Grealy's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE and Jean-Dominique Bauby's THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY - which is to say the literature of the human itself.

...thought-provoking mixture of criticism, memoir, and advocacy.