Reviewed by Michael Northen
“I am a writer. I am, as ever, a music girl. My love for being outside in nature borders on the mystical. I always have been and still am a strange sort of personal archivist."
Chrys Buckley, Invisible Violets
With the above words Chrys Buckley concludes Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays. The subtitle is important both because it hints at the degree to which popular music has influenced her life and because it lays out the way that she decided to format her book. Just as a mixtape can be a collection of individual music tracks that contribute to an overall tone, so Buckley’s seven “tracks” each focus on some particular aspect of her life while giving a composite picture that works to define who she is. While Buckley makes it clear that she speaks as an individual and not as a representative of or spokesperson for any group, her self-description on the first page of “Track One” indicates why her book might appeal to those with an interest in disability literature: “I have albinism. My skin, my hair, and my eyes are paler than pale and I’m legally blind. I’ve never known anything else.” (p. 3)
Like Stephen Kuusisto in his classic memoir Planet of the Blind, Buckley sets out to set the record straight: not all people who are blind have the same visual experience. Vision is not a black box. In the first track, “On Seeing and Not Seeing,” Buckley works to dispel the stereotypes right up front. Buckley’s condition is known as oculocutaneous albinism. Not surprisingly, as someone who attended medical school with the intention of becoming a doctor, she gives a biological description of the causes of her condition. One aspect of it is nystagmus, about which Buckley cautions:
An outsider might assume nystagmus means we see the world as forever jiggly, but that’s now how I experience vision from the inside. I didn’t have any idea my eyes moved like they did until other kids made fun of me (p. 4).
The bigger issues with her sight are not physical, but are caused by living in society. “Albinism as I’ve lived with it has often carried strong emotional currents. Shame mostly. Being and feeling…different, other, freaky. Sometimes inhuman” (p. 4). It is the feelings accompanying albinism that dominate the book and make for the subjects of the majority of the remaining essays in Invisible Violets. The majority, but not all.
Track 4, “August is Burnt Burgandy-Violet Haze,” possibly the most interesting essay in the book, deals with another aspect of Buckley’s perceptual experience, synesthesia. Synesthesia is unique enough that many people are not aware it exists other than in fiction. In fact, Buckley herself did not realize it was not an aspect of most people’s perception until she took a college course. For her, the letters J, D, P and V are green, while D is a pale sage and the word Tuesday is a muted cerulean blue. It is what is called color-grapheme synesthesia. Despite how confusing this might sound to non-synesthetes, Buckley describes how her condition actually helped her quite a bit in her early school years with subjects such as spelling and memorization. At the same time, for someone who vowed to become a writer for as long as she could remember, it could (and can) also present problems.
I am a painterly writer. Whether it’s longhand in a notebook of composing words on screen, the colors of the words and letters and how they fit together are as present in my mind as meaning and rhythm. Colors inform word choice and phrasing and permeate through all aspects of crafting what I put on the page. When these aspects of writing are at odds with each other, it’s difficult for me not to go with the pull of aesthetic sensibilities I know are invisible to anyone else (p. 87).
The difficulty that this presents for Buckley is on full display in Track 5, “Can’t Change Me: An Unusual History of My Names.” While writing with the audience in mind is not one of the author’s stronger suits, this fifth essay carries the reader through 43 pages and over a decade of a search for a nom de plume acceptable to her aesthetic sensibilities, almost abandoning any pretense that most readers have the ability to understand why this perfect pen name is so important. This adherence to her aesthetic sensibilities is unfortunate because what could have been an interesting coda to her discussion of synesthesia instead becomes a slog (at least that was my experience as a reader).
More than anything else, Invisible Violets is about becoming a writer. In her second essay, “Blue Alchemy,” Buckley pinpoints a specific time and place, a memoir workshop at Avalon Island in Northwest Washington State, when the impetus to start writing about her life that eventually led to her book catapulted to a new level. She realized she had a lot to say about growing up with albinism. Buckley reveals in bits and pieces throughout the book how from an early age she kept notebooks and was involved in various writing projects from as far back as middle school. She’d been in love with the idea of becoming a writer since as long as she could remember. If her story were rendered in a straight narrative rather than fractured vignettes, the climax might come when Buckley finally decided in medical school to give up a promising career in medicine in order to concentrate on her writing.
Simply deciding to give up a medical career to concentrate instead on a career as a writer did not bring Buckley the sense of fulfillment or identity that she had hoped for. Much of the book centers around her difficulty with personal, sometimes destructive, relationships. Despite Buckley’s repeated descriptions of herself as a “rogue cowgirl,” she is no Annie Oakley. What rises to the surface is an incredible insecurity with who she is, both as an individual and as a writer.
Intertwined throughout these life stories are Buckley’s developing ideas about the importance of memoir as a means of holding on to the past. What might for budding memoirists be the most fascinating track of the book is the final one, “Distant Lights. Structured somewhat differently from the previous essays, it chooses three dates–2003, 2006, and 2013–to revisit. Buckley describes what she currently thought she had experienced and felt at each date and what she discovered when she actually went back to reread the notebooks she kept at that time. As any long-time keeper of journals can attest , it was a revelation. In her case, though, this experience was not an epiphany. As she discovers: “not everything is a lesson, and not all mistakes lead to a better if hard-won future. Sometimes you make stupid decisions for stupid reasons, and there’s no undoing it.” (p. 205)
Buckley calls herself both a writer and a music girl and maintains these descriptors when writing; it is always with the structure of music in mind. This impulse is what led her to call her book a mixtape of lyric essays, and there are times when the lyric quality of her writing comes through, as when she describes her obsession with podcasts:
Podcasts as soon as I woke up in the morning and as I went through my pre-writing routine. Podcasts in the shower. Podcasts as I got dressed and read to leave. Podcasts as I ate. Podcasts as I cooked. Podcasts as I did anything around the house. Podcasts as I walked and took transit and rode the aerial tram between med school campuses (p. 64).
Passages such as this confirm the poetic impulse the title implies and Buckley’s ability to render them. At the risk of overkill, however, I want to quote one more lyric passage because it illustrates both how this lyricism can be whipped up almost to a frenzy and, at the same time, reveals both the extent of the influence of music on Buckley and the knowledge she assumes her readers have about the particular era of music that is part of her life.
By Jane’s Addiction’s closing set, I started crying on the outskirts of the mosh pit. Maybe from exhaustive travel. Or from my draining Mind Riot forum love affair drama with this dude Jeremiah that always had me near tears in those days. Or from getting roughed up in the mosh pit during A Perfect Circle’s and Audioslave’s sets before I retreated to the edges. Or from having gone to a tribute for Layne Staley of Alice in Chains at a small club in Seattle the night before and feeling his death like it was fresh again (p. 112).
These words encapsulate much of what readers can expect to encounter in Invisible Violets. As mentioned above, Buckley asserts that she is a personal archivist; what she is writing is her story and she is not speaking for anyone else. That is her right as an author, of course, but what many disabled readers may not find in the book is any instance of her attempts to build community and common cause with other disabled writers or a sense of the importance of advocacy or social justice for the disability community at large. In many ways, Invisible Violets feels like a throwback to the days when publishers were leery of publishing work by disabled writers and simply being able to get a memoir that spoke about one’s life with disability published was enough.
Thankfully, that situation has been changing, but it is still important (as Buckley does in her acknowledgements) to give deserved credit to publishers like Jill McCabe Johnson of Wandering Aengus Press who are willing to take the chance to publish the debut works of disabled writers, making their important contributions available to the public. I’ve always maintained that disability literature is a large tent. Invisible Violets may not stimulate a reader to political action or advocacy, but for those readers who enjoy being able to participate in the turbulence and uncertainties of individual lives that are not their own, this mixtape surely has a place in the tent.
Title: Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays
Author: Chrys Buckley
Publisher: Wandering Aengus Press
Date: 2026
Read Michael Northen’s review of Fall Risk in this issue of Wordgathering.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Volume 19, Issue 2s – Spring 2026
About the Reviewer
Michael Northen is an editor of the disability poetry anthology, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, the anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (both from Cinco Puntos Press), and the anthology of disability writing, Every Place on the Map is Disabled (Northwestern University Press, 2026). A book of his poetry, The Only One in the Room in White Socks, was published in July 2026 by Finishing Line Press.