Interview With Poet and Interpreter Ana Garza G'z

WG: In Planet of the Blind, poet Stephen Kuusisto says, "Blindness is often perceived by the sighted as an either/or condition: one sees or does not see. But often a blind person experiences a series of veils: I stare at the world through smeared and broken window paness." Dan Simpson, on the other hand, discusses the problematic use of visual imagery in his work since he in fact, never sees images. Your poem "After Twenty Years of Blindness" begins

The visual memory is dead,
except for the odd ghost that rises
from… Who knows
what startles a ghost.

Can you describe what vision is like for you?

AG: Physically I don't see anything at all, but that's different from what happens in my head as I go about my life. What vision is for me stems from what I actually saw when I could see and how my perception of what I saw changed as I lost my sight.

My vision was never great. I saw well enough that neither my parents nor I knew I had a problem till I had a routine eye test in preschool. I noticed I didn't see as far or as well as other people, but I thought sight, like coloring between the lines and writing neatly, was one of the many skills that improves as we get older. By first grade, I was using large print, but I could still see the over sized print in many of the children's books at the school library, so I didn't have any real awareness of myself as seeing the world differently from others.

I actually lost most of my sight over a relatively short period. I left first grade seeing the usual things. Then over the summer, my mom pulled out one of the large print books I was supposed to read as general edification, and what I discovered was that the print was blurry and small. I panicked because I thought I'd damaged the book somehow, or maybe I knew I wasn't especially bright and worried this was yet another indication of my immature skills. My mother panicked too for reasons of her own, so she put the book away, and by the first day of second grade, I could no longer see the silver tray below the chalkboard, though I sat in the front row, and all pages were blank, regardless of the bigness or blackness of the font.

This wasn't really surprising. I'd been having blind spells for months, moments when I saw bright lights and dark swirls that eventually broadened into nothing, but those moments would pass, and they were so abrupt and different from day to day life that I didn't associate them with the changes in my vision.

In second grade, I still saw light, color, shapes, and faces in enough detail for me to think I was seeing normally.

I was more puzzled by the way other people behaved around me, the sympathy my parents got, the school's restrictions on activities I'd done before, the way people stopped talking to me directly. I didn't understand it even while I was learning Braille and learning to use a white cane because between my light perception with the ability to see shadows and my memory of sight, I didn't notice I couldn't actually see.

I was in high school when I realized I was no longer seeing color. I don't remember how I realized it exactly, but I think it was in one of those ultra vivid Jungian sequences, where red and glaring white provoke unease, anxiety, or fear. I think I had one of those dreams, but instead of white or red, what I saw was a change in the non-color I do see.

The revelation was interesting enough that I started to pay attention to my vision. I knew a few blind people, but none had ever spoken about what they saw, and what I saw certainly didn't match the descriptions of darkness and bleakness sighted writers enjoy crafting, so I didn't know how normal my experience was.

What I see is variation in density. Many of those variations have recognizable shapes, based on what I've seen or what I've touched. Other variations are based on sound, texture, taste, or situations I've been in before. Most are surprisingly accurate.

When, as a community interpreter, I'd accompany social workers to people's homes, I knew what furniture was in the house and where it was located. Part of this knowledge came from the mysteries of echolocation, part from the sound and other sensory cues I picked up over the course of the encounter, part from the statistical frequency with which people do A, B, and C to make the best use of their small spaces. Afterward, as the social worker and I debriefed, empathized, or vented, I'd be fascinated to discover that the picture I'd held in my head during our stay was a close match to the real thing.

As a writer, I'm not sure how to handle this seeing without seeing. By the time I got to my M.F.A program, I was careful to write only what I perceived, and I never knew what to do when people asked how this blind character or speaker would know something.

In my most recent poem, the child speaker is riding in the car with her mother. As they pull into the driveway, the mother shrieks about the gate to the backyard being open and the dog sitting there, scratching her ear. The literal situation of the poem was based on something that happened the day before I wrote it. In the poem, I describe the dog in great detail visually, the way I saw her based on the many times I've petted her in a sit position or followed the movements of an ear scratching by placing a fingertip on her paw as she does it.

In this poem, I don't have to decide whether the speaker is sighted or blind because the detail is irrelevant to what the poem is interested in, but the fact that the speaker can describe the dog from the backseat of the car suggests she's sighted. To anyone who reads this poem knowing the writer is blind, this discrepancy may take away from the genuineness of the experience or feed into the misconception that blind people (and people with other disabilities) experience life in a second-hand mode.

WG: Your comment about knowledge that comes from "the mysteries of echolocation" is an intriguing one. Is this sense of echolocation something that you are consciously aware of as you move through a space? Can you describe the sensation as you experience it?

AG: I was introduced to the concept of echolocation by my first orientation and mobility instructor. He called it facial perception and said it was a way of using sound to understand the physical environment. He gave me no training in how to use it, just made me aware of it and periodically (though not systematically) asked me if I could sense the line of poles to my right or the solid masses of the buildings to my left, so I paid attention to such things. I didn't associate what I perceived with sound because, most of the time, I didn't actually hear sound . Over time, however, I noticed that my ability to perceive this type of feedback was limited in noisy environments and on days with interesting weather, rain or strong wind.

Again, I fall back on the word "density" to describe the feedback. When I'm walking down a hallway, I sense something heavy and solid close to me (the wall). Then as I walk by an open doorway, I catch a slice of airiness, even if sound, smell, or other feedback isn't being produced in the room. The first time I heard another blind person discuss this was in college. A friend was giving me directions. She said, "When you go into the building, the stairs will be on your right about halfway down the hall. You know ... they'll just open up." And I knew exactly what she meant because that's what stairs are like: open slices, like doorways, only the slice is lighter and airier the higher you go.

For a long time, I struggled with how to describe this type of perception, and I still do, but I started to get clues by reading teen vampire lit—of all things. The story line (of the first book in the series anyway) follows the misadventures of a hapless protagonist who is turned into a vampire against his/her will and learns to live as a creature of the night. In addition to the vampirely pursuits of exsanguination and tortured soullessness, this transition involves the more mundane minutiae of learning to get around in the dark. In this phase of the narrative, writers do a surprisingly good job of describing what I perceive.

A memorable example is in Christopher Moore's You Suck. In this scene from Chapter 3, Jody has just turned her boyfriend Tommy, and she's showing him how to live with his heightened vampire senses:

"Shhhh," Jody said. "Tommy, close your eyes and listen. Forget the salsa guy. Don't look."

Tommy closed his eyes and stood in the middle of the sidewalk. "What?"

Jody leaned against a "No Parking" sign and smiled. "What's just to the right of you?"

"How do I know? I was looking up."

"I know. Focus. Listen. Two feet from your right hand, what is it?"

"This is dumb."

"Just listen. Listen to the shape of the sound coming from your right."

"Okay." Tommy squinted, showing he was concentrating.

A couple of androgynous students dressed in black with severe hair, probably from the Academy of Art on the next block, walked by and barely gave them a look until Tommy said, "I can hear a box. A rectangle."

…

Jody waited for them to pass then asked, "Yes, a rectangle, solid, hollow, what?" She was a little giddy now, bouncing on the balls of her feet. This was better than buying shoes.

"It's hollow." Tommy tilted his head. "It's a newspaper machine." He opened his eyes, looked at the newspaper box, then at Jody, his face lit up like a toddler who has just discovered chocolate for the first time.

What strikes me about that scene is how exactly it matches my experience of echolocation. Some feedback is fairly obvious and turns into nonvisual visual imagery, Other feedback is subtler and emerges later. I can be standing at a parking lot, waiting for my driver, then I realize that two feet to my right is a squat narrow shape that is airy at the bottom or uniformly solid, and when I walk over to it, I confirm it's a newspaper machine or a trash can.

The other thing, which isn't echolocation but which I put into the same category, is the feedback that comes from limbic resonance. This is a concept developed by Lewis, Amini, and Lannon and described by Neenah Ellis in her book If I Live to Be One Hundred: Lessons from the Centenarians. Ellis, a reporter for NPR, conducts interviews with twenty people who are over a hundred years old. In three cases, she experiences an intense emotional connection, which she describes as a sensation of falling. On researching the phenomenon, she discovers limbic resonance, "the innate ability of mammals to feel one another's emotional state." Quoting from Lewis et al., she goes on to say, "When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition." In other words, we have the ability to feel each other's emotions." In Ellis' case, she feels herself losing her own sense of self and falling into her interviewee's emotional state.

For me, this passage was something of a revelation. Just like I know a lot about my physical environment, I know a lot about the people around me, their body language, their facial expressions, etc. I suppose a lot of this comes from subtle auditory cues or from the sort of details linguists interest themselves in noticing (I have a B. A. in linguistics), but I think more of it comes from the emotional energy people emit. I often know someone is in a room because of the vibe s/he gives off, and I can often feel the weight or point of someone's gaze. In fact, when I teach (something I do off and on), I know my students have started listening because I suddenly stop feeling their eyes on me. But as a blind person, I'm not entitled to have this knowledge or connection because it happens through eye-contact, which I obviously don't have.

I hadn't really thought about this until I started interpreting. My first job as a community interpreter was for county social services, which involved lots of mental health, including weekly therapy sessions. Interpreters are trained to be impartial and to keep their facial expressions neutral. Some even interpret with their eyes closed to maintain distance and avoid distraction. Nevertheless, some therapists insisted on having me sit so they could see my face, and a few were bothered by the fact that I kept my expression blank, even after I pointed out that the facial expression that mattered belonged to the person I was interpreting for. That prompted me to think about the tendency people have toward addressing the sighted person I'm with and the cumulative sense of exclusion from basic humanity that comes with it.

To get back to writing, I'm still not sure how to get any of this across to the reader in a way that is true to my experience of it. Writers of suspense or more general literary fiction can have their characters say, "I felt I was being watched," and no one questions it, but when a blind character turns around and approaches someone else, the scene isn't realistic. In my poem about the dog, the child speaker says the dog is poised to "sit or stand or run," tracking only with her chin. This is another one of the lines that could diminish the piece for a reader who discovers the writer is blind, but having this knowledge through limbic resonance, the experience is real and first-hand.

Lately I've been reading historical fiction and fiction with a sense of place, like C. J. Sansom's Shardlake series and Ian Rankin's Rebus series. I'm trying to learn how writers communicate information the reader doesn't already know, especially when there's a lot to get across and when it isn't essential. I'm picking up bits and pieces, like feeling comfortable with obvious explanations, which, of course, are interesting to readers, but I'm also torn about sharing information that reminds readers that I'm not like them in some fundamental way.

WG: With so much that you can potentially write about, what is it that gets you going on a particular poem? Can you talk a bit about your writing process?

AG: I used to write only when the muse came around. I could write fiction, which was what I thought would be my primary focus, even when the muse was in the room scrolling listlessly through her Twitter feed, but I needed her to give me all her attention for me to produce a poem. My best work still happens this way.

It was the method I relied on when I was working on my M. F. A., and I continued to rely on it for a couple of years after, writing new work and sending it out to journals. Then I got caught up in my interpreting job, and I started teaching entry-level composition, getting bogged down in the tedious grading cycle known to English teachers everywhere. During this time, I lost my contact with the muse. I also lost my sense of poetry writing as an important pursuit, so I stopped writing, and I stopped sending out.

One of the issues I struggled with during this quiet period was the echo of the M. F. A. The program was wonderful. It's one of the most important experiences of my life, but it was so intense that I had trouble leaving it. When I read my poetry or thought about writing poetry, I would hear the voices of my various workshops in my head, and I would feel confused about what to write and how to write it.

While in the program, I wrote about the sensual and the spiritual, two themes I'm interested in. I wrote about other things, mortality and money being examples, but I didn't have a clear sense of where to direct my writing energy.

Years before, when I first thought about writing seriously, I wanted to write oral histories. I come from a family with a strong oral tradition. People would sit down to a meal, but after the plates were cleared, cups of coffee or cinnamon tea were refilled and the _sobremesa_ began, a period of leisurely conversation, often involving narratives, so I learned to love the rhythms of speech and the tension of a good story when I was very young.

I heard other stories as well. My parents came to the United States the year I was born. Long-distance calls were expensive as was basic telephone service, so one important source of information about the home country came from people who had traveled there. They would come back and visit with all their friends to share specific information, like gossip about Aunt So-And-So or Uncle Such-And-Such, and they would keep people abreast of the latest fashions and social trends. When I read about the wandering minstrels of medieval Europe, I think about this practice.

As I grew older, it was this collection of stories that I wanted to write, the stories of men and women who broke with the familiar and tried to rebuild a world that was both exactly like the one they left and very different from it. These stories were not at all like the stories I read in most books, and anyway, I mistrusted books because a couple of newspaper pieces had been written about Ana-the-amazing-blind-student, and they weren't at all about the person I told reporters I was.

I didn't know how I would write people's stories until I read Studs Terkel. He interviewed people, letting them tell their stories, capturing their reality, their magic, in pieces that are as poetic as any poem. This was what I wanted to do too, but the prose writing professor I had wasn't very encouraging, calling my pieces folktales in obvious air quotes, and I wasn't strong enough as a person or smart enough as a writer to know there are other audiences, so I set that idea aside.

Much later, in the M. F. A., I wrote mostly about myself, my subjective experience of the world, my angst as a person coming to terms with her self as an individual. Some material went beyond me to cover female identity, poverty, social inequity, etc., but it was all closely linked to me, and it needed to be for me to focus on discovering my voice and for stocking my basic knitting basket of skills.

After the M. F. A., I found myself in contact with people's stories again through my interpreting work. I accompanied public health nurses to people's homes for post natal care of newborns, follow-up interviews after SIDS deaths, and hospice care near end of life. I went to the chest clinic to help TB patients get their treatment, to psychiatric crisis units to talk to patients after failed suicide attempts, to outpatient mental health centers for weekly counseling sessions, to sterile office buildings for mediation sessions at the ends of marriages, to upscale homes and dumpy trailer parks for child abuse interviews, to community centers, to civil court, to county jails, and everyone had stories to tell. My students also had stories. But I couldn't tell them. I didn't know how. I couldn't find the words, and I couldn't shape the poems around them.

This was very scary for me, a throwback to an earlier time in my life. Throughout college, I experienced severe writing anxiety (i.e., panic attacks whenever papers were due, failed class upon failed class, intense feelings of inadequacy). I didn't have this problem in creative writing. Poems and stories, I could do most of the time without any problems, so the idea that my old anxiety would creep into such an important area of my life was terrifying.

For a few years, I didn't write at all. I rediscovered reading and filled my head with everything from Henry James to Amanda Quick, on the premise that all tasty stews have ingredients impressive and mundane. After five years, I was ready to start over. I practiced angst-free writing by participating in discussion lists on random topics. I retrained myself to think like a writer by keeping a blog (no longer extant) in which I'd journal about one writerly experience per week or so (e.g., a technique I noticed while reading chick lit, an idea for a poem, reflections on an article about writing).

Eventually, the muse started coming around again, giving me ideas, poetic images, and words to write down. As I felt more confident about myself, I started to summon the muse by telling myself I wanted to write a poem about X, and as I went about my day, I would purposely think about the kinds of images or expressions I might include, or I would read about something related or do something connected to the target poem. Then the muse would come to me.

The poem with the child speaker and her dog came about this way. I've got enough poems for three collections. At the beginning of the year, I decided it was time to reorganize them for submission again, so…The first book follows a more or less chronological story about a child growing into womanhood. The two themes are sex and religion, of course. I noticed that I had a poem that marks the child's transition from girl to young woman, but I didn't have a poem that marked her transition into faith. So I asked myself questions. What is faith? How do I describe God? When did I have an awareness of Him? I read passages in the Bible that addressed this, and I read the work of metaphysical poets like Jon Dunn. I went to the places where poets like to put God—under a tree, in a windy field, in a quiet corner of the house—and I tucked certain images away for future use, like the gust of wind that was so strong it nearly pulled my white cane out of my hand. Then suddenly, like the light silent sound of the old testament, the incident with my dog became a poem. My mom pulled into the driveway. The dog was sitting at the gate, not running wildly out in the street. When she came to me at the car door, she was unusually quiet, still, intense, and when she moved ahead of me just before I entered the house, I thought, "God is like that, a comforting presence that accompanies, guides, and welcomes." Writing the poem only took a couple of hours.

I've also learned to write without the muse. Well, she does show up in the middle of things, sometimes staying, sometimes not. The interpreting poem was one of these. I wanted to write about my work as an interpreter. I also wanted to write about what the parents of children with disabilities really say, when there're children are not around. I'd been collecting observations and ideas for a few weeks, and I'd even planned a general structure, but I hadn't found a way to kickstart the process. At the time, I was reading—actually listening to—an audio book. The reader was Graeme Malcom, whose voice I've been listening to since the late 80's or early 90's. I like voices—the pauses, the changes of rate, the inflections. I borrow them when I'm interpreting. I like Graeme Malcolm's voice, and I like his interpretations. I asked myself whether I could write a poem that would suit his speech. That helped me get started and keep going. By the end, the muse was with me. She helped me include the suicide, a painful incident I've been wanting to write about without knowing how.

As far as my subjects, I'm still not sure where to direct my work. I'm Catholic, with a definite interest in social justice. I think I'd like to direct my work toward sharing the stories of all the voices I hear, but I'm still trying to understand how to write political poetry without pedantry. Right now, I'm writing to create books that are somehow coherent collections. I've been moving away from my own subjective experience to get at bigger realities. I've been writing about blindness. I've started telling some of the stories I hear. I've been capturing little moments of ordinary magic or horror. But I still don't know that I can point to the subject I come back to most often.

WG: You have made a number of references to your work as an interpreter. Can you describe exactly what the job consists of? What does it mean to be an interpreter?

AG: A community interpreter helps speakers of the nondominant language participate in society by negotiating certain formal verbal encounters. The most obvious examples are at court. When people who don't speak English face criminal charges, want to fight a traffic ticket, or need to settle child custody after a separation, they need to be able to communicate with the judge and other officials. They do so through the services of an interpreter, who is provided for them (criminal matters) or whom they hire themselves (civil matters). In theory, interpreters should be provided free of charge to anyone who receives services from programs that use federal money, but my observation is that this doesn't necessarily happen.

For me, becoming an interpreter has been a dream since childhood, but I actually got into the profession by accident. My parents don't speak English, so like many first-generation children, I grew up interpreting for them at school, at the doctor's office, at the bank. I enjoyed it enough to want to do it for a living, so I went to college, with grandiose imaginings of eventually working as an interpreter for the United Nations. Fast forwarding through many years and many changes of major, I moved on to other things.

As I was finishing up my M. F. A., I started teaching English part-time at two of the community colleges in my area. A couple of semesters later, I didn't have any class assignments, and I needed to find another job. My mother mentioned an ad for a screener, someone who could assess the skills of people applying for interpreting positions. I passed the test for that, and as soon as I got the job (a contract position that would yield a few hours of work every few months), I started begging and groveling for a position as an interpreter or translator (someone who works with written language).

That job was for County social services. Whenever social workers, therapists, nurses, doctors, and other professionals employed by the County needed to talk to a Spanish speaker, they would refer to a list of approved interpreters and call someone.

My first call was to the drop-in mental health clinic. When I arrived, I was accompanied to an intake area, where a man claimed he'd been given a lethal injection the day before and was now dead. I repeated what he said to the intake nurse, and after going through some forms together, the patient and I were escorted to the psychiatric lockdown unit by a security guard. There again, I sat next to the patient to help with the admission process, initial screening, and psychiatric assessment.

Though the bulk of my work was for the county, I've done a lot of freelance assignments, like interpreting for community meetings and training sessions, and I did (and still do) some telephonic interpreting. Some of this work is conference call work. Someone calls the auto insurance company, cell phone provider, or 911, and the adjustor, customer service representative, or dispatcher brings me into the call, so I can help the two parties communicate. Other calls are more like remote interpreting. Someone goes to the doctor's office or social service agency, and the medical or social service provider puts me on speaker phone or gives the patient/client an extra headset so the two can speak more privately through a dual handset.

Interpreting is probably like acting. It's definitely like reading or writing for me. While I do it, I stop being myself and take on the thoughts and motivations of the people speaking through me.

For instance, last night I interpreted a call between a mother and a nurse adviser. The mother's child broke his arm earlier in the week. Now the arm above and below the cast was swollen, and the child complained of pain whenever he moved his fingers. When the call started, the nurse sounded bored and cranky. I felt it, a cramped home office, the end of a long shift, the certainty of yet another over protective parent who knows more medicine than the experts. As the mother started to explain her concerns, I felt her too, the diffidence of knowing there was a problem, of feeling helpless about fixing it, of bracing herself against the likelihood that she would be told to give her son ivoprophen and wait for the official follow-up appointment. Mindful that every conversation is a textured fabric of goals, agendas, and histories, I did my best to convey each person as she was and to render faithfully not only the obvious cues of register and accuracy but of nuance as well.

Other interpreters don't approach their work in quite the same way. Accuracy and register are, of course, the work, but the idea of losing oneself in the communicative act is probably a product of my own history as the child of immigrants at a time when snide remarks were not uncommon, my training in linguistics, and my writerly sense of character and drama.

Part of my approach to interpreting also stems from being blind. My mother is a great describer and observer as are many of my friends. They all give me lots of visual information in passing, and I absorb it into the experience so I'm not always able to parse what I experienced first-hand from the information that comes from others.

This phenomenon is best described by Donald Murray in "All Writing Is Autobiography": What is true, what is documentally autobiographical, in the novel will not be clear to me when I finish the last draft. I confess that at my age I am not sure about the source of most of my autobiography. I have written poems that describe what happened when I left the operating table, looked back and decided to return. My war stories are constructed of what I experienced, what I heard later, what the history books say, what I needed to believe to survive and recover—two radically different processes.

I think people who frequently communicate through interpreters have a similar experience of merging what some people consider first-hand experience from other information.

My mother sometimes tells me about encounters I've helped her with as if I hadn't been there. Once she launched into an animated story about how she stood up to a government drone about something.

"I remember," I said when I recognized the incident; "I was there."

She laughed. "I guess you were," she said. "It's just that, when something is interpreted well, I remember what happened, but I don't remember that an interpreter was present."

WG: It sounds to me as though, you should be writing your own autobiography. The translation work itself is fascinating and your being blind definitely adds another component to the mix. I can’t help but think that you’ve gotten ideas for your writing from this experience. Translation itself is a natural subject for poetry on many levels and a story in which two of the characters cannot speak each other’s language a translator who can not see either of them seems to me to be begging to be written. What have you written that has emerged from your experiences as a translator.

AG: When I started taking nonfiction prose classes, long before the M. F. A., instructors suggested I write memoir about blindness. At the time, I wasn't interested in that topic. I wanted to write my oral histories a la Studs Terkel. I also felt that what my instructors were telling me was that I had only one interesting topic to write about, and I resented it.

Like many other people of my generation, I was taught implicitly that having a disability was a bad thing. When I lost my sight, people in town came over or came up to my parents on the street, hugging them and saying they were so sorry. When I was transferred to the only school in the county with a mainstreaming program, something new and revolutionary, the kids in my sighted classroom never came up to play with me or responded when I tried to play with them. Then when I played with the other blind kids at school, our resource room teachers told us not to. Using different words, they told me I was high functioning and could eventually do well in the sighted world, so I should stay away from the blind kids and try to blend in. At summer camp for the blind, I was often complimented by camp staff that I was good enough to go to regular camp. When I was in high school, I was encouraged to go to college because I might actually find work. Underlying all of this was the idea that it was bad to be blind, that it was bad to hang around with people who were blind, and that it was bad to do things the blind way because I wouldn't get anywhere if I did.

So until relatively recently (maybe the last fifteen years), I felt uncomfortable around other people with disabilities. There was always one or two who seemed normal, but I think now most of them reminded me of what I shouldn't and couldn't be. This impulse is probably what leads some African-Americans to scorn behavior they deem "ghetto," what causes many women to criticize their sisters for failing to submit to abusive men, what prompts homosexuals to put down men and women who are flamboyantly femme or butch, and what drives the children of immigrants to be more American than the native born. Eventually I realized that, however hard I worked to blend in, I was always blind and always inferior.

Before this revelation, I resisted autobiography because I resisted being defined by my blindness, an aspect of life that kept getting in the way, mostly because other people were/are amazingly ignorant about its impact on my ability to do and experience. After the revelation, however, I began to think of autobiography as a possible direction for my writing. It still didn't seem very interesting since the models I knew tended toward the inspirational, which my life and opinions were far from. There was also the fact that I could write about otherness, a concept that has defined so much of my life, through gender, ethnicity, religious practice, or even asexuality, something normal only in the context of monastic/conventual life, but of course, blindness trumped everything else because it was the thing people fixated on.

It wasn't until I read James Baldwin that I found a more productive way to think about writing disability. Baldwin was the first writer I encountered who placed the character and the problem in the foreground and the influence of race in the background. That reflected my own experience, so I read a lot of Baldwin to learn how he managed it. I was still mostly interested in writing fiction and later poetry, though.

When I started interpreting for the County, my interest in nonfiction through oral histories returned. Initially, I planned to hurry home from interpreting assignments to write down the stories I heard, thinking I'd eventually turn them into essays, but this wasn't practicable because I had several assignments a day and because the act of interpreting is different from the act of listening. In listening, you are called upon to absorb ideas and to commit to a response, even if the response is to dismiss. In interpreting, you don't have time to fully take the content in, and you don't choose the response, so it isn't based on your own framework of theories and assumptions about the world. This makes it harder to accurately recall a story, to reconstruct the chain of events that leads from one thing to another, to summon the details that develop the speaker/narrator as a distinct person.

Later, I let go of the idea of writing oral histories, deciding I could tell the truths of the people I interpreted for through fiction and poetry. Mostly I haven't been successful. I have a short story about a translator who is newly blind, but the piece has technical issues I haven't resolved. I have a nonfiction prose piece about a women's support group I interpreted for off and on. I wrote it when I was relatively new to interpreting, and this is obvious in the essay, which can't seem to decide whether it's about the interpreter or the support group. I've started a few poems about some of the stories I've heard while interpreting, but the only one I've completed is "The Master's Daughter," which appears in Rose Red Review and is based on another interpreter's experiences growing up. Beyond that, I think I was successful in "Interpreting," the piece I submitted to Wordgathering, which brings together a number of different experiences to highlight the otherness of the interpreter as voice of all, even when she is furthering ideas that work against her. After all, the interpreter can be Sacagawea, who opened the West for Lewis and Clark, or Malinche, who opened the people of Mexico to attack by Cortes, and in this poem, the interpreter does both.

Really, I think I'm struggling with translation/interpreting as a topic because I want to write about the experience in a way that describes it accurately. Metaphor is seductive, but because it's based on what we think, not what is real, it's as likely to reaffirm the false as to uncover the true. When I think about my experiences interpreting for mental health, I think of all the plays and novels I've read with wise mad characters, and when I think about my work at an inpatient drug treatment facility, I think about all the novels and articles I've read about the unlucky intersection of class and circumstance. I find that what I've read creeps into my writing and my recollection, and I need to fight hard to filter it out.

In fact, at this stage of my writing life, I find myself thinking a lot about agency. We think our decisions and actions are our own, but they're actually the obvious and not-obvious product of the time and place we live in, the expectations we have, the ideas we're willing to accept. For my mother, who is seventy-four, it's still a little shocking and thrilling to see a woman in a supervisory position over men, and for her, it is not quite acceptable for a woman to have the last word or to resist compromise when dealing with a man, so while she believes in gender equality, she doesn't support it as fully as she thinks she does because of when and where and how she learned to understand the world. I've been working hard to figure out what I want to say about being blind and being an interpreter, without letting all the things I think I want to say get in the way.

WG: As a writer who is blind as well as being fluent in both Spanish and English, have you had the chance to read other writers with disabilities who write in Spanish. Borges, is the obvious example here, but who else have you come across that you would recommend reading.

AG: I'm going to ramble for a moment before I get to the point.

I'm new to the world of disability studies. I read a little theory ten years ago, but I don't think I was ready to take in a lot of the ideas, largely because I thought (and mostly think) that literary theory is too removed from experience to be more than a mental exercise.

This attitude changed largely through my reading of Word Gathering. the combination of thought and experience in many of the essays prompted me to rethink my own doings, and it was certainly empowering to discover a community of people who aren't interested in disability as inspiration, disability as tragedy, or disability as the same old metaphors (Saramago's Blindness is an incoherent ramble for readers who haven't been keeping up on all the metaphors about blindness sighted people cherish).

I'm only now discovering writers with disabilities in general. When I read this question, my first thoughts, of course, were Borges, who was blind, and Cervantes, whose left hand was paralyzed. I did a little Googling and found eight more writers. I've read about half of them and am interested in reading the rest. The younger ones interrogate disability more directly in their work. That's a good sign.

Here's the list of writers:

Albert Espinosa writes bestselling novels as well as scripts for film, television, and the theater. He lives in Spain. He’s a cancer survivor who’s had a leg, a lung, and part of his liver removed.

Alfonso Cortes Bendaña is an early twentieth-century poet, who had psychotic episodes and spent a lot of time chained at his home in Nicaragua. He is said to be one of the earliest metaphysical poets of the Americas.

Alfonsina Storni is an early twentieth-century poet who lived in Argentina. She had depression and committed suicide at the age of 46. Some say the depression started after a breast cancer diagnosis; others say it started earlier.

Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent is an early twentieth-century journalist, short story writer, and novelist. He was a deaf Spanish aristocrat of the decadent school, whose themes include what it is to be homosexual in a repressive religious society.

Benito Perez Galdos is a nineteenth-century journalist and novelist, who is often compared to Cervantes. Many of his novels are as well-known to the people of Latin America and his native Spain and the rest of the Spanish speaking world as the work of Dickens is to people who speak English. Perez Galdos had chronic migraines. Later in life, he developed cataracts and diabetes, becoming blind, though this was near the end of his career. Most likely, the last two or three novels were written at least in part with the help of an amanuensis.

Gabriela Brimmer is a twentieth-century poet and activist who had severe cerebral palsy. She lived in Mexico and was a protégé of writer Elena Poniatowska.

Horacio Quiroga is an early twentieth-century short-story writer, who also wrote novels and plays. Though undiagnosed, he likely had depression and other mental illnesses. He committed suicide as did his father, stepfather, and adult children—all at different times, of course.

Joacobo Fijman is a Twentieth-century poet, who spent the last 30 years of his life in an Argentinian psychiatric facility. Interested in mysticism, he converted from Judaism to Catholicism during his writing career.

Jorge Luis Borges is a twentieth-century essayist, poet, and short story writer who was blind. His work tends to the philosophical, and many contend his politics kept him from winning the Nobel prize.

Juanvi Mena is a Spanish playright who writes in Valencian and has cerebral palsy. His three most recent plays concern disability from different perspectives. For example, the latest is about the Virgin Mary considering abortion on learning her fetus is disabled.

Marina Arzola is a twentieth-century poet from Puerto Rico who was probably schizophrenic. She had a series of breakdowns and produced poetry many find obscure.

Miguel de Cervantes is, of course, the author of Don Quixote and other work. He had paralysis in the left hand.

WG: Ana, you have done a number of interviews with Peter and Nancy Torpey for their Eyes on Success radio program in which you discuss topics on use of technology such as Androids and Kindle - not to mention maintaining a blog on Android accessibility - so it is pretty obvious that you are conversant with technology. We are going to include links to those programs for interested readers, but what I would like to ask you about is what technologies you use as a writer. Can you discuss what technologies you make use of when you sit down to work on a poem or story?

AG: I was a teenager when I wrote my first poems and stories. I did it on the slate and stylus. This is probably the device Louis Braille developed. It's inexpensive and easy to carry around in a purse or briefcase. You start at the right end of the line, and you write characters in mirror image. With most traditional slates, you can't read as you're writing. Well, you can, but you have to stop, pull the sheet of paper out of the slate, turn it over so the writing is facing up, read, then turn the paper back over, clip it into the slate again, and find your place—all of which is less slow and cumbersome than I'm making it sound, but slow enough and cumbersome enough to disrupt the dream state of a writing episode.

Correcting/editing Braille is a nuisance. You can cross out; you can write notes on a separate sheet of paper; if you're careful, you can erase some writing, put Scotch Tape over the spot, and write over the same place--once. That's about it. So I'd think long and hard, developing whole paragraphs in my head before actually writing anything down, especially before I discovered that Braille paper was available locally for a lot less at office supply stores under the name file card stock.

When self-correcting typewriters came on the market, I bought one right away, spending the equivalent of a semester's dorm rent on it. Initially, I composed in Braille and typed from that, but the process was incredibly slow, requiring me to take my hands off the keyboard every few words. Later I did what a lot of my sighted friends did, make mental outlines and just type as the spirit moved me. Of course, I wasn't able to reread my writing, and if I had any interruptions, like a phone call or my guide dog's sudden need to go out, I often had to start over. The particular typewriter I owned had one-step correction, so moving the correcting head over a blank space sounded different from correcting over a character. Over time, I got good at reconstructing where I was by counting characters and blank spaces. Even later I spoke into a tape recorder, then typed and revised as I listened. Sighted people I knew did this, and I eventually made some extra money by typing papers for people who used this method of composing.

A few years after that, I had my first talking word processor, which gave me my first experience of selecting, cutting, copying, and pasting whatever I wrote whenever I felt like it. This was magical. Years before, when I lost my sight and was sent to another school for mainstreaming, I had to ride a bus for two and a half to four hours, depending on the number of pickups or drop-offs. To make the time go by, I would write stories in my head, episodes of a family saga based on the evening telenovelas and peopled with my Barbie dolls. I would compose sentences with new words I'd learned or interesting constructions borrowed from soap opera scripts, television commercials, and American sitcoms, experimenting with their transfer to or from English. I would see print and Braille characters at the top of an imaginary screen as I composed and watch them move or disappear as I revised or restarted, and below the text, I'd be mesmerized by Super Star Barbie in her tiara, gesturing wildly before slamming the door after a killer exit line. With a talking word processor, I could do exactly the same thing in the real world. For the first time ever, I could control my text. This was so empowering that I didn't mind having to type my text out after composing it because the word processor could only print on cash register tape. Transitioning to the computer and printer was even better.

Now I do most of my writing on a computer with a screen reader. A synthetic voice speaks as I type and as I move around the screen. It can also speak individual paragraphs, sentences, words, and other information on demand. Though modern speech engines are human sounding, the one I use is robotic. One of the ways I know I'm almost done with a piece is that I stop noticing the annoying robotic voice. At that point, I start proofreading with my Braille display, which is also connected to my computer.

I also own an electronic Braille note taker. A friend describes it as an iPad or Nexus 7 only with Braille. I can input text in Braille and either listen to it, as on my computer, or read it on the device with my fingers. This is nice for composing in odd places, like a bench after my walk to an empty field, as when I was trying to write a poem about God.

Beside that, I have an Android phone and an Android tablet. I've done a little experimentation with both since I usually have my phone with me. I haven't found a method for using these devices that seems to be my official write-it-on-the-go technique, but I do sometimes use voice dictation. In fact, most of the first two stanzas of the interpreting poem were composed with Google voice recognition.

Of course, we all know that writing is as much about researching and reading as it is about composing. One of my great frustrations when I started to think about writing as a serious pursuit was that it was hard to do research. One of my earliest pieces of writing is a novella about an anorexic. I knew a little about the eating disorder because I knew people who were bulemic or anorexic, but access to print involved finding the rare sighted person who was willing to accompany me to the library, and the internet was young, so the best I could find was a sentimental newspaper article on teens with poor self-image. Now I can find a lot of information on the Net, and I can read lots more through Google Books and the Kindle store. Unfortunately, many e-books are still not accessible as they are rendered as images, rather than searchable text, and most of the material available through libraries exists as print or image, so research is still not as convenient and easy for me as it is for most people, but optical character recognition has improved and dropped in price so I no longer have to wait around for someone to read to me.

Through the mainstream popularity of audio books, however, I can have the world's best readers read to me whenever I want. I think fiction and poetry--especially poetry--should be read out loud. Writers spend a lot of time developing the voice of a piece. It's an extension of the speaker or character, and many decisions about what to say, when to say it, how to say it, and why it needs or doesn't need saying are determined in part by the person reflected through this voice. I think too that the kind of speech that happens during reading and story-telling is profoundly intimate. People are drawn close together in the truth being shared and in the act of sharing it. I'm always amazed that my community-college students, who have no compunction about playing cards during lecture until told not to (more than once), suddenly sit still and slip into whatever personal anecdote I've found to relate to the lecture topic of the day. Audio books are a way to remind us of this intimacy.

WG: Ana, I want to thank you for this wonderfully informative interview. I think that you have given Wordgathering readers a good deal to think about. Before ending, is there anything else you would like to add that you think we may not have covered?

AG: I'm glad we now have venues like Kaleidoscope, Word Gathering, Breath and Shadow, and Pentimento, where we can read and write about disability in ways that are true to our experience.

As someone who loves to read, I'm always hoping to find people like me in books. They rarely appear, and when they do, they're usually pathetic, heroic,, vulnerable, or passive. Their purpose is to show how kind or base another character is or to flesh out a metaphor, which generally stems from a sighted person's limited imagination about what it is to be blind or from a sighted person's vocabulary of blindness related tropes. So they're never me—pathetic, heroic, vulnerable, and passive on occasion, but mostly ordinary, flawed, and as interested in taking charge of my own destiny as the next person—and they're never really about me—someone muddling through life only with an added complication.

Sometimes the complication is worth focusing on, like in my poem about interpreting. I sent it out to half a dozen journals before it occurred to me that, literary merit aside, the piece was a hard sell. In all the genetics counseling sessions I've interpreted over the phone, I can think of only one case in which the counselor didn't recommend or strongly slant the discussion of results toward termination, and only two cases in which the parents wanted to think things over before deciding whether to schedule the procedure. The rest of the time, it's been a given that disability, however remote the risk, is not to be brought into the home. My students affirm this idea every time they debate abortion, citing rape, incest, and disability of various kinds (including my own, which is both amusing and disconcerting) as just reasons, and in their own way, the do-gooders who adopt special needs children also affirm it, presenting their desire to help the unwanted in a kindness that all too often oozes condescension. I have no doubt that the editors and readers of most journals have more in common with the genetics counselors et al. than with me. Only a readership that acknowledges and accepts the presence of disability can make sense of the poem. Others would reduce it to a melodramatic pro-life manifesto.

My hope is that journals like Word Gathering will open other readers to a community and an experience they resist.

Editors Note: Ana Garza G’z is a frequent guest on Eyes on Success, a radio show oriented towards concerns of people with visual disabilities. Two shows that may be of special interests to Wordgathering readers are her discussion of the Kindle and her thoughts aobut Android accessibility.