Think people who are blind can’t benefit from the visual arts? Think again! I have visual artist Vanessa Navarrete (and Kathy Zartman, a writer in my Lincoln Park Village memoir class) to thank for giving me the benefit of connecting with writer Francisco Navarrete. I was flattered when he contacted me for help on a short story he’s working on, and honored that he’d take time away from his fiction writing to put this guest post together to explain how we met.

A work of art is never finished

by Francisco Navarrete

That’s Francisco with his kids. (Photo by Vanessa Navarrete)

I am not blind, but in a short story I’m working on now I’m trying to “see” what that might be like. The main character is a teenager who has been blind since she was born. Janey’s boyfriend can see, and she’s spending her last evening with him before he leaves for college.

My attempt at blindness is combined with an attempt at being female, and at being seventeen — I’m a thirty-seven year old man. In fact, the impetus for writing this story was to escape myself for a little while, to be someone else who senses life differently than I do.

I workshop my work, with my wife or my writing group, and that usually acts as a filter for certain moments in a story. Having a blind character, though, I wanted to share my story with someone with that sort of specific first hand experience.

I was in Janey’s mindset for ten weeks and was generally happy with my story, and then I got to talking with a collector at my wife’s art opening and found out she has a writing teacher who is blind. What a tremendous opportunity to get it “workshopped” by someone with a very unique perspective! Rather than write Beth, though, I did nothing about it. Janey’s story was stuck in its present form, like the ice on the sidewalk this winter. And you just get used to things like that.

Spring came, and the changes that come along with it started affecting my sense of duty to my story, to my character. The more I write, the more I really care about my characters. I don’t shelter them or anything, I send them off into deep dark places that I don’t want to go to; but, I look out for them. Well, Janey needed somebody. She was patiently waiting for me to have someone see her for who she was, so I sent her to Beth, all the time thinking that I probably wouldn’t hear anything back. I mean, how often does one call out into the void for an answer and actually get one?

The very next morning, I had the kindest and most thorough response I’ve ever received waiting in my inbox. Beth’s writing voice was immediate, clear and masterful. She gave me insights into how blindness doesn’t really make you turn to your other senses so intensely. That there is a casual quality to going about your day like anyone else would. That when she gets up, or walks down the street, it’s simple shifts she notices, or things that are of immediate but not necessarily noteworthy importance.

Beth was quick to call out things I might assume a blind person would do, but that she doesn’t ever do herself. For instance, early in the story, I originally wrote:

Tracing his nose, up the bridge, over his brow, she followed the contour of his temples down over his cheekbones and along the sides of his neck to his collar.

In response Beth wrote, “I never ever want to feel the faces of people I meet or know. Lots of sighted people think blind people do this a lot –I have even had some relative strangers ask me if I want to feel their face. Okay if the woman in your story feels her boyfriend’s face, though — he’s her boyfriend! I just might not put such an emphasis on it — she would probably feel his face just the way other lovers feel each other’s face — not feeling for the contours or the shape of his nose, just a loving brush of the back of her hand on his cheek or some other loving touch.” So, I changed Janey’s gestures to be simply romantic:

She followed the contour of his cheeks along the sides of his neck down to his collar.

The change successfully economizes the moment, and puts the emphasis on their relationship – not on pointing out that Janey is blind in a way that might not be true to being blind. Beth told me to try writing descriptively and trust my readers to know what it is I mean. Reading Beth’s letter, then reading through my story, I see that as a writer I am often out there shouting, “Look, I’m writing this,” when I should be entirely invisible. Or at least only whispering.

I’ve printed out Beth’s letter, so now I have it accessible for quick reference while I work on my revisions. I guess the moral of the story is always share and always listen, and, as Flaubert said, “A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”

I’m afraid “the beautiful game” reminds me of this.

A few days ago the LA Kings finished off the NY Rangers in the National Hockey League Stanley Cup Finals. Last night, the San Antonio Spurs dispatched LeBron James and the Miami Heat in the National Basketball Association Finals. NFL training camps are still a ways off.

Ordinarily this would begin the best time of summer for baseball fans like me, because baseball takes the American sporting world’s center stage without distraction. Except, it being 2014, we have something called the World Cup.

I’ll be rooting for the Americans this afternoon against Ghana. (Though I have to say, I feel a little villainous rooting against Ghana in anything.) And I love how the Cup reveals just how much the United States is still a melting pot — folks from other countries are nuts for the World Cup, and at some bars and restaurants here in Chicago, it’s like a United Nations meeting. (more…)

It’s Father’s Day, and tomorrow Nancy Lerman — a writer in one of the memoir classes I lead in Chicago — will be on stage at the Goodman Theatre to read an essay about her dad.

That’s Nancy and her father, awhile back.

This is a big deal! The Goodman won a Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 1992, and it’s recognized for its artists, productions and educational programs. One of those educational programs is a six-week writing workshop for people over 55 called GeNarrations, where participants develop personal narratives (more…)

The World Cup starts tomorrow, and while I won’t be paying much attention to the games, I am interested in the opening ceremonies. Here’s why: a teenager who is paralyzed is going to use a mind-controlled robotic suit called an exoskeleton to do the first kick.

I learned all about this thanks to my part-time job at Easter Seals Headquarters in Chicago. I’m the Interactive Community Coordinator there, which is just a fancy-schmancy title that means I (more…)

Beth writes often about her mom, Flo — most recently this past mother’s day.

This past Saturday, Flo had visitors from Ohio, Delaware, Michigan and Florida.

Flo spent that day at a rehabilitation facility, where she has been getting geared up to move into her new assisted living apartment. Flo has yet to make it into her new digs — but she’s working on it.

She’s had a series of setbacks, and at 98 years old, well, every setback gets us all — the legion of Finke children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great-great grandchildren, friends and in-laws like me —- worried, concerned, anxious, teary-eyed. She’s bounced back so many times that for me, considering the possibility that she won’t again feels a little like what I imagine a taser to feel. Stunned dumb.

I lost my own mother 23 years ago. I’ve known Flo now for more than 30. My mom had absolutely nothing in common with Flo. At least not on the surface. As I think about it though, they both had known some serious hardship, and were forced to fairly claw for survival at points in their lives. Flo lost her husband when she was 45, had six kids at home, had no job and only part of a high school education. My mom’s first husband was in a horrible oil refinery fire in Bakersfield, Calif., just before Christmas in 1952. He survived a couple agonizing weeks, and then died — leaving my mom Esther, just turning 30 about then, with a 6-month-old daughter, thousands of miles from her own family.

My mom, well, it’d take a lot more than a blog to cover that little fireplug. Whatever our difficulties were though, I always knew I could count on Esther if my back was against the wall. I think it’s because she’d been there.

It’s been that way with Flo and me, too. Through all of the tribulations Beth and I faced, the question people immediately asked me most often was, quite reasonably, “How’s Beth?” “How’s Gus?” For as long as I can remember, though, Flo always asked, every time she saw me, “How are you, Mike?” She worried out loud that I looked tired (I did). I drove too much (I did).

Of course she was worried about her daughter, too. But I got the feeling that, looking at me, she saw someone in over his head — exactly as she had been years ago — and that she knew what that meant and wanted me to know: She was in my corner.

Right now I, and what I would estimate to be around a 1,000 members of Finke nation, are in hers.

Therapists of various stripes are on the case, and Flo’s working hard. But it’s not all work and no play. She lights up when visitors enter. She’s enjoyed the fantastic weather of the past few days. She tells everyone how good they look and how much she loves them. And she just got her nails done. When asked how long it took them to do her nails, she said, “98 years.” It was her first mani.

See you in your new place, Flo.