Blind author shares literary visions

Most 18-year-olds mark their initiation into adulthood by buying porn, cigarettes or lotto tickets. Ryan Knighton had to buy the reality that he was going blind.

On his 18th birthday, Knighton, a Canadian writer, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that impaired the functionality of patches of his retina, causing him to lose his sight over time.

On Thursday, Knighton will discuss his memoir “Cockeyed” at UCLA.

“It’s the story of a guy who is trying to become a man and is also told that he will become a disabled man, and he operates for a long time under the assumption that those two things are opposing forces,” he said.

An accidental writer, Knighton would have followed his childhood dream of becoming a welder if not for his life-altering diagnosis. After almost killing a friend with a forklift, he knew industrial work was not in his future.

Though his career choice was unintentional, his passion for writing was fueled by his family.

“At our house, language always had a real value,” he said. “Everyone’s very witty and very fast, so to be heard across the dinner table, you had to be equally witty and fast.”

After Knighton completed a degree in English at Simon Fraser University, he planned to attend graduate school. But when his then-girlfriend ““ now his wife ““ dropped out to teach English in South Korea, he chased after her.

The couple had planned to find jobs at the same school, but with Knighton’s worsening vision, no one would hire him. His girlfriend helped him conceal his condition, which took a serious toll on their relationship.

“Our relationship imploded by the pressure,” Knighton said. “She became like a mother, and I became like a child through the whole thing.”

Though Knighton is currently an English teacher at a community college in Vancouver, his teaching ability in South Korea was questionable.

“These 7-year-olds would put letters down on a Scrabble board and ask me if it was a word, and I’d say it was,” he said. “They might put down “˜XLPQ’ and I’d go up and draw a cat on the chalkboard. So they thought that’s what a cat was.”

Although Knighton reunited with his girlfriend after six months of separation, he soon received tragic news that changed his outlook on life.

Soon after Knighton and his girlfriend got back together, his younger brother died of an overdose.

“When he died, that completely changed the way I relate to all my blindness issues,” he said. “The things about my self-disfigurement, of my blindness just didn’t matter anymore. I had to become a different person to help the rest of my family.”

Despite his hardships, Knighton avoided themes of victimization while writing his memoir. He stayed away from what he calls “gimp-chic”: inspirational media about the lives of the disabled meant to comfort able-bodied people.

“I’m not interested in being inspirational. I find the whole thing quite funny. Everybody’s body is going to betray them at some point; it’s just a question of when and how, not if. The gimps like us walk around as omens of the things to come,” he said.

“I don’t have much interest in making people feel better about it. It’s hard, it’s ugly and it’s funny.”

Knighton offered an example of being able to find humor in the emergency protocol he went through at a retreat for the blind.

“Thirty-one blind people trying to do a fire drill, it’s just funny,” he said.

It was this attitude that attracted Dr. Edward McCabe, codirector of the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics the organization bringing Knighton to campus.

“Being a teenager, going blind, being diagnosed on your birthday, that’s kind of heavy stuff,” McCabe said. “But he tells it in a way that you don’t get bogged down in the emotion and the heaviness.”

McCabe heard of Knighton through his daughter, who had heard him speak at a creative writing class in Canada. He found Knighton’s story of interacting with society while living with a genetic disease to be perfect for the center.

“We’ve been looking for topics in the area of English for the center,” he said. “What we have is an individual talking about becoming blind and how that influences his interaction with society.”

In his writing, Knighton focuses on how a blind man can “see” the world in a predominantly visual society. His interactions with others give him updated pictures of the world, though his experiences often rely on his other senses.

Knighton also wrote a screenplay based on “Cockeyed” that was selected for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab this year. Although a blind man writing for the visual medium of film may seem like an oxymoron, he found words and images to be complementary.

“I spend so much of my day being sensitive to how people try to put a picture in my head, and screenwriting is really the magic trick of somebody being able to put into words a picture in the most efficient way,” Knighton said. “You live in that constant state as a blind person, so you’re really sensitive to that.”

In addition to the screenplay, Knighton is in the process of writing two more nonfiction books: one on parenthood and the other on travel. In both books, Knighton uses his blindness as a way to experience the world, not to evoke sympathy.

“Part of the problem with the cultural rhetoric about disabilities is it feeds a certain amount of self-pity and self-involvement,” he said.

“It’s more interesting to use blindness as a way of looking at other things because you are completely incongruous to the rest of the culture. It’s a great perspective for writing satire because nothing is designed for you.”

Whether it’s satire or dark humor, Knighton describes his writing as a sort of mirror, because as he progresses deeper into blindness, he loses visual memory.

“Time writes itself on your face and shows you your character. … The amount you’ve smiled or frowned or furrowed your brow or whatever it is,” he said.

“And I have no visual record of my final character. But these stories are my version of that character.”