Listen: Blindness doesn’t inhibit student’s passion for reading, writing

First-year English student and placer in the National Braille Challenge this year, Janie Brunson loves to read. Born with bilateral retinal dysplasia, Brunson has been blind from birth, but that has not impeded Brunson’s passion for reading and writing. She shares one of her short stories with Daily Bruin Radio.

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TRANSCRIPT:

PHAN: So one day, Ray, your average blue-collar worker, happens to stops by a coffee shop after a long day of work. Like many fathers, he works to put the food on the table for his two kids, but on this particular day he’s troubled by, essentially, his purpose in life, what the long monotonous hours of working day in and day out has done to his resolve.

BRUNSON: It was pathetic. It was like there was no future. Like he was stuck in this endless loop of pointlessness.

PHAN: Ray might as well have been ripped straight out of the pages of a Hemingway novel, and it would be just as easy to imagine the writer as some sort of disillusioned war veteran with a grizzly beard, perpetually clutching a drink in hand. However, Janie Brunson, a first-year English student and the author of “Ray’s Story,” hails from Monterey and doesn’t have a beard.

BRUNSON: So I call this one “Ray’s Story.” Ray had had a long day, and wanted nothing more than to get a cup of coffee and relax. As the saying goes, though, “There is no rest for the weary,” and I’m absolutely positive that if it had ever applied to anyone, he would be that person…

PHAN: As she reads, Brunson glides her hand across this compact black box, the size of a book, reciting words that form underneath her fingertips. Little plastic indentations emerge and retract, like a colony of “Whack-a-moles,” from a row of tiny holes along the box. Equipped with a keyboard, braille display and a few electronic ports, Brunson’s Braillenote is crucial to her writing. And by plugging in a flash drive into one of the Braillenote’s USB ports, she is able to read me her story.

BRUNSON: I kind of try to write like that – have some hope in everything I write. Because even though the world can seem a really depressing place sometimes, there is a lot of good in it, and I like to bring that out in contrast to some of the more unpleasant things that are in it.

PHAN: Brunson was born with bilateral retinal dysplasia, and is one of three blind students coming to UCLA this year. She does not, however, want to viewed as limited by her blindness.

BRUNSON: I try not to let my blindness get in the way, and that also applies to, like, social situations. So it always kind of bothers me when people treat me differently or think that I can’t do things, or such things, because I can’t see. It’s just people don’t know – they’re not sure how to deal with it.

PHAN : And in spite of her blindness, as she explains to me, Brunson still finds value in visual imagery which she uses throughout her stories.

BRUNSON: So I would notice that a lot of the things that I would read I would really, really like – it was because they had so much imagery in them. And so, even though I can’t really see for myself, I guess I got a good idea about how to describe things just from reading, and then I wanted to put a lot of imagery in the things I write because that’s what I like about the things that I read.

PHAN: She also shared some encouraging words for her fellow aspiring writers.

BRUNSON: Write even when you think you don’t have anything to write about, or you think that people aren’t going to care about what you are going to say because a lot of the times you don’t realize how people are going to react to it and you don’t realize the things that you do have to say.

PHAN: For Daily Bruin Radio, I’m Stephen Phan.