Hey everyone! I have a fun post for you today. I was lucky enough to be invited to join the 1st annual 2014 YA contemporary scavenger hunt hosted by The Book Belles and Katie's Book Blog.
As part of the scavenger hunt I have the privilege of hosting a wonderful author and highlighting her awesome book. I haven't had the chance to read this one yet, but it sounds fantastic! So, please welcome to my blog, author Rachel DeWoskin and her YA contemporary BLIND.
When your life as you know it is taken from you, how do you go on?
Imagine this: You are fourteen, watching the fireworks at a 4th of July party, when a rocket backfires into the crowd and strikes your eyes, leaving you blind. In that instant, your life is changed forever. How do you face a future in which all your expectations must be different? You will never see the face of your newborn sister, never learn to drive. Will you ever have a job or fall in love? This is Emma’s story. The drama is in her manysmall victories as she returns to high school in her home town and struggles to define herself and make sense of her life, determined not to be dismissed as a PBK – Poor Blind Kid. This heartfelt and heart wrenching story takes you on Emma’s journey and leaves you with a new understanding of the challenges to be faced when life deals a devastating blow.
Blind's central focus surrounds Emma, who suddenly loses her vision in an accident. What research did you do in order to write about this topic?
I began to imagine and write Blind when my two little girls and I read the children’s bookThe Black Book of Colors every night for a year. I was both terrified and inspired by that shiny, embossed wonder, full of images you can feel rather than see. The more we touched those pages, the more I wondered what it would be like to be able to see and then lose that ability. Would my memories stay visual? Would my senses cross so that I could taste, smell and hear colors? What would language look and feel like, and how would I read, think and make meaning of the world? What if one of my daughters lost her vision? We would read with our fingers and voices, take in books, each other, and everything around us in an utterly changed way. The stakes would be astronomical. What if feeling became our way of seeing?
I wrote Emma Sasha Silver’s story so I could try to feel my way through someone else’s experience, my favorite part of both reading and writing. Emma is the heroine I wanted for my daughters, a complicated and 3-D girl who ultimately manages to be a warrior when faced with staggeringly painful circumstances. Like so many teenagers I know, she is tenacious, scrappy, funny, and difficult. She is resilient not only because she musters up her own courage, but also because the girls around her are kind. Emma’s friends, sisters, and parents are like mine: flawed but loving, trying to be their best selves even in the worst possible moments. They are no saints in Blind, but girls take care of each other when it matters most. Because for me, that experience is true and urgent.
In order to dream Emma up, I spent last year studying Braille, going to “beep ball” games and eating ice cream with blind teenagers, trying on glasses, tripping over white canes, and learning basic geometry with a teacher who taught me to feel shapes on a magnetic board. I talked to blind girls who told me they always wear nude bras, so the colors won’t show through, no matter what tee-shirt they might accidentally choose. I felt clothing labels Braille-d onto little squares cut from milk jugs, learned to tell a blue eye-liner (one rainbow loom band around the top) from a red lip-liner (two bands). I got how and why blind girls like to wear make-up. I was reminded that kids are kids no matter what their particular challenges, everyone working on the same universal projects: to figure out who we are and how to engage in the world in meaningful ways. Blind is for all those kids, and for my daughters, an exploration of what we need in order to stay on the opposite side of loneliness: each other, curiosity, love, empathy, and books.
Writing Blind let me do what I want my girls – and all girls – to get to do as many times as they can, all their lives. To close my eyes and open my imagination to the fantastic possibilities of a new way to look at—and see—the world.
How long did it take you to write Blind?
Three years, during which I both researched (learned Braille, hung out with people who know more about blindness and adolescence than I do) and wrote.
Was it easier or harder to write Blind than your previous novels?
Each book presents its own set of inspirations and struggles. I wanted, writing Blind, to inhabit as fully as possible the experiences of being fifteen, being blind, and being in a giant family of sisters, so that required both a lot of research and a lot of dreaming/imagining. But that work is what I most love to do, and I’ve had (and gotten, really) to do it for each of my books.
What do you like to do when you're not reading or writing?
As part of the scavenger hunt I have the privilege of hosting a wonderful author and highlighting her awesome book. I haven't had the chance to read this one yet, but it sounds fantastic! So, please welcome to my blog, author Rachel DeWoskin and her YA contemporary BLIND.
Imagine this: You are fourteen, watching the fireworks at a 4th of July party, when a rocket backfires into the crowd and strikes your eyes, leaving you blind. In that instant, your life is changed forever. How do you face a future in which all your expectations must be different? You will never see the face of your newborn sister, never learn to drive. Will you ever have a job or fall in love? This is Emma’s story. The drama is in her manysmall victories as she returns to high school in her home town and struggles to define herself and make sense of her life, determined not to be dismissed as a PBK – Poor Blind Kid. This heartfelt and heart wrenching story takes you on Emma’s journey and leaves you with a new understanding of the challenges to be faced when life deals a devastating blow.
Buy the book!
Interview with Rachel:
I began to imagine and write Blind when my two little girls and I read the children’s bookThe Black Book of Colors every night for a year. I was both terrified and inspired by that shiny, embossed wonder, full of images you can feel rather than see. The more we touched those pages, the more I wondered what it would be like to be able to see and then lose that ability. Would my memories stay visual? Would my senses cross so that I could taste, smell and hear colors? What would language look and feel like, and how would I read, think and make meaning of the world? What if one of my daughters lost her vision? We would read with our fingers and voices, take in books, each other, and everything around us in an utterly changed way. The stakes would be astronomical. What if feeling became our way of seeing?
I wrote Emma Sasha Silver’s story so I could try to feel my way through someone else’s experience, my favorite part of both reading and writing. Emma is the heroine I wanted for my daughters, a complicated and 3-D girl who ultimately manages to be a warrior when faced with staggeringly painful circumstances. Like so many teenagers I know, she is tenacious, scrappy, funny, and difficult. She is resilient not only because she musters up her own courage, but also because the girls around her are kind. Emma’s friends, sisters, and parents are like mine: flawed but loving, trying to be their best selves even in the worst possible moments. They are no saints in Blind, but girls take care of each other when it matters most. Because for me, that experience is true and urgent.
In order to dream Emma up, I spent last year studying Braille, going to “beep ball” games and eating ice cream with blind teenagers, trying on glasses, tripping over white canes, and learning basic geometry with a teacher who taught me to feel shapes on a magnetic board. I talked to blind girls who told me they always wear nude bras, so the colors won’t show through, no matter what tee-shirt they might accidentally choose. I felt clothing labels Braille-d onto little squares cut from milk jugs, learned to tell a blue eye-liner (one rainbow loom band around the top) from a red lip-liner (two bands). I got how and why blind girls like to wear make-up. I was reminded that kids are kids no matter what their particular challenges, everyone working on the same universal projects: to figure out who we are and how to engage in the world in meaningful ways. Blind is for all those kids, and for my daughters, an exploration of what we need in order to stay on the opposite side of loneliness: each other, curiosity, love, empathy, and books.
Writing Blind let me do what I want my girls – and all girls – to get to do as many times as they can, all their lives. To close my eyes and open my imagination to the fantastic possibilities of a new way to look at—and see—the world.
How long did it take you to write Blind?
Three years, during which I both researched (learned Braille, hung out with people who know more about blindness and adolescence than I do) and wrote.
Was it easier or harder to write Blind than your previous novels?
Each book presents its own set of inspirations and struggles. I wanted, writing Blind, to inhabit as fully as possible the experiences of being fifteen, being blind, and being in a giant family of sisters, so that required both a lot of research and a lot of dreaming/imagining. But that work is what I most love to do, and I’ve had (and gotten, really) to do it for each of my books.
What do you like to do when you're not reading or writing?
I like to hang out with my little girls and my husband and my parents, dancing, painting, watching movies, baking cupcakes, stapling printer paper books together, cutting out snowflakes, model-magic-ing, flying to China. I like to teach my students at The University of Chicago, to read and think about their work. I like to swim, climb, run, and to move around the world (we spend part of every year in Beijing, and another part on the Salmon River in California). I love transition, culture shock, languages that don’t belong to me, my family, and the feeling of being able to fly and land anywhere.
Quick Questions:
Contemporary or Historical Fiction? Historical.
Beach or Mountains? Beach.
E-Book or Physical? Both, please.
Ice Cream or Frozen Yogurt? Ice cream. Unless it's at one of those frozen yoghurt places where there's a giant salad bar of candy, in which case I love it.
Rafflecopter Give Away of Blind (a physical book and an audio book!):
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Quick Questions:
Contemporary or Historical Fiction? Historical.
Beach or Mountains? Beach.
E-Book or Physical? Both, please.
Ice Cream or Frozen Yogurt? Ice cream. Unless it's at one of those frozen yoghurt places where there's a giant salad bar of candy, in which case I love it.
Rafflecopter Give Away of Blind (a physical book and an audio book!):
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Rachel DeWoskin is the author of Foreign Babes in Beijing, a memoir about her inadvertent notoriety as the star of a Chinese soap opera, and a novel, Repeat After Me. She lives in New York City and Beijing and is at work on her fourth book, Statutory. 
Connect with Rachel:
Head on over to Eileen Cook
for the next stop on the hunt!
