We Can Hear You Just Fine

Book excerpt: In We Can Hear You Just Fine, seven visually impaired young authors from Appalachia, the Inner Bluegrass, the Western Coalfields and other parts of Kentucky offer vivid, incisive and illuminating portraits of their lives. Their essays cover a range of topics: the travails and triumphs of visual impairment, the difficulties of marginalization, the decision to leave home for the Kentucky School for the Blind, learning to live with schizoaffective disorder, the rapid life changes attending pregnancy and childbirth, pastoral recollections of rural communities, an autodidact's path to producing his own internet radio show, and the relief of finding community and achieving independence. Their book highlights the particularities of their lives, but also serves as a poignant reminder that the desire for acceptance and dignity, and the drive to succeed and make meaning in the world is common to all of us.