My short story “Noa and the Dragon” was published in the anthology Artificial Divide in 2021. Artificial Divide is an anthology of stories about blind characters, written by blind authors. You can buy the anthology from Amazon, B&N, or Bookshop. And if audiobooks are your jam, I also got to narrate my story for the Artificial Divide audiobook, which was a really fun, and surprisingly challenging, experience.
“Noa and the Dragon” was actually the first story I ever wrote from the point of view of a blind character. My story “Polaris in the Dark” was published first, in the 2018 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide anthology, but it was not the first story I wrote about a blind character, this was. And so it is very special to me, and I’m so glad it found a home in such an important anthology.
I wrote “Noa and the Dragon” in the spring of my year in Italy. I actually wrote it in response to a call for a different themed anthology, this one about the power of reading. It wasn’t accepted into that anthology, and though it was disappointing, I did read the book when it came out, and I actually agree that “Noa and the Dragon” wouldn’t have been a good fit with the other stories they included. This gave me the chance to revise and submit it more broadly, which eventually led me to discover the call for submissions for the Artificial Divide anthology.
As a side note, if you’ve read a few of these story behind the story posts, you’ve probably noticed it takes me two kinds of timespans to get a short story published. Either it happens immediately or it takes years for a story to find a home. The publishing industry is slow and often inscrutable, in my opinion—unless it’s fast and inscrutable. This was definitely a story that took me years to get published, but that just means it was all the more satisfying when it was published. (I can say this now, but it can also be pretty frustrating while you’re going through the process, not gonna lie.)
I’d never written a story about a blind character before. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but if you’d asked me about it, I probably would have said that I didn’t want to write about a blind character because I didn’t want people to expect me to only write about blind characters, because I’m blind. I didn’t want to get shoved into that box. (Incidentally this is one of the same reasons I switched from pursuing disability rights to outer space law when I was in law school, but that’s another story.) So I’d never written about a blind character before, but here I was in Italy, and at the time I was facing a lot of discrimination because I was blind. Along comes this call for short stories about the importance of reading for kids, and it just fit for me to write about a blind character. Reading is incredibly special to me, especially Braille literacy, which only added to my desire to tell this story.
In addition, I wanted to tell the story of a blind girl in a fantasy world, where we so rarely see characters with disabilities living normal lives. I used the fantasy world I was already writing a novel in, and I created a girl who lost her vision as a child and had to adapt to it, with all the social problems that would entail for her. And so Noa and her family and her journey to rediscover independence through reading were born.
Now, I write blind characters regularly. My story “Polaris in the Dark,” published in the 2018 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide, is a sci fi story about a blind girl, and I’ve since expanded that into a novel that is currently on submission to editors. I don’t want to write only about blind characters, but at the same time, I want kids who are blind to be able to see themselves in books, and I want kids who are sighted to read about blind kids and perhaps have more empathy and understanding for any blind people they cross paths with in their lives. And who better to capture the experience of being blind on the page than someone who is actually blind? No one. So thanks to “Noa and the Dragon,” I’ve added blind characters to my repertoire of writing skills.
“Noa and the Dragon” captured a lot of the feelings I had as a kid, from my love of reading to my struggles to fit in. It was difficult to write, but it was a joy to put these experiences on the page. I’m so glad Noa is out there reaching readers, and I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing.