Cockeyed

On his eighteenth birthday, Ryan Knighton was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a congenital disease that would eventually leave him blind. In this penetrating, nervy memoir, Knighton tells his story of going blind and growing up, while incidentally revealing the sighted world in all its peculiarity. Knighton learns to drive while unseeing, navigates the punk rock scene (where banging into things is acceptable), and enters into his first significant relationship-with a deaf woman, naturally. While stumbling literally and emotionally into darkness, into love, and into adulthood, he enters into a truce, if not acceptance, of his identity as a blind man. Cockeyed is not a conventional confessional. Ricocheting between meditation and black comedy, Knighton is irreverent in words and impatient with the preciousness weve come to expect from books on disability. Readers will find it hard to put down this wild ride around their everyday world with a wicked smart, blind guide at the wheel.

Author Biography

Ryan Knighton teaches contemporary literature and creative writing at Capilano College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and served for two years as editor of the literary magazine The Capilano Review. The author of a book of poetry and co-author of a collection of short fiction, Knighton has also published widely as a journalist and essayist. He has also produced, written and performed radio monologues and documentaries about blindness for the CBC.