What do you love most about your memoir?
By nature, I tend to think more about the future than the past. While I’m conscious of my own history and narrative, I usually spend most of my energy thinking about the cool things I’d like to do and what comes next. Writing this book with [co-author] Wendell Jamieson has been an incredible opportunity to carefully consider the amazing people who have shaped my life—family, friends, collaborators and mentors—and to appreciate the cumulative impact of their invaluable support and encouragement.
What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?
Connecting Dots offers a fun, interesting and exciting ride for two specific sets of readers. I try to normalize and offer insights about blindness for the total newcomer, someone who knows nothing about blind people and who wants to learn more, from basics like Braille and cane use to how we use computers and raise children. At the same time, it’s crafted for folks who do have a connection to blindness and are curious about my life and work: my time at NASA, developing accessible mapping software, crowdsourcing audio description for YouTube and so on. Either sighted or blind, student or teacher, child or parent, consumer or designer, I think my story includes enough nuance and depth to be appreciated from almost any perspective.
At what point did you know this story was a book?
For the past 25 years, my friends have been encouraging me to write this book. While flattering, I had a hard time believing that it would be sufficiently meaningful to devote the kind of time and effort I knew a project like this would take. I also questioned whether I had made enough progress in my career to be memoir-worthy. With the recognition of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2021, and Wendell’s generous offer of partnership in the project, these objections seemed to have been largely addressed, and I was forced to admit to myself that the time for a book had finally come.
“I have always worried that my violent and traumatic origin story is a distraction from the important work I want the world to know about.”
What was the hardest memory to get on the page?
For most of my professional life, I’ve been trying to direct attention to my work in disability and disability inclusion, and away from my personal origin story: how I became blind. I have always worried that my violent and traumatic origin story is a distraction from the important work I want the world to know about. While the story of Connecting Dots focuses emphatically on “the important stuff”—blind identity, cool accessible technologies, inclusive design and even the arc of my blind life—completeness required us to include the story of how I got burned as a little kid. It was a challenge to cover these events while being neither dismissive nor sensational or maudlin. Ultimately, I think we got it just right.
Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?
One of the most delightful things that arose as we wrote was the strength and power of our collaboration. We kept our draft live in a Google doc, with Wendell drafting most sections from weekly interviews. I’d go in and edit, revise, trim and expand. Wendell would revise my revisions and I’d improve his updates. We were usually thrilled with the results. We would occasionally debate strenuously on one point or another, but always with respect and always ultimately finding a satisfactory resolution. Through this amazing partnership, I learned a lot about storytelling and I think Wendell learned a lot about disability, and he definitely learned a lot about me.
How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?
In addition to feeling optimistic that we’ve told an interesting, funny and engaging story, I hope this book has a positive influence on lives and the world. My ultimate mission is to normalize blindness and disability, to help move us a little further along the road of everyday, reasonable expectations and opportunities for people with disabilities. I hope to offer an example (or counterexample) for young blind people, parents of blind kids and blind parents, educators, designers, engineers and other shapers of our more-accessible future.
How have you changed since you started writing it?
I honestly think I’ve learned many things since starting the Connecting Dots project, but have changed very little. If I’ve changed, it’s to become more patient, more understanding of difference, better able to communicate with people holding opinions different from my own. These are not changes brought by the writing process, but the slow progression of age and maturity. It’s been a long road.
What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?
Since Connecting Dots is a memoir, I had to do very little research; I consider myself a world expert on my own blind life. However, early in the writing, I constructed a simple timeline of my life that included dates and timespans for major life events, girlfriends, trips and places I lived. Most of it was easy, but reconstructing the early ’90s with a reasonable degree of accuracy was surprisingly difficult. Interestingly, there are also no photographs of me from this time period. Maybe it has a connection to the aliens that got the Mars Observer, or maybe it’s just a result of the college lifestyle I was living.
Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?
A robust and resilient blind life dressed in a lively, acidic and sweet disability-pride reduction, served with good and bad choices, mixed mature and immature romance, a sprig of accessible design and plenty of fresh Pacific oysters.
Author photo of Joshua A. Miele © Barbara Butkus.
