“I once had a blind friend ask me to close my eyes and describe a restaurant for him. I tried descriptions from memory, using only my sense of sight. With my eyes closed, though, I could describe fork metal scraping against teeth, crunching paper napkins and snippets of conversation in the room.
I realized my entire life has a soundtrack with layers of sound. It’s the same as when I see any Romare Bearden collage or witness the building tensions at a dinner table. Everything—poem, story, character, conflict, silence—has its own sound. You sometimes have to close your eyes to hear it. Then write to get it out of your head.”
—Cherryl Floyd-Miller, author of Exquisite Heats (Salt Publishing, 2008)