Ann-Chadwell Humphries Photo contributed by Ann-Chadwell Humphries
Ann-Chadwell Humphries turned to poetry, a childhood love, when her life was changed by adult-onset blindness. Most recently, she has published her second work, My Blind Obsession, which showcases her prolific and courageous approach to writing. Living with complete vision loss, Humphries depends on her “other senses” to experience and interpret the world around her: “ mobility, orientation, prisms of touch, polyphony of sound, memory, and paradox.” She fills her mind with words, phrases, and visions by listening to books and other publications. She never stops pursuing the things she loves in this life—one of these joys is expressing her thoughts in poetry.
Humphries’s first published anthology of poetry, An Eclipse and A Butcher, was chosen for publication by Muddy Ford Press as the second volume in its Laureate Series. She begins My Blind Obsession by candidly sharing her life experiences as a person with vision loss. She describes how she maintains her independence, her strategies, and habits developed to help her to stay active and involved in the community, as well as why she chose to develop her lifelong love of poetry to become a well-known member of the local literary community.
The second portion of My Blind Obsession is a collection of Humphries’s most recent work. She includes poetry that describes her childhood in the rural Texas Hill Country. She grew up on the campgrounds of a religious children’s camp managed by her parents alongside the Frio River west of San Antonio in Leakey, Texas. Her poems, “Flood in the Night, 1964,” and “Memorial Day Flood,” describe catastrophic floods in Western Texas, that killed horses, cattle, and livestock causing loss of property and life.
In addition to sharing poems inspired by her rural Texas upbringing, Humphries confronts issues such as the war in Ukraine; “Cosmology;” the experience of Mary, the mother of Jesus, facing childbirth in Bethlehem; the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan; a poem about “The Kite Boy from Bangladesh;” and other experiences as if in the midst of them.
Humphries’s choice of diverse subjects, inclusion of descriptive words new to the vocabulary of the average reader, and demonstration of the humility to tell her own life stories show her courage and confidence as a writer. Her voice is one of wonder, asking questions of this world and life and drawing her readers into new experiences as only she can.
She writes,
“Poetry has claimed me. I’m restless without writing.
I want to swing from the r in word and paragraph, bounce on the s in sentence and phrase.
More than a want, I need to steep in good poetry.”
My Blind Obsession can be purchased at All Good Books in downtown Columbia and other bookstores as well as online at Amazon.com.
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