An Unlikely Writer

By Deborah Ann Lucas

We moved every year when I was young, making me the perpetual new kid. One day during the summer after fifth grade, I complained I had nothing to do. Busy making dinner, Mom sent me out into the small Michigan town to find a library—my first. I walked around the block, climbed the stairs, and entered a cavernous room. The smell of musty books enveloped me. As my anxiety grew, the room blurred. I couldn’t figure out the catalog system. But Mom expected me to bring home a book. Unable to find one with horses, I grabbed a few off the shelves, signed for a card, and ran home.

I returned the books late. Mostly unread.

You see, I couldn’t see the words.

It’s my eyes. They don’t work well together. The eye doctor couldn’t explain why. My first pair of glasses helped me see the chalkboard but didn’t help me with reading. I kept losing my place at the end of each line, then had to search the page for what came next. After a few lines, I’d fall asleep. My eyes were focusing behind the page, but I didn’t know that then.

I earned good grades by paying attention in class—a skill I learned from listening to Dad tell his stories. I was a storyteller, too, when I found someone to listen. I couldn’t imagine how I’d write them down but swore that one day I would.

At 27, I longed to study Art in college, but signed up for Architecture instead. “Artists don’t make enough money,” my controlling husband said. I loved being a student, but not being well read continued to haunt me. I confided to my brother’s partner while we were cooking that I felt illiterate. He turned to me. “You’re not dumb. You have an eye tracking issue called Binocular Vision Dysfunction that runs in families. Your brother has it. That’s how I know.”

Why had no one ever told me?

The only treatment I found for BVD was eye muscle exercises, but with little result, I let them fall by the wayside. Meanwhile, my insatiable curiosity and willingness to ask questions helped me thrive, though my hunger for an education cost me my first marriage. Later, with the support of my second husband, I returned to my first passion—fine art.

At 40, I earned my second degree in ceramics, an MFA at UCLA. Working with my hands minimized my need to read. But when my brother and his partner died of AIDS, I set my art aside and began to write memoir, lining the walls of my home with books to teach me how. Over the next few years, I lost what remained of my family. Though flawed, they had lived extraordinary lives; their dying too soon made me keeper of their stories. I longed to write them down.

And yet my vision problems persisted. With my hands on the keyboard, I drifted asleep, the weight of one finger repeating a letter until I woke to delete and begin again. To stay awake, I drank coffee, ate chocolate, and splashed cold water on my face to push through another page or two. Prisms in my glasses barely helped.

I nevertheless pushed on, breathing my way through pages about my family, identity and my search for home. Unearthing stories I hadn’t known I remembered opened insights into my struggles as a girl, a woman, and now as a writer—helping me heal. Mentors told me to sharpen and tighten my scenes, and to read memoir. More work. More time. More fighting my eyes.

Over the years, I’ve learned the eye infirmity that forces me to read slower and closer than most, in truth enriches my writing. When I zero in to stay focused, I hear the lyricism of each phrase, I see words that drag or stop the flow, I sense where to rearrange and redline. Muscle strain and headaches still force me to take breaks to rest my eyes. Luckily, I type fast, because once I begin, the stories pour out like rivers in a spring thaw. I’ve had essays published in anthologies and a journal. With sheer determination, I’ve written two novels and split my memoir, expanding it into two full manuscripts.

During the pandemic, I endured a four-year illness requiring five surgeries, which confined me to a wheelchair for more than a year to save my leg. I continued to write as therapy, sometimes on my laptop in the ER waiting room. As I healed, I became a certified book coach to help other women find their stories, and now work one-on-one and with a group, supporting them while sharing my passion for writing.

My book coach training also helped me claim my slow reading as an asset: I see what others might miss. Through the eyes of an artist, I visualize a story’s shape, shades, and colors…and feel its flow. When I write, I use all that I am, authentically, proud of my differences and my perseverance to have come this far.

I am an unlikely writer, driven by a deep responsibility to keep my family’s dreams alive through my words…enabling me to live within mine. To achieve your dream, persist. Don’t let anything stop you.

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Deborah Ann Lucas lives on twenty acres in rural Northern Illinois with her husband and her rescue animals, including two senior off-track thoroughbreds. She creates art, and writes about healing with horses, and finding home, with plans to release her debut memoir Dance While the Fire Burns later this year. As a book coach certified by Author Accelerator in Fiction and Memoir, she works with women to envision, structure, and complete books about their own healing journeys. Her superpowers are empathy, enthusiasm, and perseverance.