Catching Sight

by Beth O'Brien

Catching Sight by Beth O’Brien is a sequence of creative nonfiction pieces that follow a visually impaired woman across the course of a day. The microchapbook provides a first-person account of the internal thought processes involved in navigating a sighted world and contrasts this to a third-person, external summary, like that of audio description. In this way, Beth O’Brien attempts to translate the world she sees into words that other people may understand. Through her descriptions, and how much of her “seeing” is educated guesswork, she attempts to answer the question she has been asked more times than she can count: “What can you actually see?”

15 pages, ebook

First published November 3, 2021