Ken Brandt has led a fun and adventurous life and had a successful business career despite, or perhaps in part because of, having low vision. He recently published his book Positive Vision, he chats with Sam Colley about his decision to write the book and why he believes having low vision is no barrier to a full and rewarding life.
From in Australia, this is talking vision. And now here's your host, Sam, calling.
Hi, it's great to be with you. And for the next half hour, we talk matters of blindness and low vision. This week we've got a special program in store for you as I speak with Ken Brandt, the author of Positive Vision Enjoying the Adventures and Advantages of Poor EyeSight over the course of his life. Ken has had six operations for detached retinas and cataracts in both eyes and spent parts of his life legally blind, but has adapted to live a life full of adventure and long lasting memories. I started off by asking Ken about what inspired him to write positive vision and invited him to share his lived experience.
Well, I'm I'm retired now and most of my life and all of my career, really. Before I retired, I didn't want to discuss my vision because I thought, you know, it's definitely way worse than most people I talk to, and I didn't want anybody feeling bad for me, and I didn't want it to limit career options and things like that. So I just didn't want to discuss it, didn't bring it up. But now that I'm retired, I thought, Well, you know, I have a lot of stories that people seem to really like, and I thought it might cheer up and be helpful to some people with similar vision to my own or worse.
OK, now how would you say would be the target audience for your book? Having read it, it's quite relatable to somebody with lived experience of low vision, but I totally get the feeling it does have that really broad, wide appeal. Was that what you're going for or did you have a particular demographic in mind?
Well, actually, both both that you just touched on, you know, one, I'm hoping it be enjoyable and helpful to people with poor vision. And second, I think anybody who likes adventures and biographies and memoirs would like it as well. And so far, you know, there's people in all those groups, which is great.
Okay, for sure. Absolutely. Now, over the course of your life, you've been on numerous adventures, which you do touch upon in the book quite extensively. So what are some of the adventures you'd say really? Stick with you? What are the most sort of long lasting memories that you've had that might or might not have resulted from low vision
for, well, a whole lot of them? I guess I could be the one I'll jump into to literally jump into. First is parachute. I I really like I like going fast, but you know, running, jogging, sprinting, no problem but going a little bit faster than that, like bicycling or rollerblading. I can easily go faster than I can see the bumps and the potholes coming up. So, you know, it gets a little dicey. And then the other thing it's like, like driving a car, which I've done a few times way off road, colossally fine. But it's very good for society. It's very safe for society that I cannot get a driver's license. You know, it's not. It would not be a good idea, you know, I definitely. Well, absolutely. So I thought, well, I was in university and and had a chance to read about how you could learn to parachute. And I thought that sounded really fun. It would be that it looks cool and movies and TV, and you don't have to worry about potholes or bumps or something. You're just in the sky, you know? I thought, Oh, that would be really good. Now what I should have thought about, but I didn't think about till after I tried it was am I going to be able to see the place where we're supposed to land, you know? But I didn't think of that. So I signed up with two of my friends and we went out to a place I went to school in. Washington, DC and nearby state is Maryland, and the place where the parachuting was was down Bell, Maryland. That was literally the real name of the place, which I still love it.
And so, yeah, Annapolis or
more up Baltimore. Now it's the opposite way. The way, yeah. So then, you know, go to the training and you learn all that stuff, which is really fun. You learn, you know, how to how to land in your practice, jumping off boxes and rolling forwards and backwards with your eyes closed so that no matter what's going on with the when you're ready, you learn that if you're about to hit a bunch of trees, cross your legs, which makes a colossal sense. You don't practice that, but you learn that you learn how to open the parachute and how to open the backup parachute. And you're very strongly told do not open a backup parachute unless you're really sure, because if the two parachutes get mixed up with each other, neither one is going to work. So, yeah, anyway, the first three jumps you and you are you're not responsible for pulling your own parachute. You're attached by a line that pulls your parachute as you jump out of the plane. So you didn't have to worry about it the first time, but you did have to worry about being ready with your backup parachute. So we go up in this little tiny, tiny, tiny plane, right? And only the pilot, the instructor and maybe three other skydivers or all newbies like me are in the plane. And when you get in the plane and there's what should be a door, but there's just an open space. We're in the plane and we take off and I'm sitting just millimetres away from this open space, which you really notice as you're flying up in the air and the plane is flying and you're like close to nothing, you know? So that's there, then it's my turn. So you crawl out of the plane, the plane is flying right, the engine is roaring, the wind is blowing, you know, the plane is flying. You crawl out on below the wing and above the wheel and you're holding on to this metal bar and your feet on this other metal bar. You're holding on for dear life until it's time to jump. And then you see the instructor yell, Jump. But of course you can't hear it. But what else is he going to be saying? So you jump back and up and you start going down and the plane gets very, very far away and your parachutes still has an opening and you start thinking, Okay, open my back up or not. I don't know. So you go, so you wait. Wait, wait. And finally, your parachute open. So it's probably seconds, but it seems like forever your parachute opens. You float down. It's beautiful. And then I realized, Wait a minute, where am I supposed to land? How do I? Own this place. So there were a whole bunch of big fields, all of them had lots of trees or they were farms, and then there was one that was like, not a nut. Neither of those so said, All right, that's got to be it. So I go down, I get a little bit closer, I get a little bit close to get a life closer. And then I could see when I was pretty low that there was a big circle of people. So I aim for that. And then when I got much lower, I could see in the middle of the circle a frisbee sized object, and that's the target big, important and competitive parachute. So and this was competitive parachuting. It was it was not being strapped to somebody who did all the work, who jumped out of the plane. You know, you're by yourself doing this whole thing. So I landed pretty close to the the thing and I thought, Oh, this is great. So then you have the choice if you want to go again, which I did because I loved it is you could pack your parachute yourself or you could use one somebody else pack. And I said, Well, you know, I'm taking my life in my hands. I might as well do it myself and learn how to do it, and I want to know everything about the sport. So what you do is you go, you go into a field, and if it's windy, you spread the parachute out, but you put rocks from the field all over the parachute to hold it in place and then you fold it up, throwing the rocks out as you go. So sounds very simple and it is pretty simple, but my second jump, I jump out of the plane. Same thing I can say with guy and then a billion rocks. Luckily, they weren't that big. You know, a bunch of medium to small size rocks are pummeling my head, babe and shoulders. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Luckily, when your parachute, you wear a motorcycle helmet. So I didn't see a million rocks and I, you know, I just don't just pack them into my parachute. That was too late to do anything, but I don't think anybody was below me. So I was the only one who walked by the rocks, so I learned my lesson. I did much better the next time I became because I was, I was pretty good at coming close to the target and I was good at drinking beers with the other, more experienced people. They made me the captain of the parachute of my university parachute. So that was really good, and I was all excited about the whole thing until I had heard from my doctor. And he said, You know, you've got to stop parachute and that's nuts. You had a detached retina in each eye earlier, you know, it had those much earlier in my life. And he said a big blow to the head which could happen in parachuting. You know, you hit a tree, you do something and you could read, detach the retina and go blind in one or the other. I said, Oh man, I didn't really think about that at all. I didn't tell him about the rocks. But the so I ended up very reluctantly, not reluctantly, because I know it was a good thing. But I I was sadly gave up my captaincy of the team and gave up parachuting. But I still stayed in touch for many years with my parachuting friends, and then I still recommend parachuting to anybody who has now detached retinas. So you know you live and learn. So that's something I did for a while, but I probably, you know, it turns out I shouldn't have really done that.
Oh yeah, you live and learn and a lot of positive experiences. And that's also why you've called it positive vision. I'm Sam Cully, and I hope you're enjoying this interview with author Ken Brandt. You're listening to Talking Vision on Vision Australia radio associated stations of RPA and the Community Radio Network. You can find more information about the program, including radio frequencies and past programs on the Talking Vision web page. Just type talking vision into your search engine, or you can find the program on iTunes or through the Vision Australia Library. And now back to the interview. You've got a bit of a glass half full, I guess, perspective on on life in general, and I guess that ties into the next question, I suppose. So what would you say would be the advantages of of low vision or poor vision, as you'd as you'd phrase it? What have you found have been the positives from that?
Well, I think there is there are just tons of them. For example, public speaking, which many people are totally terrified of. And you know, apparently many people would choose death over public speaking. But I think as somebody with poor vision, we as we have an advantage over others in public, are several advantages over others, other public speaking. First, even before we start, you know, we have to prepare or we can't count on notes that we have at the lectern or even seeing our own PowerPoint slides or whatever we're showing because it's too hard for it's too hard for me and others to read them. You know, you can't read them and give the speech. You can't, you know, you have to hold it close to you at the turn around. You know, it just doesn't. It doesn't work. It's too hard to keep track of. So you end up preparing more. You have to memorize the outline of your speech and your key points and what you're going to say. Maybe practice it a few times. And all of that definitely works for anybody in terms of giving a better speech, not just if you're have poor vision, but it works to our advantage because we we have to do that. So you give a better speech, you're more prepared to give better speech during your speech. Sometimes I don't, you know, like if I had PowerPoint, I might outline in my mind is not exactly equal to the PowerPoint, so I could be slightly all off when I'm talking about certain things on a different slide is up, but that just keeps the audience on its toes, trying to figure out what's going on to connect the two points or whatever. And then if I don't notice that at all, it doesn't bother me because I'm totally relaxed and just rambling on. Or if I do notice, then I just laugh and explain what happened that I can't seem to think very well and blah blah blah and the audience laughs. And then you have an even better connection with the audience. You have another little layer of connection. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. And then other things are a lot of times people get nervous, the bigger the audience. Well, that doesn't really affect you that much. If you have poor eyesight because you're looking at, you can only see so many people anyway. And so if there's 500 times as many, you know, does it really matter, you know? So it's not really. So you're not terrified by the scale. And another part of it is like, sometimes you're in a place where you're on a stage and the lights are on you and the audience is there, but you can't sit. You literally can't see them because the lights are in your eyes. And that would. And if you're if you have poor vision, that bothers you less because you're used to judging reaction of people by. Are they applauding or laughing in the right place? You're used to doing that all the time anyway, because it's harder for you to see facial expressions, whereas people who can see well, they're used to judging everything by facial expressions. Well, we don't do that because we can't. So it's just another thing that makes it easier in comparison for us. So public speaking is, you know, is a good thing for us. And then other things, balance, balance is a good one where, you know, like when I'm walking along on the street or a path or or a trail or or the footpath or anything. And I can't see as well as other people is that there's a little bump. Is that a little dip? Is that ice? Is that a leaf or is that a shadow? Or, you know, like you can't tell it, so you're not sure exactly what height your foot is going to land on and how you need to adjust and you get used to that. Your whole life is used to that. So you're you're very good at that balance in that sense of being able to. Walk. All right. It's not exactly what you were expecting, but that's OK. And that happens all the time, so you get used to it and you know, that's got to be good for you. So there's that. And then and then there's a whole lot of examples related to living longer. Well, one of those being parachuting in, I like avoid boy parachuting, basically, you know, some other dangerous things, but by living longer. I think we, as people who don't see as well get more exercise, we walk longer because we just get lost more often. You know, you can't read the sign. So we go an extra block or two blocks or a mile or whatever. We maybe don't take the elevators because we can't find them or we can't read the elevator buttons. We might be really good at reading maps, but we have trouble seeing them. Whether you know, now the whole thing is easier on your phone. But even then, sometimes it's hard to
find all those things yet.
Yeah, but but and then if you're carrying stuff while you're walking longer than you need to, that's even better exercise. So yeah, you've got all this stuff going on. I think also we have better knowledge of general health things, which is going to have a good impact on our life because we're naturally interested in news and science and about science and medicine related to eyesight and what maybe could help us in the future more now. And so we read about that, but it's only a tiny step further to reading about general health and other things that are good for you. You know, they're all sort of crammed together in the news, and when you're reading about one, you're going to cover the other and you go, Oh, maybe I should be thinking about it, like diet and different kinds of exercise and stuff. And so you, you're you sort of go along with the tidal flow in terms of of health. If you're focused on one or you, you learn about others and there's a good positive impact there as well.
OK, fantastic. No, that would that would absolutely snowball. Will touch back on the book a bit more for a bit. So what would you say would be the most enjoyable aspect that you can recall of writing positive vision from your standpoint?
Well, I'd say there's several. One is, and I bet I didn't really know. I knew I didn't know anybody who was like, really fully blind or and I didn't know nearly as many people with low vision and meeting and getting to know a bunch of them was really fun and low vision organizations. You know, I'd heard of vaguely Vision Australia, but I didn't really know anything about it. And you know, now I know a bunch of people and you know, it's a bunch of it's, you know, it's a nice, nice group of people.
Yeah, wonderful people. A lot of you know, a lot of good things and a lot of good people.
Exactly. And then another thing and this is, you know, I'm reluctant to say anything positive about, you know, the global pandemic and COVID 19, but coincidental with writing my book and then spending a lot of time narrating my part of the book and publicizing and everything, it's a heads down sort of solitary activity. And it's good to not have distractions and coincidental with the whole global pandemic. I was working on my book. And that timing accidentally worked out great. It was the perfect time to be an author and writing a narrative. So, so I had a little bit of a side benefit there. I'm not in any sense, an actual damage or anything.
You know, it's a silver lining. You know, it is important to say the positives because it is a very overwhelmingly sort of negative and can have bad sort of mental impacts and all that sort of thing. So it is good to have that. I guess that optimistic outlook. So I think I'd agree with you 100 percent there.
Yeah. And then I guess lastly, I thought I had a very, very good experience where, you know, I wrote what I thought was the whole book and spent a lot of time editing it and everything else. And then before I showed it to a professional editor, I ran it by 10 friends and I just said, You know, what do you think I should change? You know what kinds of things you notice anything because it's so hard when you're writing a book. It's the first time I've ever written a book and you read it, you read it over and over again and and you just don't see things because you have it so solidly in your mind. When you're trying to say you almost can't read the page because, you know, there'd be a word that will repeat three times and you won't even notice it, you know, so. So I showed it to 10 friends and they came back with. A whole series of great connections, combat connections, corrections, you know, some had sort of strategic things move this from this chapter to this chapter of reverse this. Take this out. What about this story that you know, that kind of thing, which was colossal? Others turned out to be super duper copy editors. You know, they can't all know you've got the wrong cancer. You need a comma here. You need this word is repeated in two different sentences back to back change. One of the words you know, all that kind of stuff was super super. It was so helpful that after you made all those changes, I did the same thing again with 10 different friends and it was just as helpful. And I was so happy and sort of overwhelmed with the generosity of time of my two friends to, you know, to really do that. And they always seem to really enjoy it, which was really well, except one of my friends. Long, long, long time friend, right? If you read the book, his name is John. Oh yeah. He the first time you read it, he came back to me and his comments were all like, That's me, that's me. I'm here, I'm here. And I said, Wait, wait, I know you're in the book. I was hoping you could like figure out anything to prove it changed. You know, the book you got so excited about being in the book? He didn't want to. It forgot that. Then he did get back to me with a budget. You're supposed to get it, but I loved his first reaction. Yeah. So that's the general brand helping you with their time by reading it and making suggestions as it was very impressive. So those are the kinds of things about writing that I was sort of surprised about.
Okay, for sure. Now, I guess when you use the phrases like poor eyesight or bad eyes, or is there a particular intent or thought process behind that chasm? I guess some people in the community, the sort of blind and low vision community might have a few questions or sort of things about seeing blindness or low vision face like that. Have you had have you had any feedback, perhaps from people who are low vision or blind about or that's not how I'd refer to it or that sort of thing, because everyone refers to their low vision or their blindness in different ways. And there's no, I guess there's no right or wrong way. But yeah, have you have any have you had any sort of conversations along that line?
Well, so far, I don't know whether people are just being polite or or or what, but nobody's been upset about that. I tend to use the phrase low vision. Some people have definitely asked. And the reason I don't didn't use the phrase, I didn't want to say blind, even though I was legally blind for big chunks of my life because I think most people see the legal view. Legally blind as not literally not being able to see it. Yeah. And then I didn't want to use low vision either, because I I think most people who are not in the low vision community or working in stuff related to blind and low vision. I think it's a confusing term, you know, like low vision, high vision that like headlights, what is, you know, like what does that exactly mean? And then some people think of low vision as a as a medical term where, you know, it's below a certain degree of specific degree of sight. And so I thought that might actually confuse a lot of non blind, low vision community people by the phrase low vision. So but everybody, there were some people. And then on the other hand, some people said poor eyesight has a very negative connotation. Yeah, sort of. Or has the, you know, as bad as you said or you or even bad eyesight or bad vision? Even worse, but I said, you know, that's what I've been saying when I had to use some phrase like that, like my whole life. And nobody like it never even caused a conversation. Like, Everybody knows what you're talking about. That's right. Yeah. So I thought, you know, I'll go with that. And hopefully that doesn't bother people.
And it does. It does make sense if you're sort of looking for a wider appeal and the sort of people who might not be familiar with blindness or low vision, they they say that and they think, Oh yeah, that makes sense. That sort of just, I guess, connects for them. Okay, now how can people find a copy of positive vision if they've heard these stories and think, Wow, that's really interesting, I'd love to pick up a copy. How would they be able to go about that?
Well, it's great. Good on them. You could go to any of the almost all, not all, but almost all the major online bookstores, and they'll have a bill, you can order it there. And you could or many, not all, but many, many local bookstores. If you go in and ask them for the name daily, they can order it for you. But the easiest way is to go online on my website. There's a list of a whole bunch of online bookstores around the world that including Australia, that that have it available, so can grant Dotcom and Brandy Kim Dotcom. And on there, there's a bunch of book reviews and articles and interviews that as well as the list of places where you can order it.
All right, great little website. I had a had of look through there. Lots of code. Little Ken Brandt facts and info. Good place to check out. Yeah, now. Okay, fantastic. Thank you. Now that was Ken Brandt, the author of Positive Vision Enjoying the Adventures and Advantages of Poor EyeSight. Now again, that's available at major bookstores as a hardcover, a paperback or an e-book in all formats. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ken.
Well, thanks so much for having me.
And that's all we have time for today. You've been listening to my interview with Ken Brandt on talking vision. Talking Vision is a production of Vision Australia radio. Thanks to all involved with putting the program together. And remember, we love your feedback and comments. You can contact us at Talking Vision at Vision Australia dot org that's talking vision or one word at Vision Australia dot org. But until next week, it's bye for now.
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