Writer is sightless but not without insight

John Evans began to lose his sight at the age of 5 while playing a game of dice on a playground.

He remembers that as doctors told him a genetic disorder was the cause of the problem, his biggest worry was not the many adjustments he would have to make for the rest of his life. He dreaded never being able to watch a movie again.

“I was truly, deeply, passionately in love with ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ that whole kind of genre,” Mr. Evans said. “I was always someone who wanted to work with cameras and film things, so as soon as I lost my eyesight, I found that a whole genre was at least partly walled off for me.”

 Mr. Evans, 21, said he was at a loss as he struggled with the prospect of being cut off from a beloved medium.

That was when he decided to become a writer.

“That psychological trigger led me to say, ‘Well, if I can’t see the things that I want to see, I should write the things that I want to see,” he said. “And I should write them and honestly and humanly possible.”

Since then, Mr. Evans, now a Manhattan College junior, has published three collections of poetry.  He does this by typing into a custom, braille-etched keyboard on his laptop, which can then read his work back to him so he can self-edit.

He recently released an anthology of his best poems, called “Adams’s Lament,” with Oloris Publishing, a small company in Canada, and he is just as prolific with prose.

“I am re-releasing my first novella, which is called ‘All the Best Things,’ but there are several key changes,” he said. “It was originally an experiment in prose, but after this one experiment, I didn’t really do much prose after the fact.”

The book, which is being self-published, is a semi-autobiographical account of Mr. Evans’ time as a folk musician in Riverdale and his native Dobbs Ferry, alongside his lifelong friend Matt Lewis.