“Blindness was my father’s blind spot, and it became my family’s, the word we didn’t dare say.” So begins Going Blind, Mara Faulkner’s memoir about her father Dennis Faulkner, a hard-working Irishman struggling to raise a big family in Mandan, North Dakota, during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. A genetic disease gradually blinded him, but he and the family conspired to keep his blindness a secret. This book is the author’s effort to understand what blindness was like for her father and how it affected each member of the family, several of whom, including herself, have inherited the disease.

In Sister Mara Faulkner’s account, just released from State University of New York Press, physical blindness becomes a lens for various types of metaphorical blindness—refusal to see the truth in a family, and, in the wider culture, refusal or inability to see the full humanity of other people because of the color of their skin or their circumstances. The world of Going Blind is at its core the Faulkner family home and grocery store; but in this account, bigger worlds leave their indelible traces on the family: patriarchy, Dennis Faulkner’s Great Famine Irish history and Catholicism. Their lives intersect with others around them, including Native American tribes disrupted by the Garrison Dam, Germans expelled from Russia who settled the town, the Japanese interned in Bismarck, North Dakota, during World War II, and many others.

Faulkner is an associate professor of English at the College of Saint Benedict (CSB), and teaches students from both CSB and Saint John’s University. As a writing teacher, she is attentive to the English language and all its metaphorical richness, and finds many entry points into her exploration of physical and cultural blindness in our idioms: “blind spot,” “putting blinders on,” “blind prejudice,” “blind faith” and “blinded by light.” She has also been a vowed member of the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn., since 1967. As a Benedictine, she practices the Liturgy of the Hours and is committed to the values of awareness, hospitality and simplicity. This compassionate memoir, in recognizing that blindness is not shameful nor should it be secret, moves, as Faulkner says, toward a “quiet discovery of gifts—those my father gave his children and those blindness can give to all of us.”

To purchase S. Mara's book, contact S. Ione Jesh at Whitby Gift Shop at ijesh@csbsju.edu. Also available at amazon.com and other booksellers.

For more information on Going Blind, including a copy of the first chapter, visit the book’s home page at SUNY Press: http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61832.