Ryan Knighton

On his eighteenth birthday Ryan Knighton was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a congenital, progressive disease marked by night-blindness, tunnel vision and, eventually, total blindness. Blending mordant wit with intense personal reflection, Cockeyed is the story of Ryan's loss of sight. We follow his journey from absolute denial - which lost Ryan his trousers, his girlfriend and, perhaps unsurprisingly, his driving licence - to acceptance of life without vision and reliance on a cane. Ryan Knighton's irreverent memoir makes us discover our surroundings afresh, and reminds us that even the most ordinary things have extraordinary and precious qualities.'Unexpectedly and frequently funny... An enlightening and enjoyable read.' -- Vogue'Engaging and irreverent. Knighton is brave, witty and shameless. The reader ends with nothing but respect and admiration for [him]... Learning to count one's blessings need not always be a somber lesson - Knighton makes it a pleasure.' -- Francesca Segal, Financial Times'This engaging, often moving memoir explains exactly what happens when a young man is told he will never see his own wrinkles... A thoughtful and likeable book.' -- Sunday Times

On his 18th birthday, Ryan Knighton was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), a congenital, progressive disease marked by night-blindness, tunnel vision and, eventually, total blindness. In this penetrating, nervy memoir, which ricochets between meditation and black comedy, Knighton tells the story of his fifteen-year descent into blindness while incidentally revealing the world of the sighted in all its phenomenal peculiarity. Knighton learns to drive while unseeing has his first significant relationship,with a deaf woman navigates the punk rock scene and men's washrooms learns to use a cane and tries to pass for seeing while teaching English to children in Korea. Stumbling literally and emotionally into darkness, into love, into couch-shopping at Ikea, into adulthood, and into truce if not acceptance of his identity as a blind man, his writerly self uses his disability to provide a window onto the human condition. His experience of blindness offers unexpected insights into sight and the other senses, culture, identity, language, our fears and fantasies. Cockeyed is not a conventional confessional. Knighton is powerful and irreverent in words and thought and impatient with the preciousness we've come to expect from books on disability. Readers will find it hard to put down this wild ride around their everyday world with a wicked, smart, blind guide at the wheel.

'Swing In the Hollow' is a debut collection that struggles with the service and spoil of lyrical attention. In quirky and precise turns, Knighton's language teases a sense of phenomena from the rubbish and rubble of atrophied urban experience. "It is wonderfully subtle and witty, with the title setting a tone for the poems to follow." - Winnipeg Free Press

It's not where you're going but how you get there ...Everyone's got a good story to tell about cars: a funny fender-bender, a bad cab ride, awkward amorous acrobatics. But the stories we tell about cars tell even more about ourselves. You'll see what we mean in Cars. George Bowering, one of Canada's Grand Prix writers, and Ryan Knighton, a young writer just entering the race, realized that they could tell the stories of their lives and friendship through the automobiles that have driven them. Now, these aren't your ordinary boys-and-cars stories. There's no drag racing or cruising for chicks. In fact, George likes to drive pretty slowly, and Ryan, who is now blind, doesn't drive at all. But they take turns in the literary driver's seat, bantering and fender-nudging so their stories curve and tangle like a BC highway, until what emerges is a poignant, hilarious conversation. Boiling fish in the radiator, jousting with a forklift, cabbing with Doris Lessing: in one hundred panels (that's fifty each), George and Ryan tell the tales of their friendship, families, friends and loves - all illuminated by the dashboard light. Cars is an auto biography that'll chauffeur you through the intersection of the lives of two of Canada's most interesting writers.