Live From Stage IV Weekly Substack: A chronicle of my life and insights from living with metastatic kidney cancer
Witty Title Here a blog devoted to links to poems and poets I love along with fiction and non-fiction reading lists
I was born and raised in a tiny town in Northwest Iowa. I was born legally blind but the "professionals" thought it better to force me to do things visually and did not teach me braille. While this harmed me in many ways, it did lead me to develop the Code Master Braille Learning System to help adults learn braille. I was taught to be ashamed of my blindness, but after college, I was introduced to the National Federation of the Blind and developed a positive attitude toward blindness and started to shed the shame and fear. I spent 15 years teaching non-visual alternative techniques at Blindness: Learning In New Dimensions in Minneapolis. I fell in love with my amazing wife there and we've been together for more than half my life. We moved to Des Moines, Iowa and I worked for the state agency for about a decade before being diagnosed with stage IV kidney cancer. This taught me so many things,but most impactful for the narrative of my life, that life is too short and I needed to focus on writing.
Emily Wharton earned her MFA from Hamline University. She has had poems published in the Minnesota Poetry Calendar and the Backwards City Review and forthcoming in the Shame / less anthology. She is the author of Zoomorphic: A Chapbook More information about her poetry and other projects can be found at https://poetry.one. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa, with her wife and their tiny Sheltie named Haiku.