In his middle grade debut, Whale Eyes: A Memoir About Seeing and Being Seen, James Robinson uses optical exercises and personal recollections to explain how he perceives the world. Due to an eye condition—strabismus with alternating extropia, which he has nicknamed “whale eyes”—Robinson as a child missed the target in T-ball, was caught holding a book upside-down during a reading session, and felt classmates’ impatience while taking extra time on tests. He went on to study documentary filmmaking at Duke University, and his New York Times “Adapt-Ability” videos demystify disability for audiences. Robinson spoke with PW about turning a video into a memoir, reframing disability, and writing his first draft on video animation software.
After feeling excluded from reading books as a child, what led you to love storytelling?
Reading was always a difficulty throughout my childhood, and it almost felt like a lie, to be honest. I would hear classmates talking about this excitement they had in the books they were reading, and I wasn’t feeling that myself. Funny enough, what made storytelling come alive was filmmaking. My family had a TV, but it lived in the basement and came out once a year for the Super Bowl. But what that meant is when I was 10 or 11, and I asked to see a documentary for the first time, I was really moved. It felt like all the things that reading was supposed to do could happen in video, so I came to reading and writing through falling in love with that format.
How did you decide to turn your Whale Eyes video documentary into a memoir?
That video started as my senior project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, and it was picked up by the New York Times. The morning it was released, we got this outpouring of raw emotion in the comments, from people who shared my condition or people who had disabilities and related on a personal level. There was a sense of community you don’t always feel in an internet comments section. Just hours after the release, my now editor, Nick Magliato, reached out and said, “Would you ever turn this into a book?” I was quite hesitant at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the perfect opportunity to play with the medium of a book.
Visual challenges and deconstructed words in Whale Eyes simulate some of your 3D and optical challenges. How did you work with artist Brian Rea and your publisher to craft the imagery?
From the onset, I didn’t just want readers to read about my eyes. I wanted them to experience these exercises, to help them understand how I see and navigate the world. Creating this interactive experience was essential to the writing process, and for my first draft, I turned in a fully laid-out book with those illustrations. I mean, some of it was kind of janky! I was using video software—like, I’m the only person who has written part of a book in After Effects, which is animation software. And Penguin would sometimes laugh because I kept calling the readers “viewers.” But it helped me to bring this video brain that I have to the written words. I loved working with Brian on the [final] illustrations. That design was as important as the words.
In your memoir and videos, you’re attuned to empathy and enhanced understanding. Who do you see as the audience for your work?
From the very beginning, when I thought of the audience for the book, I was thinking of all those people who wrote to me after the film release. Some of them were in their 80s, and there was a 10-year-old in New Zealand who gave a speech to her whole school inspired by the film. So much of the book is about coming to terms with your difference and learning to be the author of that difference, learning how to describe it to the world, especially in the disability space. I also think the book allows you to sit and be that kid who’s the slowest in the class; maybe if you’re a teacher, you weren’t that kid, but through the book, you can experience that. To me, audience is tied to this process of coming to terms with difference, even more than it is tied to a specific age range. The audience isn’t singular!
Whale Eyes: A Memoir About Seeing and Being Seen by James Robinson, illus. by Brian Rea. Penguin Workshop, $18.99 Mar. 18 ISBN 978-0-593523-95-7
