Poet and URI doctoral student Olivia Thomakos is exploring how disability drives creativity.
One fall morning in 2021, Olivia Thomakos awoke with warped vision in one eye.
She was pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing and working on her first poetry chapbook, a small collection of poems, when she received a diagnosis of ocular melanoma, a cancer of the eye. Fluid surrounding the tumor accounted for the change in her vision. Thomakos successfully underwent radiation and surgery in January 2022, but at a cost: The treatment caused partial vision loss in one of her eyes, resulting in problems with depth perception and night driving, as well as light sensitivity and migraine headaches.
Three years later, Thomakos is a doctoral student and teaching assistant in URI’s Department of English and Creative Writing. She is researching the literary significance of blind poets and poetry about blindness, as well as exploring her experience of vision loss in her own poetry.
“I started to wonder where blindness appears in writing and what writers can do with the topic of blindness,” she says.
Thomakos recently attended a conference called Disabled People’s Creative Writing, presenting on “hyper-visibility versus invisibility” and “this interesting tension that arises because of a desire for people to recognize that you are struggling more than others are and also a desire for people to know there’s so much more to you than your disability. So often writers with disabilities get pigeonholed into talking about their trauma or their experience of life.”
Thomakos’ writing resists narrow categorization. In her debut chapbook, Love and Other Cancers, she uses personal experiences to underscore universal truths. “Don’t Look Up” examines the fatigue that comes of soothing others’ discomfort with disability; “Night Hunt” details the perils inherent in the mating ritual that is the modern bar scene. “When Speaking to Doctors Gets You Nowhere” is hilarious and biting for its close-to-the-bone candor.
“It’s been really fascinating to enter into the disabled community because I see a new perspective on things,” Thomakos says. “I used to be an outsider and now I’m an insider—though mine is an invisible disability for the most part. There are all these intersecting circles that I am inside and outside of.”
Thomakos approaches writing and life with a “yes, and …” philosophy. Yes, she is a person with a disability. And she is a scholar, writer, editor, teacher, advocate, and friend. All of these identities are brought to bear on her writing and teaching.
“A student sent me his creative work, and I thought, ‘This is why we do what we do,’” Thomakos says. “I get such fulfillment and joy engaging with people on that deeper level you get to when you teach.
“I’d thought I wanted to work as an editor in publishing, but I want to encourage people’s work, not reject it. People did that for me, and I want to do that for other people.”
“Olivia has impressed me with her hunger for knowledge,” says Professor Carolyn Betensky, chair of URI’s English and creative writing department. “She has been on an incredible trajectory; she’s creating her own archive.”
Martha Elena Rojas, associate professor and director of the Rumowicz Literature
of the Sea lecture series, calls Thomakos “a paradigm-setter.”
“Olivia comes to us already a professional,” Rojas says. “She’s a total go-getter who displays great talent as a poet and insights as a critic. She’s extraordinary in both realms.”
If literature chronicles human experience, Thomakos’ poetry is an invitation for sighted readers to see what is unseen about blindness, and that’s by design.
“Poetry more than any other genre allows blind writers to show you their full, authentic experience,” Thomakos says. “And for sighted readers to empathize with that experience.”
—Marybeth Reilly-McGreen
PHOTO: SETH JACOBSON
Losing Vision In The Shower
If I could look away, I would but I know this may be the last time. Tomorrow I’ll see less. Amethysts will mute, their shimmers burn my eyes or worse they will not shine at all. One day with my right lid closed I’ll feel the wind, wet imagining pinwheels in the rain. It’s quiet here – my spine to the light fluoride water falls translucent just flicks of white twinkling, warm. But turning illuminated from behind a change: white and violet curtained tinsel shot with glitter, like sun reflections on a rippling lake or fairies dancing joropo in Canaima’s Angel. Will I be first to hear the trumpets? Vibrations deepen, vision dulls. What if angel song is water spraying time-worn rocks? In the end will I hold the scales, the sword? Or like a sandworm will I burrow, sharpen my extra teeth iron on iron, bone on bone? I don’t know if it’s worse to know color before losing it or to never have known it at all – for shapes to soften bit by bit or to disappear all at once. No glass clarifies the obfuscated page, this Kumulipo night. They say Blessed are those who have not seen yet believe, but I have seen, I have seen, I have seen.
–Olivia Thomakos From Love & Other Cancers (2024)