Letters with Smokie: Blindness, Guide Dogs & More Than Human Questions

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. Many in the blind community have guide dogs, I don't have one and I'm not sure I ever will. But in talking to those blind friends who do have guide dogs, I'm told consistently that having a guide dog changes how they move through the world. Fundamentally, guide dogs become more than a service animal, more than a pet or companion. It's a unique relationship, my guide dog using friends say, that transforms what it means to be blind and how they themselves relate to their blindness. Nevertheless, the team, blind person and dog, create a relationship that blurs the boundaries between sight and blindness, animal and human. Today, we discuss blindness, guide dogs and interspecies relationships. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to the Pulse on AMI-audio, I'm Joeita Gupta. I'm really excited to bring to you a truly prolific author who's written many books. And last fall, I think he wrote a book or two, and I said, "I've got to have Rod Michalko back on the show." And I never really got around to doing it, my bad. But Rod has recently published Letters with Smokie: Blindness and More-Than-Human Relations. And Rod joins me today to talk about the new book. Hello and welcome to the program. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Rod Michalko:
Thanks so much, Joeita. It's good to be here.

Joeita Gupta:
Who is Smokie and why is Smokie writing letters?

Rod Michalko:
Yeah, I should explain that. Smokie, first of all was my late guide dog. He died several years ago. And I have a good, good friend named Dan Goodley in the UK, he teaches disability studies at the University of Sheffield. And he published a book during the Pandemic and I wrote him an email of congratulations. And the book title was Disability and Other Human Questions. So it just occurred to me that my late guide dog, Smokie, might have something to say about that title.
So I said to Dan that this is what Smokie told me, and he still talks to me even though he passed on several years ago, and he said something like this. And I wrote a little email from Smokie to Dan saying something like, "Why are you talking about Disability and Other Human Questions? I dragged a blind guy around for almost my entire adult life. I know a thing or two about disability, it's not just a human question." Just joking around. And about two weeks from then I got an email that said, "Dear Smokie..." And it was from Dan. And then we just exchanged letters.

Joeita Gupta:
Yeah, I mean when you go back to read the book, it's a really fantastic and organic development of ideas. Did you always have in the back of your mind that you were going to write a book based on these letters, or did it all just come together organically?

Rod Michalko:
No, we weren't intending a book at all. We were just passing the pandemic lockdown in different kinds of ways. So we were just writing these letters. It was actually Tanya, my partner and colleague Tanya Titchkosky, who first suggested we might make a book out of it after we were done the letters. And then an acquisitions editor from the University of Manitoba Press named Jill McConkey asked me if I could send her the letters. And I said to her that it really wasn't an academic book in the traditional sense. And she said that she'd still liked to look at it. So she did and said she loved it and wanted to publish it. So we went from there.

Joeita Gupta:
And you were writing, I hesitate to say for Smokie, but you were writing in Smokie's voice. In what way was that challenging for you? Because there might be a tendency to filter Smokie's impressions through how you might choose to recollect them. I mean, how would you have genuinely known what Smokie might have felt or thought about something?

Rod Michalko:
Well, speaking of genuine, I'm not sure I genuinely know what I'm talking about. I'm not sure any of us know that genuinely. But I think what I did is I took my experience with Smokie when he was alive or what Smokie refers to in the book as when we were together, and took that communication. And me knowing what he was thinking about and trying to say to me through the harness and through different sounds that he made, et cetera, and what I was trying to say to him through the harness and different sounds and talking. So I took that experience and just extrapolated into how he might consider some of the things that Dan Goodley raised in letters to him.

Joeita Gupta:
And one of the central preoccupations of the letters is really tackling this question of where animals and the treatment of animals comes in in our thinking through about blindness specifically, but disability as a whole. And in the book they say there's so many things we do with animals, we eat them, we pet them, we fear them. And of course, then you've got the service animal, which is la-di-da. It doesn't really... Now you're helping the most vulnerable people. What does thinking about animals are more than human can do in helping to deepen or broaden our understanding about questions around disability and questions of blindness?

Rod Michalko:
I'm not exactly sure. I think terms like service animal, working animal, those sorts of terms tend to emphasize the notion that disability, in my case blindness, is merely a technical problem, that it's requiring technical solutions. So we often hear the phrase, "I'm just like anybody else except I do things differently." And that is probably the most simplistic, disingenuous understanding of blindness that there is. Of course we do things differently and of course we use technology to do things, but so do people who see. That's what a refrigerator is, technology, or anything else like that.
So I think I try to see that Smokie would consider himself more than a technology, more than a technical solution to my technical problem of blindness. So I think what I tried to get across in the Letters with Smokie, with Smokie's help is... Or maybe the other way around, is that service animal and working animal were terms that, just as I said, emphasized that blindness is a technical problem. And it's the farthest thing from a technical problem. Seeing is a technical problem as well, and people who see use kinds of technology. But we wouldn't say that being sighted is a technical issue.

Joeita Gupta:
In the letters, in many places, the phrase that Smokie helps move you towards a different conception of blindness or a different concept of blindness and provides some context to blindness, this theme comes up again and again. What are you getting at with that?

Rod Michalko:
I think when I began to lose sight to the point where I needed some way of getting around like a white stick or something, I think I was still thinking of blindness as what I was suggesting earlier. It was just a real tragedy that I couldn't get around even with the 10% vision I used to have, and that now I needed this clunky white stick. And I think what Smokie did for me was to show that blindness wasn't necessarily and only a tragedy of losing sight, but it was an occasion or an opportunity to see a world that hasn't been seen before by sighted people. To understand that blindness far from being the lack of perception, is perception. It's not just the way to see the same world differently, it's a different world. But that requires a lot of attention to the perception of blindness, to understanding blindness as an opportunity to move in the world in a way that sight just cannot move.

Joeita Gupta:
I was really struck by one anecdote related in the letters, which is about your first day with Smokie. You're now home from Oakville, the Guide Dog Training School. You've had your graduation and you've been learning all the commands and learning them well, "Left, Smokie. Right, Smokie. Forward, Smokie." Everything's hunky-dory until you actually get out on the sidewalk and suddenly you're hesitating. And it's in the letter. Smokie says, "Okay, well then I just thought, right looked really good and I went in that direction and the guy had a smile on his face."
Tell me, we got that anecdote from Smokie's recollection but what was it like from your point of view, that first day out with your guide dog all by yourself?

Rod Michalko:
Well, all by myself in my neighbourhood, Joeita, it was trepidation. I was so excited and yet a little afraid that I might mess up. Because Smokie was very well-trained and I was just being ironic with this service animal thing, and Smokie refers to his training as postgraduate education for a dog. But I got out on the street and we got to the curb, it was the corner of Dufford and Sinclair West actually. And I just thought, "Which way am I going to go?"
And Smokie never liked the fact of hesitating. He always liked me to make up my mind and do it quickly. So I just stood there and suddenly he just hung a right. And I just smiled. I said, "Okay, let's just hit it." And we did it that way. And right to the very end when we were on subway stations, when we got off to a subway station that I didn't know, that I hadn't been to before, the door would open and I would just say, "Smokie, okay, let's go out." And he would just go. So he would decide a lot of things.

Joeita Gupta:
And in the book, you spend a lot of time discussing these really heavy concepts. And one of the things that you talk about in the letters is Dan Goodley says, "Well, it feels like we're blurring the lines of friendship." And then in response, at one point you say, "But that's your vision that you have, where you see and you appreciate the blurriness and things." Now for a lot of people, when their vision starts to go blurry they aren't they don't go, "Woo-hoo, my vision's going blurry." Usually people start to freak out. What is so fantastic about being able to appreciate the blurriness in life, whether it's in friendships or other relationships?

Rod Michalko:
I think that's a really good question, Joeita. Actually, Smokie and I have been thinking about that for a long time when we were working together, together. There's kind of a blurry sense of blindness, a blurry sense of the relation between the human and the animal, et cetera. And I think what Smokie was getting at there was that the contemporary way of doing cultural studies and disability studies, et cetera, is to suggest that we are blurring the boundaries between what are otherwise considered to be very clear distinctions like man, woman, blind, sighted. And that these are actually boundaries that are pretty fluid, I think is a term many scholars use.
So what Smokie was getting at was we didn't blur these distinctions like a friendship. They were already blurry. But then as human beings, what we did was create them as fixed entities, a friend is this and not that. A man is this, a woman is that. And we did that. And then we start blurring them, but they're already blurred. We're the ones that made them fixed, we people. So it's just interesting and ironic to me, and actually humorous that we as scholars, as academics sometimes take credit for blurring things when they were already blurred. We didn't want to fix them. So I think that's what Smokie was trying to get at, making a little bit of fun of academics there.

Joeita Gupta:
The other thing that is in the book that I found was quite funny is he says, Smokie says, "Listen, you've got experts for all kinds of things. But as an animal, we have a lot of expertise on humans as well." In what ways would you say that Smokie allows a certain kind of expertise to develop about blindness, as someone who spent his adult life, to quote the letters, dragging a blind guy around?

Rod Michalko:
I know. I think especially in contemporary times, we have experts for everything. When you listen to news for instance, they'll have a story and they'll get an expert in it. It could be an expert in some major, major thing like the Middle East or an expert in parenting or an expert in almost anything, expert in Halloween. So I think what Smokie was trying to do there was trying to suggest that there are experts right in front of us, many of whom we don't notice, for instance like guide dogs. They're not only experts in guiding blind people, they're also experts in beginning to guide blind people if blind people decide to be guided into new and very creative conceptions of blindness, they're experts in that. But like any other sort of expert, you need to first of all recognize that and then take their advice.
But in the realm of today, there's just experts galore for everything. And Smokie was, again, being ironic and making fun of the human, it's almost like a visceral need to have an expert in almost anything.

Joeita Gupta:
In another letter, and it was a revelation for me because I don't have a guide dog, but in another letter, Smokie is describing all these obstacles, for Rod that is. And he's talking about the caution tape at construction sites and saying, I can get underneath it, but it's not that it would hurt Rod but he's going to wonder, "What on earth is going on? What is that thing?" And he talks about shifting his vantage point and having to look at things very differently.

Rod Michalko:
No, that's beautiful Joeita. The thing is, when Smokie is moving through the world with me, or by himself, he's at above my knee level. His head came just above my knee. So that's how he was looking at the world. That was his vantage point of the world, visually. And all of us in the world have a vantage point, which is to say we see the world from some position. And one of those positions is a physical position, our height, whether we're wheelchair users, et cetera. Other kinds of positions are positions of our gender, our race, our ethnicity, all sorts of things, our social class. Those are all vantage points.
So eyes never see, people do. And we see with our loves, our hates, our aspirations, our fears, our anxieties, and that's how we see the world. One of the ways Smokie sees the world is to see it as a way to take care of someone else, as a way to take care of me in this instance. That's what Smokie I think was trying to get at. Maybe we as human beings ought to see the world as a way to see how we can take care of others.

Joeita Gupta:
But I mean, you take care of Smokie too in the more obvious sense of food, water, and picking up the poop, but also vet visits and making sure that Smokie isn't being mistreated or abused by anybody. In thinking about caring then, how does it shift your conception, or are you hoping it'll shift the reader's conception of human-animal relationships? I mean, you also spend a lot of time discussing what the right term should be for that. The distinction between humans and animals is one that humans have created after all.

Rod Michalko:
That's right. Yeah, that's a difficult question. Even having written the book with Smokie and Dan, it still is difficult for me to say that, Joeita, what it should be or what it is for that matter. But there is a relation between humans and animals that, as you say, is a human creation. So how we see animals and how we understand animals and experience them is based almost solely on our understanding of the difference between us people and animals, but we do say that we're different. Now, how we fill in that difference is the crucial thing.
So it's our choice there's a gap between animals and people, how we fill that gap in is up to us. And quite often in human relations, that gap is filled in with cruelty, with treating animals as merely servants at our service or working for us rather than saying, "We cohabit a world, we live together in a world." And what's the best way to do that is the question. So I think that's what Smokie was trying to raise, is that eventually we have to think about the best way to live together, people and animals, people and people et cetera.

Joeita Gupta:
As you think about one of some of the more vivid, you paint such beautiful pictures with your words, but some of the most vivid recollections for me in reading the book are about Smokie traversing the hustling bustling city of Toronto and then going off to a small town in Nova Scotia. And he talks about it being semi-retirement and not having too many people, not too many traffic stops, none of that.
What did traversing the world with Smokie get you to think about or think differently about in terms of the design of physical spaces? I know it's something that a lot of blind people like to think a lot about, but as you evaluate the design of physical spaces and our cities and sidewalks, is there something about the way in which Smokie led you through these different environments that has got you thinking differently about how we design physical spaces?

Rod Michalko:
Oh, I think so. I mean, as you know and as I'm sure many people know, the world is designed for and by people who see themselves as able-bodied or sighted, et cetera. And people like me and you and others are then almost second thoughts. So buildings, the streets et cetera are created for those who see and by those who see. And once in a while, we're consulted to say, how best for us to fit into this already structured world? But the world is not created by us for people who see.
There's often complaints by able-bodied people that we disabled people are too expensive to accommodate totally. And the most expensive accommodations ever are for people who see and are able-bodied people. I mean, lighting itself costs a fortune to accommodate sighted people.

Joeita Gupta:
Yeah, I remember taking your lecture and you had made that point in the lecture that I'd taken with you so many years ago. It's like, "Well, all these people get chairs and tables and lights and all this other stuff handed to them." Towards the end of the book, you or Smokie and Dan would get into this completely nerdy, if you'd like me to say this, completely nerdy debate about whether we should have a disruption or a disturbance. Just lay out the debate for us in its broadest terms, and why did the debate take on a life of its own?

Rod Michalko:
Well, it's funny because people who do disability studies, which is something I've done for decades as you know, always talk about disability as disrupting normalcy. They just say, "Disability disrupts normalcy." And of course it doesn't, it just makes normalcy stronger. When disability shows up, whether it's in the form of people, disabled people, or in the form of a threat, like, "You could lose your eyesight, so take care." normalcy kicks into high gear and we normalize everything.
In order for disability or we disabled people to disrupt normalcy, we have to do a lot more than just show up. A lot more. And unfortunately, we really don't. For instance, the thing about getting through the world and how it's designed. One thing working with Smokie taught me is that blind people can knock the hell out of the world and how it's designed. We can move through it a lot quicker and a lot better than any sighted people can. So that was kind of fun to realize, that we could beat sighted people at their own game.
And I think the disturbance disruption debate was I said that we need to be like artists, like James Baldwin said, "The incorrigible disturbers of the peace." When we find normalcy peaceful, where we find seeing peaceful, we need to show through blindness that seeing isn't perfect. There's a lot of stuff that sighted people just can't see, and we blind people can help them see some of that stuff.

Joeita Gupta:
When you think about one of the other things that comes up in the book at around the time that you share your recollections, or Smokie shares his recollections of a mutual late friend, Mary-Jo Nadeau, is this idea of community. Why is the theme of community so important in the letters?

Rod Michalko:
I think whenever we move through the world, in whichever way we do, we are communal. We are moving together with other people, whether we know them or not. We share space with other people. It's that sharing and that movement with other people that needs to be a lot more on our minds, a lot more part of our conversations and discussions with each other than it is.
We rarely, rarely speak about moving in the world together with others. We speak about moving in a world where there's other people, but then it's a more almost self-centered movement. "How do I get through the world?" Rather than, "How do I experience this world that is made up of others?" It's me and others. The world is just automatically something we share, but we rarely think about the shared world. So that this thing of design you brought up earlier, even to think that disability exists in the world should be part of design. Not an added feature, but an essential feature of designing anything. So I think that that's what we meant by community.

Joeita Gupta:
Your first letter to Dan Goodley goes out in September 2020, something like that. And then you write in Smokie's voice for the next six to seven months, and you occupy this truly incredible and unique space. What did the project mean to you on a personal level, because that's a long time to spend thinking about your guide dog with whom you evidently had a very close relationship?

Rod Michalko:
I mean, that's a great question. I think that what this book meant to me is I am now retired as a professor, and as I grow older and I think about what have I contributed as a blind person to the world? What have I left the world with in relation to understandings of blindness? And how do I begin to speak about or think about my understanding of blindness as I lived it in the world? How do I get that across and did I live it well? Did I do blindness justice?
And I think speaking through Smokie's voice really allowed me to at least raise some of those questions. Not necessarily answer them, but at least raise some of the questions about my responsibility and how I need to move in the world of many blindness [inaudible 00:26:28], through various conceptions of blindness that are floating around our culture. And how I maneuver those conceptions, negotiate them, and what I bring to them and what I'm going to leave in the world. So Smokie just allowed me to do that, at least to begin to address that.

Joeita Gupta:
In the close of the book, in your last letter you say, "This is the first of a series of letters, and I'm sure there'll be more." Will there be more? And what more do you envision will happen down the road?

Rod Michalko:
Oh, I am not sure Joeita. We'll have to see. I do think of Smokie a lot and daily, and have some version of communication with him. So there's a lot that he has to say about blindness, about disability, about the world. And we'll see, I don't know.

Joeita Gupta:
Rod Michalko, thank you very much for speaking to us today about your book. It's a fantastic read, thank you so much for putting it out in the world for us.

Rod Michalko:
Oh, you're very welcome.

Joeita Gupta:
Rod Michalko is the author of Letters with Smokie: Blindness and More-Than-Human Relations, which is published by University of Manitoba Press. It is really a fantastic read. If you have a chance to pick it up, pick it up. It's not your quintessential textbook so even if you're a non-academic, I think there's a lot you would take away from the book that's enjoyable, relatable, funny. So I do hope you have a chance to grab a copy of that book. And if you have any feedback, you can always leave us your feedback down below where we have our comments. But you can also write us at feedback@AMI.ca or give us a call at 1-866-509-4545, that's 1-866-509-4545 and do leave your permission to play the audio on the program. And you can find us on X @AMIAUDIO and use the hashtag #PULSEAMI.
Our videographer today has been Matthew McGurk. Our video editor is Jordan Steeves. Mark Aflalo is our technical producer, Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for AMI-audio podcasts. And Andy Frank is the manager of AMI-audio. And I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.