I’ve been following this story, about Canadian crime writer Howard Engel’s stroke and subsequent loss of the ability to read, for some time because my first poetic mentor is the guy who helped Engel write his memoir (largely by reading back what had been written). Imagine spending your entire life as a writer and then having a stroke that leaves you with the ability to write, but not the ability to read, even what you’ve just written. Who ever heard of such a thing. This gives me the same weeping sympathy and fear as reading about “locked-in syndrome”. I almost shudder at the thought.

Of all the ways to learn that your brain has suffered an “insult,” as medical professionals like to call the effects of strokes, one of the oddest is to get up in the morning and discover your Toronto newspaper seemingly printed in a mix of Serbo-Croatian and Korean. When 70-year-old Howard Engel came back inside with his Globe and Mail that hot July day in 2001 and found he couldn’t read his own books either, the bestselling mystery novelist headed for the hospital. Tests confirmed Engel’s own assumption: stroke, left side, rear. His memory was shot — still is, for that matter, especially for names — and he had lost a quarter of his vision, on the upper right side. But the essence of the diagnosis was a rare and almost incomprehensible condition: alexia sine agraphia. The elegant combination of Greek and Latin words meant that while Engel could still write, he could no longer read.

Such a triumph that he’s back at it.  The mind is a mysterious and fucked-up thing. It’s like a lava lamp of possible injury. I just finished a great book called Into the Silent Land by Paul Brok, in which Engel’s ailment could have been used for any variety of Brok’s eloquent riffing on identity. It’s a testament to the machinery of the brain, but also the force of will, that Engel’s writing at all.