Where logic meets language

During his sophomore year, Dan Roche ’81 signed up for a fiction literature course, an elective the mechanical engineering major took mostly for fun. Midway through the semester, Kitayun E. Marre, professor emerita and former associate vice president for graduate studies and research, called him into the hallway with a suggestion he hadn’t expected: He should consider switching his major to English.

“You’re a good writer,” she told him.

Roche had always been a reader, but the notion of becoming a writer felt distant and abstract.

“I didn’t have any writers in my family,” he said. “I didn’t have guidance on that. Those were vague ideas just coming into focus.”

And besides, he was already deep into engineering: 18‑credit course loads, long nights of problem sets, “pages and pages of calculations on green graph paper,” he said. He liked the logic. He liked the work. More than anything, he liked the stability: the kind of practical path a first‑generation college student could trust.

“I grew up as a military brat, so I learned to be independent and enjoy my own company from a young age,” Roche said.

Moving every few years had taught him how to adapt quickly, but it also made the idea of a steady career feel especially grounding.

Still, he found himself slipping into the library ... imagining what it might feel like to sit in a room where people talked about books the way he wanted to talk about books.

Still, he found himself slipping into the library to read Flannery O’Connor and imagining what it might feel like to sit in a room where people talked about books the way he wanted to talk about books.

It wouldn’t be until after graduation that he’d finally get the chance.

Roche joined the Peace Corps to teach math, then came back to Dayton to work as an engineer at Wright‑Patterson Air Force Base. But at night, he returned to the world he’d once hesitated to claim, enrolling in UD literature courses to earn prerequisites for graduate school. Marre wrote his letters of recommendation, and those classes, he said, “confirmed what I wanted.”

By 1985, he’d quit his job after being accepted into The Ohio State University’s English master’s program.

“As soon as I was there, it was like, these are my people,” he said.

But the engineer in him didn’t disappear overnight. In one early literature paper, a professor noted that he seemed to assume “art must provide answers.”

“I had to relearn how to think like a humanities major,” Roche said. “With writing, you explore, you don’t solve. That approach doesn’t work very well if you’re building an airplane.”

“You can be very technical and factual and yet poetic at the same time. It let me use all of myself.”

His first nonfiction workshop cracked something open. The genre, he realized, could hold both sides of his brain. “You can be very technical and factual and yet poetic at the same time,” he said. “It let me use all of myself.”

Roche earned his master’s and, by 1989, was enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Iowa’s prestigious English program, where his writing met its fiercest tests. One professor, he said, “was vicious,” delivering critiques like, “I read this with increasing distress.” The writing itself wasn’t the issue; it was the perceived lack of emotional and personal depth.

“She forced me out of the practical engineering way of thinking,” he said, “and into something emotionally riskier.”

For his final essay, he took the risk. The paper came back with an A+++++ and a note that he was “going in the right direction.”

“I was really mad at her by then,” he said, laughing. “But ultimately, she was right.”

Roche’s writing life has moved through different forms — essays, journalism, teaching — but his newest book, Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing, published by MIT Press in 2025, is the one that gathers every part of him: the engineer, the essayist, the patient, the person.

Born with a severe cataract that left him mostly blind in his right eye, he received a prosthetic eye in 2009 after what he described as “five decades with a natural eye that had never worked and that was slipping rapidly into even more disfigurement and pain.” The new eye, he wrote, was “life‑changing,” transforming both his comfort and his sense of being looked at — something that shaped his day‑to‑day interactions for most of his life.

What surprised him just as much was discovering the people who make eyes.

“I hadn’t known,” he wrote. “I mean, I’d known abstractly… but I’d never known anything in particular about those folks.”

Living at the crossroads of art, science and innovation, their work explored the intersections he’d always been drawn to.

Said Roche, “I felt completely qualified to write this book, because I had gone through the experience.”

In addition to scouring libraries, archives and the internet for historical writing on ocular prosthetics, Roche interviewed ocularists across the country, attended their conferences and even traveled to Germany, one of the few places where prosthetic eyes are still made of glass rather than acrylic. He spoke with others who wear prosthetic eyes, gathering their stories that spanned car wrecks, cancer and freak accidents involving rose thorns or golf balls.

“It’s horrifyingly easy to lose an eye, that most vulnerable of physical attributes.”

“It’s horrifyingly easy to lose an eye,” he wrote, “that most vulnerable of physical attributes.”

The trauma wasn’t the throughline for the survivors’ stories, but the physical, emotional and psychological healing that followed. Even in his own case, the self‑consciousness that colored so much of his childhood, he said, “still vibrates at some almost imperceptible but annoyingly tangible level.”

Through it all, Roche said, he pushed himself toward honesty: “I kept telling myself, ‘Be 100% vulnerable. Let yourself be seen.’”

Today, Roche is an associate professor in the Department of English and Communications at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, where he directs the creative writing program. He teaches writing, literature, journalism and media ethics — and this spring, a speech class that began with students making animal noises for 15 seconds.

“It broke the ice,” he said. “They loosened up immediately.”

His teaching reflects the same philosophy that reshaped his writing: ask harder questions, resist easy answers, stay curious.

“I always try to bring it back to what it means to live an ethical life that’s rooted in your own sense of self‑honesty and self‑awareness,” he said. “The experience of finding deeper meaning is a breakthrough.”

To learn more about Eyes By Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing or about Roche's writing, visit his website.  

Photography by Sylvia Stahl '18 

A version of this article appears in print in the Summer 2026 University of Dayton Magazine, Page 29. EXPLORE THE ISSUE — MORE ONLINE