Romance novelist, poet, president of a national writer’s association, blind.

Of the themes that run through Bobbi LaChance’s life, the one that most other people recognize on their own, is the one that she pays least attention to.

“I chose to live in a sighted world, and because I did that, people accept me,” the Auburn woman says.

LaChance keeps a packed schedule writing prose and poetry alongside advocating for blind-friendly legislation with the Pine Tree Guide Dog Users and the National Federation for the Blind. Now in her 60s, LaChance is learning a whole new set of organizational skills while serving a two-year term as president of Behind Our Eyes, a nonprofit group for writers with disabilities.

About 60 percent of the group’s members are blind, she said. They are scattered across the country, and they have recently welcomed new members from South Africa and Ireland. They’ve published an anthology of work by their members, also titled “Behind Our Eyes.”

The group meets twice a month by teleconference, and offers each other constructive criticism and support for their writing.

“It’s like being in a writing family,” LaChance said. “We celebrate our wins together, and we cry about our rejection letters together.”

In her writing, descriptions of rooms are the most difficult, she said. Because she started losing her sight at age 19, and wasn’t completely blind until suffering a concussion in an accident at home at the age of 28, she has a few decades’ worth of memories to draw on when she needs to depict people or objects. But styles have changed since then, presenting a challenge when she began writing her first novel titled “Wishes.”

Her solution? Set the story in 1964, an era that she can visualize.

LaChance talks excitedly about new technologies that have broadened the world for blind people, like GPS navigators and digital audio book readers. She’s thinking about publishing her next novel in digital format, and Behind Our Eyes recently published the second issue of its Web magazine, Magnets and Ladders.

She has no desire to live anything less than a full life, she says. “Being blind doesn’t have to be a state of being,” she said. “I put my mark on life. I did it.”

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