Nothing about Us without Us: A Conversation with Raymond Luczak
Raymond Luczak lost most of his hearing at eight months due to a bout of double pneumonia and fever; he grew up in a large hearing family of nine children in a small mining town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He was not allowed to use sign language until he was 14 years old (he’d demanded to learn it). After graduating from high school, he went to Gallaudet University where he learned American Sign Language (ASL) and got involved with the Deaf community there. He is the author and editor of 22 books, including Flannelwood: A Novel (Red Hen Press) and Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels). As a poet, he’s had seven collections published, the latest title being A Babble of Objects: Poems (Fomite Press). He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he can be found online at raymondluczak.com.
ALLIE SPIKES: Thank you, Raymond, for the opportunity to have this conversation with you. You’re a prolific writer across many genres, an impressive career. You’re a poet, a playwright, an essayist, and your Flannelwood: A Novel (Red Hen Press 2019) just came out this June—congrats! I’m curious, how do you know what material should be written in what form?
RAYMOND LUCZAK: Inspiration—wherever and whenever and however it comes—resists the process of being pigeonholed, especially in the haze of trying to get something started on that blank screen. What does help is the amount of reading I’ve done across genres. Sometimes there are elements in fiction that I intuit would work really well in a new poem, or the twist in poetic language that could fix a knotty line of dialogue in a play, or the requirement of straightforward clarity for an essay. Sometimes an enigmatic title will come to me, and I simply have to answer the question of what that title means. I don’t even know the answer upfront; that’s what writing is for. I write to discover the answers I didn’t know I had to the questions I didn’t know I was having prior to that very moment. That’s why I love writing first drafts. I’m discovering! I feel like Magellan every time, especially when I’m feeling divined by inspiration. I don’t try to rewrite in my first drafts. Mistakes are absolutely wonderful in such moments because in the middle of all that sludge, you can find an amazing pearl of a line or character. Rewriting often helps excavate those overlooked gems.
SPIKES: What are the links between the different genres that you write in?
LUCZAK: Other than the process of discovering while writing intuitively without questioning what is pouring forth on my computer screen, I think the common link between all those genres is my desire to tell a story of some kind in some way no matter how oblique. Even in a lyric poem I do try to convey a narrative arc out of emotions; but then again, most lyric poems seem to be more like a snapshot rather than a short video clip, as one usually finds in narrative poetry. (Lyric poetry is harder to pull off because there has to be some undercurrent of why one must compose that particular kind of poem. Otherwise the lyric poem just sits there and does absolutely nothing for the reader. I believe that most avid readers of poetry are quite intelligent and would be sensitive to that undercurrent in a poem without being able to articulate why. That’s the key advantage of reading a wide range of poets and poetic styles. But I digress.)
SPIKES: Much of your work seems to be about language and identity. Do you see a relationship between language and unity in human experience?
LUCZAK: For me as a Deaf person, it most certainly is. Hearing people grow up learning English by listening, so much that when they go to school, they can refine what they’ve already learned by osmosis and break it down into smaller and definable bits such as subject, predicate, noun, verb, and so on. Because I cannot hear as well as most people, I’ve had to be taught how to speak. I knew right away that through this very act of being taught such things, I was different from the others. I didn’t quite then understand that I was DEAF and that they were HEARING, but I knew I was different. As a result, language—whether it was trying to speak and lipread English as well as learning how to read and write—was very much bound up in my sense of differentness.
Obviously, if a group of people can share the same language, their chances of achieving a greater unity among themselves are much improved (so much would hinge on the group dynamics, of course). A common language enables two people to share more quickly their experiences. That said, I would not want to live in a monolingual world: can you imagine how dreary such a place would be? As much as English seems to be the most universal spoken and written language on our planet, I would want to see many other languages—spoken, written, or signed—continue to survive. Being bilingual with English and American Sign Language (ASL) means that I have a better grasp on how to communicate differently and quickly whenever a situation calls for it. When many, many languages are allowed to thrive, we are all richer for it.
SPIKES: Much of your work is about disunity, distance, and disintegration. You write so poignantly through palpable barriers in poems like “How to Fall for a Deaf Man,” “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man,” and “God’s Scarlet Fever” (forthcoming in Bellingham Review, spring 2020). Can you talk about that?
LUCZAK: I don’t know if it’s obvious to the hearing reader uninformed about the Deaf experience, but these three poems show that the problem is not with the Deaf person at all but hearing people themselves. Because they see how their own world is hearing and therefore it must be the only way to live, they impose their own cultural expectations on Deaf people around them. Many of my poems that deal with the Deaf experience delineate some aspects of this.
These three poems are quite different from each other in approach. The poem “How to Fall for a Deaf Man” is more of an instructional manual on how to connect with a Deaf man, so it’s quite loving and encouraging the reader to put aside one’s fears of how to communicate and connect. It’s also quite long compared to the very short poem “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man.” It’s very concise and quite bitter; although I’d never thought of that poem as a riposte to “How to Fall for a Deaf Man,” I suppose it could be read as such for those hearing people who have all these peculiar expectations about Deaf people. Its narrator has been burned by hearing people way too many times who’ve treated him as a novelty. Trust has become a major issue. With “God’s Scarlet Fever,” however, my approach was vastly different. My DeafBlind friend (and writer) John Lee Clark and I had talked at great length about the cult surrounding Helen Keller, and he was a bit frustrated by how so few people seemed to know about Laura Bridgman, the first DeafBlind educational success in America. The more I read about Bridgman’s life, I knew I had to explore how disabled children are often exploited for profit and professional gain. Once I saw Helen Keller in the background of my narrator’s mind, the poem basically wrote itself. I almost didn’t have to think when I wrote it, particularly the last line. I don’t want to give it away, but let’s put it this way: when I performed this poem in ASL onstage more than ten years ago, hearing audiences really liked the poem until the very last line. They were stunned. It was as if I’d given them a slap in the face. It really shocked them that anyone could say such a thing about Helen Keller. (Yes, this is my way of inducing you to check out my poem when it appears in Bellingham Review!)
SPIKES: In your searing essay, “Forbidden Fruits in Our Hands,” you write about your bilingualism and some of the strange ideas hearing people have about ASL—for instance, not grasping that ASL is a non-English language with a distinct and complex syntax and morphology—a language capable of housing many dialects, and acquired by the human mind, exactly like spoken language. In your essay, you also write about how deaf children may be kept in linguistic isolation by signing restrictions, your own linguistic isolation as a child, and teaching yourself the manual alphabet from your brother’s Boy Scout Handbook, in a closet. You mention both that poetry has saved you and also that signing has amplified your voice. So beautifully put. What advice do you have for emerging writers seeking amplification?
LUCZAK: First off, in order to warrant yourselves worthy of amplification, you need to be aware of others who’ve been there before you. Read them closely, and keep them close to your heart. They may not know your name, or they may not be even alive, but they are nonetheless your family: stories are a damn powerful way to connect with one another. Once you know the stories swirling around in your new family scrapbook, you can then see how you can tell your own stories in a new way. Otherwise your stories, no matter how powerful, may sound like any other in print. Writing well will enable your voice to be amplified that much more. Great writing will break down walls faster than you may realize.
Because too many of us have been hurt in ways both subtle and not quite so, we rightly feel the need to have our existence validated, often through the stories we urgently need to share. So, my dear writer, read and write. Keep reading. Keep writing. But above all, nurture that flame flickering inside of you. It will keep you warm on days when everyone around you acts as if they’re doubting you. Do not let them determine the value of your own self-worth. If they keep giving you negative energy, change your friends and/or the toxic environment until you feel loved and accepted as you are.
When it comes to finding your own voice from within your writing, just be patient with yourself. Great writers do not appear overnight; if they do seem so, it’s because they’ve spent a lot of time away in the shadow of obscurity. They’ve worked hard to make their prose and poetry seem effortless. Great writing is hard to fake, so do not let those so-called stories of “overnight sensation” fool you. Just be honest with yourself when you write, and plug away. Don’t take editorial rejections personally, especially if they don’t come from the same marginalized community as yours. You will be heard.
SPIKES: You write about the spatial nature of ASL and that transcription of it on the page isn’t standard practice. Does this spatial aspect, which is not found in English, influence your writing process?
LUCZAK: You’re absolutely correct in that there is really no agreed-upon standardized way of conveying the complexities of ASL in a textual way. ASL is that complex, and wonderfully so. It’d be extremely cumbersome to depict the actual spatial relationships between this or that sign(s) on paper without drawing, and even then drawing is usually inadequate. You’d need to know ASL to fully appreciate what is being drawn because your brain would fill in the gaps apparent in the drawing. As for my own work in ASL gloss, I’ve had to make peace with a key assumption, which is what many translators have had to do, and that is to accept the fact that when one goes from one language to another, some things will get lost. The question is: just which elements am I willing to lose in that transition? As translator, I have to make that choice with each line I translate. Is that particular word crucial to the understanding of the piece? No? Why not? Because I’ve been bilingual—and a poet—for so long, it’s become second nature not only to look at the weight of each word that I chose in translation but also in new poems that I compose initially in English. Does that line need to stay? What about that turn of phrase? Am I being too glib? When I write in English, I don’t think in terms of spatial relationships, but when I work in ASL gloss, I acknowledge the physical signing space but not so in my textual use of ASL. How? Use arrows? How far should the arrows go? How many times for emphasis? That’s why I usually choose to omit such directional stuff and assemble the English equivalent into the ASL sign order because that kind of information would probably intimidate most readers. So much is lost, but if one is given context, the reader can see a little bit of how ASL is not “English on the hands.”
SPIKES: Do you think that conceiving of language in a particularly spatial way influences your penchant for multigenre work?
LUCZAK: I don’t think there’s a direct connection at all. I’ve always read across genres long before I became a writer, so I think that willingness to read most anything had the biggest impact on how I jump genres depending on how and what needs to be conveyed. You can blame the public library for that because I grew up with a teeny-tiny allowance, which wasn’t enough to buy books, so I felt rather rich when I was able to borrow armloads of books at a time. I just read and read and read. Knowing more than one language enables anyone to think differently about how to look at the world; it gives us potential solutions when confronted with a thorny moment when trying to communicate something specific. If the German tongue has a specific idiom that helps clarify something in English, then one can translate that idiom into English and continue talking.
SPIKES: In order to accommodate your English-speaking audience, you necessarily engage in translation. “Gazelles” is one of your poems that makes use of translation and circles ideas of exchange. Can you talk about that?
LUCZAK: If I were writing poems just for the Deaf community in America, I wouldn’t bother with using proper English at all. I’d simply write ASL gloss (or “ASL English”) and let them have fun signing along while reading my work. But I must deal with the fact that when I submit such ASL gloss poems to literary journals, the editors are almost always hearing and most likely unfamiliar with ASL syntax. That’s where English comes in, and this makes them feel more confident about evaluating whether my work is a good fit for their journal. Using English is a necessity if I want to increase my chances of getting my work considered (and accepted). I’m just so grateful when editors who may not be wholly familiar with ASL, Deaf culture, or disability poetics are willing to give me a chance to be heard as I am, hopefully without their ableist bias. It can be a real challenge because ableism is so deeply embedded in our culture, and ableist metaphors still run amok in contemporary poetry.
SPIKES: Who are you reading right now, and what do you find most compelling about their work?
LUCZAK: Right now I’m devouring Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving Up the Ghost. It’s very interesting to observe how she writes because she’s concise without seeming so. (I’ve never read any of her books, including Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies.) Part of the reason why I was so interested in reading her memoir is that, to my understanding, she’s had to deal with some health issues later in life; I haven’t gotten to that point in her book yet. I’m always interested in representations of disability by disabled folks, and she doesn’t strike me as someone who’d write inspiration porn. (Incidentally, if you haven’t read Jillian Weise’s latest book Cyborg Detective, you must score a copy and read it pronto! It’s truly kick-ass.)
SPIKES: Is there any question you wish I would have asked and didn’t?
LUCZAK: Why aren’t more able-bodied writers called out for their ableist writing in the same way that racist and/or homophobic writers are? I mean, come on.
My request to you—if you are hearing or able-bodied with no enduring connection to the d/Deaf and/or disability community, please stop writing inaccurately about us. Just STOP. We are not your metaphor. No more inspiration porn, please. (You don’t know what “inspiration porn” is? Watch Stella Young’s TED Talk on YouTube.) NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US.
Keep your eye out for “God’s Scarlet Fever,” Raymond Luczak’s incisive poem forthcoming in issue 80 of Bellingham Review.
ALLIE SPIKES is managing editor of Bellingham Review.
Featured Image by Raymond Luczak