Learning to Write My Truth as a Deaf Queer Writer

The best thing that writing can do is to replace a shallow illusion with something more nuanced and closer to the truth.

Days before spring break ended, my laptop lit up with an email notification. I was a creative writing major at Portland State University, studying fiction writing. I was about to start my last quarter before graduation, and I had signed up for a fiction workshop with Leni Zumas.

Leni had sent over the syllabus for the workshop. She asked me what she could do to ensure the classroom was accessible to me; as a Deaf person entering her classroom, I would work with ASL interpreters as I had done every quarter.

When I went through the syllabus for Leni’s class, my heart leapt. Leni had assigned the first act of Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic as reading. I read that line in the class schedule over and over, a smile growing on my face. Work from a deaf writer was in a class. Work from a deaf writer was part of a class I was in.

A deaf writer on Leni’s syllabus felt like encouragement. I had made it a personal goal to read d/Deaf and disabled writers whenever I could. Those readings were always in bed, in the hour before sleep. Now, I would be moving past that. I wouldn’t just be reading a deaf writer. I would be studying him. My peers would be studying him.

Even the thought came as a shock. I had assumed I would be the only person in the room to write about deafness and think about deafness, because I was the only Deaf person in the program and, by extension, the only Deaf person in every classroom.

*

Whenever I think about Portland, I mainly think about my second and last year. During my second year, I was writing what I liked, and with that came the exhilaration that I was saying something only I could say.

My first year was an exorcism. My first year, I regurgitated the stories I’d read before, and it was only during spring quarter of that year that I looked down at my story being workshopped and realized I hated it.

I hated that I’d written another story that revolved around abled straight people discovering disability and queerness. I was writing stories of discovery and uncertainty when I was further down the road: I was comfortable in my skin as a Deaf queer person. But hearing straight people told me that those stories about deafness and queerness, soaked in uncertainty, were what they knew. These stories were important, people claimed, whether they were about two men struggling with their attraction to each other or about an abled person who was unsure of how to behave around a disabled person. People said those stories came from important writers, serious writers. I wanted to be taken seriously, and I had followed in those writers’ footsteps.

After my workshop that day, I hid in the bathroom. I waited for the feeling of defeat to drain out of me. It didn’t.

The teacher in that workshop, Gabe Urza, gave me an A on the workshopped story, an A I was confused by. I felt like I didn’t deserve it for a story steeped in clichés. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I wanted to ask him why he’d been so generous—the closest I came was asking about a class he would teach in the fall.

“It’s research for writers,” he explained. “We spend one quarter developing one fiction story. It’s a lot of fun.”

I nodded. I didn’t give him an answer then, but I emailed him my final project for his class with a postscript: I signed up for your research seminar, so I’ll see you then.

I had stumbled, but Gabe saw something in my stumbles. I wanted to take another class with him to learn how he looked at fiction, where he was looking, and how I could get there.

In that research seminar, months later, I saw what I could do. I could write about Deafness if I pulled from our history, our trauma, our community. Surrounded by hearing peers, I wanted them to read what I knew instead of writing something they knew and expected.

In order to move forward as a writer, I had to reject the idea of hearing approval. I had to move away from writing stories that were in line with what people expected. There are already plenty of stories about abled discomfort, and I didn’t have anything to add to those conversations. I could be taken seriously, I learned, without writing what was already there.

When Gabe gave me an A for the work I did in the research seminar, I felt accomplishment instead of confusion. The next quarter, in a workshop with Janice Lee, I got a story back with so many checkmarks I felt disbelief. I knew I was on the right track, but I had expected a course correction, a suggestion, or a fine-tuning toward where I was supposed to go.

 I could write about Deafness if I pulled from our history, our trauma, our community. 

When I admitted this to Janice in a one-on-one meeting, she chuckled. The ASL interpreter behind her suppressed a smile.

Janice grew serious as she talked: “You just need to keep going. You’re not writing the stories typically told. You’re not writing for the straight white men out there”—the ASL interpreter, a straight white man, suppressed another smile as he interpreted—“and people may want you to explain things. It’s not necessary. You’re not writing for them.”

I left the meeting with warmth cresting in my chest. I felt empowered in a way I hadn’t before.

Before, I had dreaded workshops simply because I was bringing in stories about Deaf people to a room full of hearing people. Participating in writing workshops means you are introduced to other people’s perspectives, their minds, and their traumas, which are all part of their stories. It also means that you are introduced to their prejudices, their pet peeves, and their assumptions. I submitted my stories, and people responded in the ways they knew how. Peers’ biases showed up in their annotated copies and their critique letters.

In one critique letter, a peer wrote, “Maybe you shouldn’t write these stories.” I felt small and uncertain as I read her words. I wondered if she couldn’t understand or if I hadn’t been clear enough about why I wrote what I did.

Even as I physically set peers’ workshop letters aside, I couldn’t shake them from my mind. If creative writing programs are representative of the literary industry, I would be in an industry where people like me are rarely given space. Janice’s words in our meeting felt like permission to trust myself—but in my lowest moments, I wondered if it was worth it to ignore those words if I was the only Deaf person in the classroom, if no other Deaf people were critiquing my work. I wondered if it was worth it to ignore my peers’ feedback if they were saying they would never understand my work.

If creative writing programs are representative of the literary industry, I would be in an industry where people like me are rarely given space.

By my final quarter, I was writing the stories I wanted to write. I couldn’t control what people thought of them, but I could control how it affected me. I could stop writing, or I could keep going.

I kept going.

*

When Leni Zumas walked into the classroom on our first day, she caught my stare and smiled. I felt a flush of embarrassment but smiled back. I felt anticipation, more than I ever had before. I was excited for a class that included reading from a deaf writer. I was excited for a class where I wasn’t the only deaf writer that would be read.

When the day to discuss Deaf Republic came around, I brought in my book. My peers pulled printouts out of their backpacks and folders. As we discussed it, I could feel eyes on me; my peers were watching me, waiting on what I would have to say about this deaf book by a deaf writer.

I remember us talking about syntax, about the fact that this was a story about rebellion and love; I remember us talking about the signs illustrated in the book, the way it dissected embodiment and language.

What I took away the most from that discussion was that people could analyze my work and talk about it, just as they do any other book. While context and content matter, so do the choices you make. The choices to invent. The choices to explain. You only have to put in the work to make sure someone who does not share your experience can enter the world you create. If the reader refuses to enter, you cannot do anything. But if the reader encounters a barrier, you must decide if that is part of the path. If the work cannot be understood or felt, it only becomes something to admire rather than something to engage with. Conversation can’t come from admiration. Conversation comes from understanding.

The best thing a teacher can do for a marginalized writer in their classroom is to include texts by people who share their identities and write about it. Ilya Kaminsky and I are both deaf. Ilya is not similar to me. Our forms of deafness are different. Our relationships to English are different. Our voices and forms are different.

But we both write about deafness. Including a deaf writer and making sure I could participate in a conversation about his work made people pay attention to me like never before. I wasn’t only a peer, but someone who understood this book in ways they couldn’t. I was someone who could understand and continue the conversation Ilya had started. More than any other class, on any other day, with Ilya Kaminsky’s words before me, my goal of being a writer, a Deaf writer, felt tangible and possible.

*

That spring, at the end of my last year, at the end of my time at Portland, I was striding forward, moving toward a space I could call my own. This is my space, this is what I have envisioned, I could say now. This is what I know, and this is what I will write about.

Conversation comes from understanding.

I think of my time in Portland now as both a learning of craft and a preparation for the responses I would receive on my writing. Since I graduated from my program, I continue to write and publish the stories that feel true to me, and I’ve learned over and over that reading is never a neutral act, and abled people project their ideas of disability onto disabled people constantly. Abled people’s responses have nothing to do with me and everything to do with their preconceptions of me. And the best thing that writing can do is to replace a shallow illusion with something more nuanced and closer to the truth, to my truth.

Writing is often a solitary act. It does not have to be lonely. A piece of writing invites comparisons, experiences, ideas, responses—conversations. In the process of putting my own ideas to paper and letting other people, hearing people, criticize them, I often felt like I was saying something people wouldn’t listen to.

The knowledge that there were disabled and d/Deaf writers out there was what kept me going in a space where I was the only Deaf person. The discovery that there were writers, like Ilya, who were given close attention and study within a creative writing class thrilled me. Because I saw my peers studying a deaf writer, being moved by a deaf writer, I could see my voice having impact as well. I could see myself as part of a conversation that progresses. At Portland, I learned to look beyond abled people and their approval to imagine only what I wanted and then write it. I hope for the disabled writers who come after me to do the same. Conversations about us, by us, are being written. What we see now is only the beginning.