5 Questions with Author Rachel Kolb
Hi friends. Times are bad, books remain good. I'm really excited to share this mini-interview with friend and deaf writer and scholar Rachel Kolb regarding her debut book, Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice. It's one of those books I wish I could put in the hands of all hearing parents of D/HH kids...and anyone who wants to think differently about speech, language, and being alive. Articulate is out from Ecco on 16 September, but you can preorder it right now, a little back-to-school present for yourself.
You can also find Rachel at her website, or her newsletter, Switchbacks, which I read religiously.
I saw an Instagram post of yours featuring your childhood journals. What was journalling like for you as a kid? Did they come in handy while writing this book? (As someone who recently wrote a memoir and was an avid journaler, I was kind of expecting my Past Self to be more helpful, but alas, I was just kind of horny 😂.)
Looking through my childhood journals while writing my new book was fascinating! And it also reminded me of how I've actually always been a sporadic journaler, which is something I think might surprise people. For a long time, and for whatever reason, I've found it difficult to write without a specific audience or project in mind. Private diaries about my day-to-day activities just don't hold my interest for very long. This was true even when I was in middle and high school.
That being said, though, I had several childhood journals where I'd write furiously for a couple of days or weeks, even though I'd often become bored after that. (Those journals are consistently filled with apologies to myself: "Dear Diary, I'm sorry for not writing to you for a while" and so forth. It's pretty funny.) I did excavate some stuff from my intermittent journaling-heavy periods while writing my memoir, and those entries helped me remember the many things I thought and cared about as a kid, from horses and books to camping trips, as well as the feeling I did have of being stuck between Deaf and hearing worlds. But there's still plenty of boring, unhelpful stuff!
There were so many other materials from the personal archive that were useful to my writing process, too, including old school writing assignments and short stories/essays and the speech journal I kept for a year as part of my "speech homework." I quoted from several of those materials in my book, and I'm now very glad I kept all those papers on hand. I'm also glad my teachers had me write so much! I always loved my English classes. And the attitudes I had about language in some of those early materials felt intriguing to uncover years later — from the way I wrote about sound to how I internalized the responsibility of making sure hearing people understood my speech.
Can you talk about the transition between writing for a scholarly audience in your PhD work versus writing Articulate?
Whew, writing Articulate really forced me to learn a whole new writing style. I'd written essays and creative nonfiction before, but I didn't know how to sustain that voice and narrative energy across an entire book, rather than just a few thousand words. In the years before writing this book, I'd also spent most of my time writing my PhD dissertation, which obviously had a very different audience and purpose. I had to spend a lot of time messing around on the page, playing with what worked and didn't work.
I do give my PhD a lot of credit, though: finishing my dissertation gave me the confidence that I could write something long, even when the process felt tough, and it also gave me the skills to make connections between lots of ideas. I brought that energy to my early writing process for Articulate, even though I knew I was trying to do something very different. I didn't want to include academic jargon or think about the "scholarly literature," even though many of those concepts were in the back of my mind when I was drafting. I kept asking myself: how can I actually show how my experiences with language have unfolded in the world, alongside the various contexts that have influenced me and other people?
These are the two poles that interested me while writing: my own personal experiences and the larger historical and cultural contexts of deafness. I always wanted to put these in dialogue with each other, to give the reader a sense of how we're all shaped by the places and linguistic ideas that we're born into. These can be complicated, and I wanted those layers to show through somehow.
But, in many of my early drafts of this book, I found it very difficult to balance these two poles of the personal and the cultural. I couldn't quite figure out how to weave them together, while keeping the kind of narrative force and momentum that I wanted to have. I kept observing how my tone would be very different, when I jotted down some story or another from childhood, versus when I "stepped back" and tried to contextualize it for the reader. I had to learn to narrate everything in a new way, as well to think more carefully about the reader and how to invite them into something that would hopefully feel accessible and meaningful, but still nuanced and not dumbed-down. I'm very glad with how the final version turned out, but wow, it was hard.
ID: A purple and magenta book cover with the word articulate, written over and over again in block white font, with different portions of the letters missing.
Was there anything in earlier drafts that you had to cut but still have a soft spot for?
This is such a great question. You really know how writing works! I wrote on my own Substack about "killing my darlings" while revising my book, and it's so real...
I had to cut some very nerdy stuff about deaf literature from one chapter, just because it was getting long and there wasn't space for all of that material. I still wish I could have dug into even more of that history, but it kept feeling like a digression from my story of learning about literature and writing and such. In a very early draft, I had a lot about Martha's Vineyard and the idea of Deaf cultural utopias, and that got seriously cut or dispersed throughout the book. Maybe some of it will end up as an essay one day. I took out a scene I really liked about going back to volunteer at my old deaf camp when I'd become an adult, plus a story about going to a fellow deaf writer's book-release party in London during the years I lived in the UK. I hated to cut both of those, because they felt like treasured memories with a real relevance to my narrative themes. But sometimes you find that something doesn't quite fit with the trajectory or structure of the book, or other stories just do a better job of encapsulating the ideas you want to dig into. That's just how writing goes.
Besides those examples, there was also a lot of waxing poetic about something or another, including certain paragraphs or sentences I loved (alas!). My editor wisely suggested I condense the opening of one early chapter in the book, where I describe the enchanting light and vast wide-open landscapes of New Mexico, and that was so hard for me to do. I love New Mexico. I could go on for pages about it. But those paragraphs really weren't the essence of this particular book or chapter, so yes, it was time to get to the point. She was right. Bye-bye.
Who's your dream reader for this book? What do you wish they could take from it if only one thing?
One of the hardest things about writing this book was thinking about different kinds of readers! I was very aware that I was writing for a general readership, which typically means hearing people. But I wanted other deaf folks to get something out of this, too, without wading through too much "Deaf or disability 101." I tried to put in just enough background and context for the hearing readers to keep up, while still getting to the deeper stuff I really wanted to say.
To put this a different way, I've never wanted to preach to the choir with my writing (even though the choir is an important part of my life!). So, yes, I want this book to get out to those general, curious, naive hearing readers. People who are also invested in literature and storytelling, who enjoy contemporary nonfiction about various social issues, and who want to think about the world in a new way, including considering different approaches for communicating and interacting with others. There's so much rich potential within deafness and disability, and I want to open that up for people who simply may not know much yet, but who still may enjoy this take on language and how it can work.
And what I'd love for those readers to take from my book: there are so many ways we can use our bodies to communicate. When you meet someone who's deaf or disabled, just follow their lead and their existing wisdom and savvy. Try something new, whether it's gesture or some basic sign or typing things down, or finding new ways to provide ASL interpreting, whatever. We have so much potential to connect with each other, especially when we break out of existing "hearing-culture" boxes and try to articulate ourselves in different ways, all with care and attention, of course.
What's next for you? Do you have plans for another book?
What's next: I'm looking forward to bookstore events and conversations with readers this fall! It's been fun to chat with some early readers for this book (including you!) and see where those discussions go. I'm trying to soak it all in and enjoy the moment, plus be open to new ideas and possibilities as they come up. It's good to let all of that unfold organically, I think.
And I do have early ideas for several other books... I'd love to write more about nature and the outdoors, so that's one future possibility, among others. Maybe I'll get to wax poetic about New Mexico sometime, after all!
Biz
Raymond Antrobus's The Quiet Ear is out now! Read his mini-interview here.
Disability Rights Watch has been shadowbanned from instagram, so in an attempt to reset the cache, we are taking a two week break from posting there. Weekly updates will continue on the site. https://disability-rights-watch.com.
I'm finally coming up to Boston this September! A few things in the works, but for now, save the date--or better yet, register--to hang at the Watertown Library on September 30th at 6:30PM.