front cover of Adventures of a Deaf-Mute and Other Short Pieces
Adventures of a Deaf-Mute and Other Short Pieces
William B. Swett
Gallaudet University Press, 2017
In Adventures of a Deaf-Mute, Deaf New Englander William B. Swett recounts his adventures in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the late 1860s. Given to us in short, energetic episodes, Swett tells daring stories of narrow escapes from death and other perilous experiences during his time as a handyman and guide at the Profile House, a hotel named for the nearby Old Man of the Mountain rock formation. A popular destination, the hotel attracted myriad guests, and Swett’s tales of rugged endurance are accompanied by keen observations of the people he meets.
       Confident in his identity as a Deaf “mute,” he notes with wry humor the varied perceptions of deafness that he encounters. As a signing Deaf person from a prominent multigenerational Deaf family, he counters negative stereotypes with generosity and a smart wit. He takes pride in his physical abilities, which he showcases through various stunts and arduous treks in the wilderness. However, Swett’s writing also reveals a deep awareness of the fragility and precariousness of life. This is a portrait of a man testing his physical and emotional limits, written from the vantage point of someone who is no longer a young man but is still very much in the prime of his life.
       This collection also includes “Mr. Swett and His Diorama,” an article from 1859 in which Swett describes his miniature recreation of the Battle of Lexington, as well as Manual Alphabets, a pamphlet published in 1875 on the history of manual alphabets that includes short biographies of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, two pioneers of Deaf education in the United States. The work is accompanied by a new introduction that offers a reflection on Swett’s life and the time in which he lived.
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front cover of Deaf American Prose, 1830-1930
Deaf American Prose, 1830-1930
Jennifer L. Nelson
Gallaudet University Press, 2013

This new anthology showcases the work of Deaf writers during a critical formative period in their history. From 1830 to 1930, these writers conveyed their impressions in autobiographies, travel narratives, romances, non-fiction short stories, editorials, descriptive pieces, and other forms of prose. The quick, often evocative snapshots and observations featured here, many explicitly addressing deafness and sign language, reflect their urgency to record Deaf American life at this pivotal time. Using sensory details, dialogue, characterization, narrative movement, and creative prose, these writers emphasized the capabilities of Deaf people to counter events that threatened their way of life.

       The volume opens with “The Orphan Mute,” a sentimental description of the misfortune of deaf people written by John Robertson Burnet in 1835. Less than 50 years later, James Denison, the only Deaf delegate at the 1880 Convention of Instructors of the Deaf in Milan, published his “impressions” that questioned the majority’s passage of a strict oralism agenda. In 1908, Thomas Flowers wrote “I was a little human plant,” a paean to education without irony despite the concurrent policy banning African Americans from attending Gallaudet College. These and a host of other Deaf writers—Laurent Clerc, Kate Farlow, Edmund Booth, Laura Redden Searing, Freda W. Bauman, Vera Gammon, Isaac H. Benedict, James Nack, John Carlin, Joseph Mount and many more—reveal the vitality and resilience of Deaf writers in an era of wrenching change.

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front cover of Deaf American Prose, 1980–2010
Deaf American Prose, 1980–2010
Kristen C. Harmon
Gallaudet University Press, 2012

In Deaf life, the personal narrative holds sway because most Deaf individuals recall their formative years as solitary struggles to understand and to be understood. Few deaf people in the past related their stories in written form, relying instead on a different kind of “oral” tradition, that of American Sign Language. During the last several decades, however, a burgeoning bilingual deaf experience has ignited an explosion of Deaf writing that has pushed the potential of ASL-influenced English to extraordinary creative heights. Deaf American Prose: 1980–2010 presents a diverse cross-section of stories, essays, memoirs, and novel excerpts by a remarkable cadre of Deaf writers that mines this rich, bilingual environment.

       The works in Deaf American Prose frame the Deaf narrative in myriad forms: Tom Willard sends up hearing patronization in his wicked satire “What Exactly Am I Supposed to Overcome?” Terry Galloway injects humor in “Words,” her take on the identity issues of being hard of hearing rather than deaf or hearing. Other contributors relate familiar stories about familiar trials, such as Tonya Stremlau’s account of raising twins, and Joseph Santini’s short story of the impact on Deaf and hearing in-laws of the death of a son. The conflicts are well-known and heartfelt, but with wrinkles directly derived from the Deaf perspective.

       Several of the contributors expand the Deaf affect through ASL glosses and visual/spatial elements. Sara Stallard emulates ASL on paper through its syntax and glosses, and by eliminating English elements, a technique used in dialogue by Kristen Ringman and others. Deaf American Prose features the work of other well-known contemporary Deaf writers, including co-editor Kristen Harmon, Christopher Jon Heuer, Raymond Luczak, and Willy Conley. The rising Deaf writers presented here further distinguish the first volume in this new series by thinking in terms of what they can bring to English, not what English can bring to them.

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front cover of Mickey’s Harvest
Mickey’s Harvest
A Novel of a Deaf Boy’s Checkered Life
Howard L. Terry
Gallaudet University Press, 2015
Howard L. Terry wrote a novel between 1917 and 1922, which he donated to the Gallaudet University Archives in 1951. There it rested until a resurgence of interest in Deaf literature led to its recent rediscovery. Mickey’s Harvest: A Novel of a Deaf Boy’s Checkered Life recounts the rollicking tale of a young deaf man and how he learned to survive and thrive at the advent of the 20th century.

       Mickey Dunmore’s story begins with the sinking of his father’s merchant sailing ship and ends with a cliffhanger in World War I. In school, after an illness caused his deafness, Mickey finds himself constantly fighting the hearing boys and later competing with the signing students when he attends a residential school for deaf students. In college, he and his best friend Dick Wagner leave early to travel the nation with the hobos, carnies, and grifters. In one town, they outfox a barker who was using a deaf girl to “read” the minds of their marks. Further on, they meet Bunny, the Mighty Mite deaf man who helps expose a hearing woman posing as deaf to scam sympathetic people. Mickey faces his greatest challenge when he falls in love with Marion Carrel, a deaf girl whose hearing father forbids their romance on eugenics grounds.

       Terry, who became deaf at the age of 11, states from the outset that he means for his novel to reveal the biases confronting  deaf people at the time. As a tonic, he populates Mickey’s Harvest with artistic, talented deaf individuals who engage readers in an earlier, colorful time as they “show their stuff.”
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front cover of Silent Life and Silent Language
Silent Life and Silent Language
The Inner Life of a Mute in an Institution for the Deaf
Kate M. Farlow
Gallaudet University Press, 2018
Silent Life and Silent Language presents a fictionalized account of life at a Midwestern residential school for deaf students in the years following the Civil War. Based on the experiences of the author, who became deaf at the age of nine and entered a residential school when she was twelve, this historical work is remarkable and rare because it focuses on signing deaf women’s lives. One of only a few accounts written by deaf women in the 19th century, Silent Life and Silent Language gives a detailed description of daily life and learning at the Indiana Asylum for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb.

       Kate M. Farlow wrote this book with the goal of giving hearing parents hope that their deaf children would be able to lead happy and productive lives. She sought to raise awareness of the benefits of deaf schools and was an early advocate for the use of American Sign Language and of bilingual education. The Christian influence on the school and on the author is strongly present in her writing and reflects an important component of deaf education at the time. Descriptions of specific signs, games, ASL story nights, and other aspects of the signing community during the 1870s will be of interest to modern students and researchers in linguistics, deaf education, Deaf studies, and Deaf history. Farlow’s work reveals a sophisticated, early understanding of the importance of access to language, education, and community for deaf individuals.
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