Make Your Own Hats
Just do it.
Content Warning: With respect to the state of *waves hands around* all this, what follows is an unserious post. If you would prefer serious content (understandable) in these terrible times, click here.
Recently, the publishing world seems to have a thing for hats. In an ever-competitive market, book sellers have turned to offering swag—in this case, baseball caps bearing book titles or iconography lifted from their covers— to influencers as a way to build hype around certain books. The New York Times Style section even wrote a thing about whether the hat was the new tote bag.
A lifelong lover of both baseball and its hats, I was jealous when I first saw them. But being neither cool nor on TikTok enough to be a recipient of book swag, I was relegated to watching the proliferation of hats longingly from afar (Instagram).
“I wonder what kind of sales numbers I’d have to do to get a hat,” I mused to a writer friend one night. She said encouragingly that I could totally get a hat, especially because “true biz” is also fun slang with meaning in the world beyond books. Trubiz, though, in book years True Biz is already old news, and even when it was shiny and new, it had not been the kind of book that captured the hearing swag-imagination.
Still, if not on my head, the hats were living rent free inside it. I weighed my options: I could learn to do TikTok. I could write a swag-worthy next book, though almost certainly everyone would be over hats by the time I finished the damn thing. I could just be normal and forget about hats!
“Write the book you want to see in the world,” is a thing people say in writing workshops. It’s the kind of advice that is both valid and probably unhelpful most of the time. As readers, it’s often hard to articulate why we love the books we do, and reverse-engineering that magic from the craft perspective can be even harder.
When I started True Biz, I didn’t know the specs of what the book should be, but I knew the voids that needed filling. I worked backward from them, casting deaf mischief and humor, deaf rage and deaf joy into discernable shape from the empty mold.
In the end, I think I did actually write the book I’d want to see out there, or one version of it—especially something I could’ve used as a young person going deaf. And even as I can think of 1,000 little ways I’d change it now, I’m also proud of what it has done out in finding its deaf community, and making hearing readers think for a beat.
I’m working on another round of edits for my next book now. God-willing, the publication grind for this new thing will kick into gear and there won’t be much Biz biz left to worry about.
So how about a little send off?
Reader, I made the hat I wanted to see in the world. I kept the rainbow colors, but changed the spelling to “tru biz,” in keeping with the way we traditionally gloss the ASL phrase into English. Is it a nerdy, and slightly corny thing to have done? Sure. But also, it makes me happy, this deaf hat.
If you, too, would like a tru biz hat, you can have one for $20 (+ shipping). Proceeds will go to Off the Grid Missions.
Off The Grid is a deaf-run NGO that provides humanitarian aid to deaf and disabled people in areas of armed conflict, natural disaster, and other crises. OTG is currently working in Gaza, Syria, and Haiti, among other locations.
Biz
On August 25th 2PM ET, I’ll be teaching a virtual master class “Disability as Craft” as part of fundraiser for beloved Philly literary nonprofit Blue Stoop. The class will be in ASL, with English interpretation and captions. Registration is $50 (goes to the Stoop), 10% off with the code NOVIC10. More info and registration here.
Be sure to check out the entire Summer School lineup— featuring Liz Moore, Carmen Machado, Asali Solomon, Emma Eisenberg, Madeline Miller, and many other greats.
Save the Date: Deaf Lit Fest, happening in Seattle, WA on Oct 11-12. More info TK!