Reclaiming my book
Making Deaf space in the world of sound
During the lead up to the publication of my first novel, I had a lite existential crisis about the creation of its audiobook. I had worked on the novel for years, carried it with me in notebooks across state lines, oceans, and now it was slipping away. But it wasn’t only a loss of control—that happens with all publishing—the thing that was freaking me out was a lack of access. The story I held so close to me and knew like the back of my hand would be transformed into something I could no longer understand.
Girl At War had a very talented narrator and team. By all accounts, they made a great audiobook. But I will never know that, not for sure. I’ll experience what it became. It’s weird.
This time around, True Biz’s audiobook woke me from a dead sleep. I’d made my peace with audiobooks of my books, conceptually, and had kind of forgotten about the eventuality of this one. But this novel presented a whole new existential problem: in the writing itself, I had worked hard to make use of space on the page as a way to highlight the strength and clarity of ASL as a visual language. The result was just a small token of appreciation for what ASL can do—I had still flattened a 3-D language to two—but the signed dialogue looks and feels different than spoken dialogue in the novel, and I had no clue how they’d be able to make that distinction for a listener. I sent a low-key panic email to my editor. She said she’d flag it as a “challenge” for the audio team.
Here’s what they came up with: The audiobook team would record the book as usual, and then record a signer performing the ASL dialogue in the book. Very sensitive mics would pick up the sounds of signing—the skin-on-skin contact, the mouth morphemes, the rustling of clothes. The listener would learn that these sounds beneath the dialogue were to mean the character was speaking ASL rather than English.
We can’t capture ASL in sound form but, like the use of space in the printed text, it’s a token. I appreciate that a hearing team put some thought into the project, and were paying enough attention to notice that neither signed languages nor deaf people are silent.
So yesterday, I went to the studio, rigged up with two heavy duty mics. When I first got into the soundproof room and looked around, I started to laugh. It was mostly foreign territory, but there was also a trace of the audiologists’ booths all of us deaf and hard-of-hearing people have spent so much time in.
“I know, it’s a little ironic,” the director said, smiling. We were in uncharted territory.
We rigged up an iPad and a Google Meet screen with closed captions so we could stay on the same page. There were some charades through the window. But also, we had fun. And now that I’ve quite literally had a hand in making this book an audiobook, it feels like mine again.
If you want to see a little clip of me having a very animated conversation with myself as part of this endeavor, it’s up on Instagram here.
It’s still a little weird. But it’s true.
True Biz is out April 5th. You can pre-order from wherever you like to buy your books. Enter your receipt number here for a free sticker set designed by Deaf visual artists!