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Ohio State University professor Brenda Brueggemann is committed to making her course content accessible to students with disabilities. Her course offerings have included such subjects as "Representations of Deafness in Literature and Film" and "Critical Writing." Her recent book, "Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places," is made up of essays on the modern deaf subject since the turn of the 19th century. Brueggemann visits Writers Talk to share an excerpt from Chapter 6, "Posting Mabel," a work of creative non-fiction that explores the world of Mabel Hubbard Bell, Alexander Graham Bell's deaf wife and a character whom Brueggemann refers to as a "classic case study."

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00:00:07
00:00:10	>>From the Center for the Study and Teaching of
00:00:12	Writing at The Ohio State University, this is Writer's Talk.
00:00:15	I'm Doug Dangler. Brenda Brueggemann is an Associate
00:00:19	Professor of English at The Ohio State University, former
00:00:21	director of the first year writing program, and a prime
00:00:23	force in the effort to create OSU's disability studies minor.
00:00:28	She's the author of many journal articles and three books:
00:00:31	"Deaf Subjects Between Identities in Places",
00:00:35	"Rhetorical Visions: Reading and Writing in a Visual Culture",
00:00:38	and "Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness".
00:00:42	Welcome to Writer's Talk Dr. Brueggemann.
00:00:44	>>Thank you for having me.
00:00:46	>>Sure. Well tell me about the writing that you're doing
00:00:48	now. You've got a book that just came out, The Deaf
00:00:51	Subjects book. Tell me about the book and what you're
00:00:54	working on in it.
00:00:57	>>You want to know about the current project?
00:00:59	>> Yes.
00:01:01	>>Well mostly I'm trying to work on an expanded
00:01:03	biography of Mabel Hubbard Bell that's not
00:01:05	necessarily a straight-laced historical biography.
00:01:08	It's a work of creative non-fiction as well, so
00:01:13	one of the things I'll read from today is an
00:01:17	earlier piece from that that's actually in the Deaf
00:01:18	Subjects book. I'm working on that and also a
00:01:20	project about James Castle, a deaf folk artist,
00:01:24	self-taught artist in Boise who grew up in the
00:01:26	Boise, Idaho area.
00:01:28	>>So the Mabel piece, "Posting Mabel" which
00:01:32	comes out of the Deaf Subjects book is addressed
00:01:36	to the wife of Alexander Graham Bell, Mabel Bell.
00:01:41	She was herself deaf as was Alexander Graham
00:01:46	Bell's mother. So tell me about your take on this
00:01:51	subject. You're writing it in a non-academic or a
00:01:53	different kind of academic writing even though
00:01:55	it's appearing in an academic text.
00:01:58	It's a series of postcards to her.
00:02:01	>>Yeah, really I think that all of the works
00:02:04	that I've done, all three of the books, I try to
00:02:07	do academic work based on academic research, but
00:02:10	also with some kind of creative element in it as
00:02:13	well. And that element tends to be essayistic and
00:02:17	involves some perspective also myself.
00:02:19	So with this piece with Mabel, you know I guess
00:02:21	I can say I've long been fascinated with Mabel
00:02:25	Hubbard Bell. Most people don't know that Alexander
00:02:29	Graham Bell's wife was deaf and that in fact that's
00:02:33	how and why he invented the telephone.
00:02:36	He was looking for a device that would help deaf
00:02:38	and hard of hearing people to hear better so that
00:02:40	he could teach them this method of instruction
00:02:43	that he and his father had devised called
00:02:45	"visible speech." And Mabel was one of his
00:02:49	students. And once he fell in love with her, at
00:02:52	least he had the good graces to not be her
00:02:56	teacher anymore and so we have, just all this
00:03:00	stuff and to think about also her life and how
00:03:03	she would have negotiated her life, living a life
00:03:06	literally through letters and through letter
00:03:07	writing herself, which is why I choose to
00:03:09	write letters back to her.
00:03:11	But to have negotiated what would have been,
00:03:13	especially for the six months they always spent
00:03:15	in in Washington D.C., a very social atmosphere
00:03:20	and how she would have been in that space and
00:03:23	given as deaf as she was, and how she would have
00:03:27	been his wife and accompanied him in that. I think
00:03:30	the story is very different between the Washington
00:03:33	D.C. residents and the Nova Scotia residents.
00:03:36	When she's in Nova Scotia, she seems to thrive.
00:03:40	It's her place and so I want to work on that.
00:03:43	What I'm doing essentially is using passages
00:03:48	from the voluminous letters that she wrote that
00:03:50	they have in the Library of Congress archives in
00:03:52	the Alexander Graham Bell Family Collection and
00:03:54	often using bits and pieces from those letters
00:03:56	plus the historical context... that I know there are
00:04:01	four different biographies of Alexander Graham Bell
00:04:05	that are out there now. And she's always written
00:04:06	into them, but there's never been her story alone.
00:04:09	So I'm using her letters to reconstruct her
00:04:12	story also based on the A G Bell biographies.
00:04:15	>>And you excerpt some in here where she's sort
00:04:18	of chastising Alexander Graham Bell for not
00:04:19	writing more because she tends to write really
00:04:21	long letters, and I guess he didn't.
00:04:24	So how did he respond to her writing?
00:04:27	>>There are also some pieces from his letters
00:04:30	and they'll be in there too, but kind of that
00:04:31	essentially irony I guess that sometimes sits in
00:04:34	the middle of many marriages.
00:04:37	So while he was seen very much - as his
00:04:38	biographer said - everything about Alexander
00:04:40	Graham Bell was about communication.
00:04:43	One biographer Robert Bruce said that was only
00:04:46	the summary of Alexander Graham Bell's whole
00:04:52
00:04:53	life's work. And Bell himself saw himself primarily,
00:04:55	first and foremost as a deaf educator. He thought
00:04:56	that was one of the major contributions of his life
00:05:00	story. So communication, but yet ironically it was also
00:05:03	said that he didn't communicate much.
00:05:06	His son in law David Fairchild said he was one
00:05:08	of the most reclusive people that they knew, and
00:05:12	it seemed to be when they went to Nova Scotia
00:05:14	that became particularly the same.
00:05:16	And then people came to the Bell estate, but he
00:05:19	was gone. He was also gone a lot particularly in the
00:05:22	earlier years of their life. And so they're writing
00:05:24	letters back and forth and over and over and over
00:05:27	again, she does. She chastises him for not writing
00:05:31	and while that might seem like kind of stereotypical
00:05:34	gender thing, it was the only way that Mabel had to
00:05:38	communicate. It was her primary method of communication.
00:05:42	>>Is that how she communicated to him when they
00:05:45	were together? Or was--he had talked about the visual
00:05:49	language that they had created which was a forerunner...
00:05:51	>>She used no sign language whatsoever.
00:05:53	Sign language already existed in America, it had
00:05:56	already been here on American soil for probably
00:05:59	about 80 good years, and there were schools all
00:06:02	over for the deaf, and in fact Mabel Hubbard
00:06:06	Bells' father founded the Clarke School in North
00:06:08	Hampton, MA, is still to this day the world's
00:06:11	premier best known university for the oral
00:06:15	education of deaf people. They don't use sign
00:06:18	language and it's always been that legacy. She
00:06:20	herself never had anything to do with the school
00:06:24	other than attending a few classes there when
00:06:26	she was younger. She was asked several times
00:06:29	to give graduation speeches there and always
00:06:32	turned them down. As she said in one of her
00:06:34	letters she did not choose to associate with
00:06:36	deaf people at all. So her father also had this
00:06:39	connection and built this school. Of course
00:06:42	Alexander Graham Bell gave quite a bit of money
00:06:44	too. But that...
00:06:49	>>Well that's really... there are all these ironies
00:06:54	clustered around here. He invents, as the deaf
00:06:58	educator, a machine that probably wasn't able
00:07:01	to do a whole lot for the people that he was
00:07:03	attempting to invent it for, but what were the
00:07:06	ways that they negotiated that out? She's writing
00:07:12
00:07:13	to him a lot and he's sort of responding.
00:07:16	Do you get a sense of what that meant for the
00:07:18	marriage between the two people? Her ability to
00:07:22	write and his ability to not necessarily communicate.
00:07:24	>>I very much see a shift already in her story
00:07:27	from the earlier years. The first ten years she looses...
00:07:31	she has two daughters and then she looses both
00:07:33	boys. Both of the boys lived, died very shortly after
00:07:39
00:07:39	their birth. And for both of their births, Alex was
00:07:41	not there at the time, he was traveling abroad.
00:07:46	So she also, I can't imagine for someone who is
00:07:51	very hard of hearing, myself, and who has given
00:07:54	birth myself, it was extraordinarily stressful to
00:07:57	understand what was going on. The conversation
00:08:00	around you in that moment. The seriousness of
00:08:05	a hospital. I had one child, there were only a few
00:08:08	complications with, but it was quite stressful,
00:08:11	not ever feeling you were communicating clearly
00:08:14	with them. So she would have negotiated that by
00:08:19	herself. It seems that of course her lip reading
00:08:21	didn't go. She has a very famous piece that she
00:08:25	wrote in an 1895 article in The Atlantic Monthly
00:08:31
00:08:31	called "The Subtle Art of Speech Reading." And
00:08:34	when she talks about how she learned to speech
00:08:36	read and how it's an art and how she uses it.
00:08:39	So it seems that it was primarily through lip
00:08:41	reading that she communicated with him.
00:08:45	Also when they were abroad, trying to ask him to
00:08:48	write. I do know that seeing a letter her many mentions
00:08:50	that she often communicated with her staff,
00:08:53	because they had a very extensive staff,
00:08:56	particularly on the big estate in Nova Scotia
00:08:58	primarily through writing back and forth with
00:08:59	them. So I haven't seen any of that writing, but
00:09:01	I'm hoping there are some samples of it at the
00:09:03	estate up in Nova Scotia so I could look at that
00:09:06	kind of communication as well. She lived in a time
00:09:09	when letter writing was a thing to do.
00:09:14	What does happen later in her life is that she
00:09:16	begins to take over all of his record keeping so
00:09:18	he's doing the experiments with the hydro kites
00:09:21	and aviation. And she's keeping all the notes for
00:09:23	that and she's keeping all the notes for the sheep
00:09:25	experiments that he was doing with sheep about
00:09:29	raising a stock of sheep and she's the note
00:09:31	taker. So she really gets to enter his research
00:09:35	rather than standing outside of it.
00:09:37	>>This is all stuff that I didn't know he did in
00:09:38	the later part of his life. What were the sheep for?
00:09:41	>>Alexander Graham Bell was one of the primary
00:09:45	eugenic - eugenicists of the day at the time and
00:09:47	in fact he also had a famous tract called "On the
00:09:52	Marriage and Progeny of Deaf People in the United
00:09:57	States." So he studied deaf families in the
00:10:00	United States to try to document what level the
00:10:03	deafness was transmitted genetically and it was
00:10:06	his argument that that's why deaf people needed
00:10:08	to not marry other deaf people. And because,
00:10:11	and he was smart enough to know that deafness
00:10:15	was not all genetic. Obviously Mabel was not
00:10:18	genetically deaf. She became deaf from scarlet
00:10:20	fever at the age of three.
00:10:25	So he's a primary eugenicist of the day and so
00:10:27	the sheep experiments were part of eugenic
00:10:30	experiments to see if he could raise a different
00:10:32	kind of breed of sheep. He believed that having
00:10:35	plentiful sheep would be a great advantage to
00:10:38	the sheep stock and the raising of young sheep.
00:10:40	So he was working on that project and many others.
00:10:43	>>Well you've brought something that is from
00:10:46	"Posting Mabel" so I'd like to hear some of it if you'd like.
00:10:52
00:10:52	>>Sure I'd be glad to. I guess maybe I should
00:10:55	say just a couple things before.
00:10:58	This is an example of the whole series of works,
00:11:01	but what I'm trying to do is use an image from
00:11:04	the AG Bell family collection of photographs in
00:11:07	the library of congress and using an image as a
00:11:09	kind of visual anchor for it and each piece also
00:11:15	contains some actual pieces of Mabel's writing so
00:11:17	I use it, but I'm writing to her. So it's also historical
00:11:23	because I'm basing some of it on historical facts
00:11:26	from their life, but it's creative and inventive
00:11:30	because at some points I leave the history on
00:11:33	the page and I have to imagine Mabel because
00:11:35	I don't know all the truth of her life.
00:11:37	And the other part that occurs is I inevitably
00:11:40	write some of my own autobiography into here.
00:11:43	So there are pieces too because as someone who
00:11:46	is very hard of hearing, and Mabel was much
00:11:48	deafer than I was, I kind of imagine myself in
00:11:51	her position, and vice versa. So trying to build
00:11:54	that on her. This is also for me, you mentioned
00:11:58	one of the books, I have a textbook actually
00:12:00	on Reading and Writing in a Visual Culture,
00:12:04	which is about teaching students how to
00:12:06	understand visual rhetoric and visual communication
00:12:09	and analyze it. This in some ways, this little piece
00:12:12	is also an example of visual rhetorical analysis on
00:12:16	which I analyze an image kind of rhetorically and
00:12:17	analyze it from its visual angles. So I guess I'll just read it.
00:12:23
00:12:24	>>Alright.
00:12:26	>>Ok. This begins, this is the Alexander Graham Bell
00:12:30	family portrait--a very famous one from 1885.
00:12:34	"Dear Mabel, this image appears, reappears,
00:12:37	replicates itself in virtually ever book I have
00:12:41	found about AG Bell, about you and Mr. Bell, about just you.
00:12:44	It is an official family portrait from 1885.
00:12:47	It makes me anxious. Yet I can't stop staring at it.
00:12:50	The girls are young here, Elsie at age 7 and
00:12:53	Daisy at age 5. You have also recently lost two
00:12:59
00:13:00	sons who both died shortly after their birth.
00:13:04	Edward in 1881, and Robert in 1883.
00:13:07	I think their ghosts haunt this portrait.
00:13:11	I have never lost a child, but my youngest
00:13:16	sister has lost two, and two boys at that.
00:13:19	And even today with her one beautiful daughter,
00:13:21	now married and happy with a successful career,
00:13:24	my sister's character always seems a bit anchored
00:13:26	down, ever on the verge of a deep sigh.
00:13:29	And with a slightly dull tinge from the losses
00:13:31	that surround her. There is a space in this
00:13:36	portrait for Edward and Robert.
00:13:38	They inhabit in their absence, the triangular
00:13:40	place that is cut between you and Alec, the space
00:13:42	behind where Daisy, their youngest older sister
00:13:44	sits. It is this space that you are gazing toward,
00:13:47	a space of past, or through Alec himself.
00:13:53
00:13:53	You are in this portrait, but you are not.
00:13:58	Your girls and Alec all face the camera.
00:14:01	Their eyes are aimed at one object together.
00:14:03	You are not with them. You're smaller even
00:14:07	than your daughters. The tight angles of your
00:14:11	body match the slant of your gaze which travels
00:14:14	in the direction of Alec to your left, but then
00:14:17	goes right passed him somewhere into infinity-
00:14:19	into ghosts. There are angles everywhere.
00:14:23	You predate Picasso's own Weeping Woman.
00:14:25	Your eyes angle slightly downwards as if ready to
00:14:28	Alec's eyes should they move to meet yours, or
00:14:33	perhaps your eyes angle downwards as if to look
00:14:36	at subjects smaller than you. The only thing that
00:14:38	anchors you in this portrait is your elbow so
00:14:41	angular and stiff locked into Elsie's hands.
00:14:46	In fact Elsie whose seven year-old form is far
00:14:48	more substantial than yours here holds you up.
00:14:52	Your fragile slight angular corseted frame edges
00:14:54	against her arm. And the corset itself traps you
00:14:59	as a triangle. The bend of your arm with Elsie's
00:15:02	locks creates a harsh right angle.
00:15:05	And the deep V and the gulf of ghost white face
00:15:08	between you and Alec actually dominates an
00:15:10	angularity the center of this portrait.
00:15:12	The inverted triangle from your shoulders to
00:15:16	your bound waist reverses the one with your head,
00:15:19	with your chin tucked tightly against your neck.
00:15:23	And Elsie's legs are crossed at her ankles, but
00:15:25	with her knees held tight against each other
00:15:28	while Daisy's legs are in a more relaxed pose,
00:15:31	less ladylike perhaps, but she was only five.
00:15:33	And her knees are wide apart, although her
00:15:35	ankles also come to a crossed position.
00:15:37	Another triangle then is captured in the post of
00:15:39	Daisy's legs and this one dominates the central
00:15:40	foreground of the picture. Your right hand extends
00:15:44	from the right elbow that is held by Elsie and
00:15:46	comes to rest slightly on Daisy's shoulder.
00:15:50	Without the girls, you would collapse to the
00:15:53	floor, or drift spirit-like up out of the image.
00:15:57	They anchor you. They show you up.
00:16:00	The three of you, a woman and her children, form
00:16:03	your own triangular unit. And Alec alone is square.
00:16:08	Alec is alone. And he seems to realize this in 1885
00:16:11	as well in a long, anxious letter to you written on
00:16:13	December 12th 1885 from New York, approximately
00:16:19
00:16:20	two years after you lost David, your second son.
00:16:22	He begins by confessing that in your eight years
00:16:26	of marriage so far he has largely offered you
00:16:29	"words without soul like too many of the letters
00:16:32	I have written to you of late years." His
00:16:35	letters filled with memories of how he wooed you
00:16:37	and then near death proclaims of his debt and
00:16:40	respect and love to you he writes, 'All that I am
00:16:42	today I owe to you and yours. I love you darling
00:16:44	more than you can ever know.' But then following
00:16:47	on these anxious endearments, he wonders first
00:16:51	whether it is best for you 'that I should return just now.'
00:16:55	And then he turns that wonder into his own,
00:16:57	pending on the matter and he pronounces,
00:17:00	'I do not believe that anything short of our
00:17:04	complete separation for time with secure for
00:17:06	you that perfect rest that I am sure you need
00:17:07	to make you well.' And then in the longest
00:17:09	paragraph of the letter, near the end when he
00:17:11	declares your complete separation necessary,
00:17:14	he comes finally to the real heart of the matter:
00:17:16	to the loss of your two sons and his guilt over
00:17:19	those losses. He writes, 'and when death came
00:17:22	and robbed us of the little ones we wanted so
00:17:25	much, you forgot your own suffering and you
00:17:27	tried to comfort me. Dear, dear Mabel.
00:17:31	My true, sweet wife. Nothing will ever comfort
00:17:33	me for the loss of these two babes for I feel
00:17:35	that at heart I was the cause. I do not grieve
00:17:39	because they were boys, but because I believe
00:17:41	that my ignorance and selfishness caused their
00:17:43	death and injured you. In the first child case,
00:17:46	one cause seemed clear, both to you and me.
00:17:49	After his death, I prevented you from fully
00:17:52	recovering and I gave you another child before
00:17:55	you were well. You have not even yet completely
00:17:57	recovered and I believe you never will until you
00:18:00	had a complete and prolonged rest.'
00:18:04	This is from the 12th of December 1885.
00:18:07	In an undated letter then you write to Alec
00:18:09	which seems in the same period, you also bring up
00:18:12	the loss of your son and in the very same short
00:18:14	breath your additional sense of your own lack as
00:18:16	a mother." And I want to say here as an aside
00:18:19	when I read this aloud. I have to point out that
00:18:21	the undating of this letter is really significant.
00:18:23	Mabel kept the legacy and she knew very early
00:18:28	on, she would always chastise Alec for writing
00:18:32	her letters and not dating them. Because she
00:18:34	already knew that this was a famous person who
00:18:36	was a legacy and she was keeping all of the material.
00:18:38	So when she doesn't date the letter herself it
00:18:41	is in some ways to me code to real privacy of the
00:18:44	moment, that it wasn't really meant to be part of
00:18:46	the record. So we have this undated letter and here
00:18:51	in this one, here you're hearing Mabel's loss
00:18:53	haunts the text and forms a cross of burden
00:18:55	that you try to share with him. He writes,
00:19:00	"I believe in God, perhaps the reason our boys
00:19:03	were taken from us so early was that we have
00:19:04	not done our duty by the children that we have.
00:19:05	And perhaps we never have wanted till we prove
00:19:08	that we are able and willing to give our children
00:19:10	proper care." "Why was our wealth given to us if
00:19:14	not to give you Alec, time to make up to your
00:19:18	children what they lose by their mother's loss.
00:19:20	They need to be better cared for, provided by,
00:19:24	they will have to act more for themselves than
00:19:26	other more fortunate mother's children." And
00:19:30	that's the end of that passage.
00:19:34	"What they lose by their mother's loss, if only
00:19:37	they were 'more fortunate mother's children.' I
00:19:39	hardly know what to write now Mabel.
00:19:44	This portrait and those words, they drive a
00:19:45	wedge through my own heart. You end this
00:19:48	letter as your loving but distrust wife and you
00:19:50	set down the weeping woman. A sentence that
00:19:54	swirls in pain. Alec, I am frightened and I don't
00:19:57	see what we are coming to. And in this portrait
00:20:01	I can hardly see you Mabel and I am frightened too."
00:20:05	>>Well that's a really great passage and it
00:20:07	interests me on a couple different levels.
00:20:11	One of the interesting things is to see somebody
00:20:14	do a reading of an image like this and to say,
00:20:17	what is that image mean in the context of the
00:20:21	time and the context of the family?
00:20:24	But you're bringing it into the context of your
00:20:25	own life, which is, I think, an unusual academic
00:20:28	move because normally as an academic writer
00:20:30	you're supposed to pull back and not have any of
00:20:33	that in there. So how far along were you in your
00:20:35	academic career before you said, "you know what?
00:20:40	I'm willing to take this chance.
00:20:42	I'm willing to make that part of the writing."
00:20:44	Because there is a camp of writers that do that
00:20:47	and then there's a camp that's very against it.
00:20:50	>>It was in my first book called "Lend Me Your Ear".
00:20:54	In that book which was before tenure - it was my
00:21:00
00:21:01	tenure book - the books that you write to get
00:21:03	tenure. And to be honest I was in the middle of
00:21:05	writing very academic chapters, and the chapters
00:21:08	were very much about the ways in which young
00:21:10	deaf students negotiate and pass particularly in
00:21:14	the age of mainstream, where they are largely
00:21:16	mainstreamed. And how they pass as hearing
00:21:19	impaired people as much as they can, and to
00:21:22	what degrees they give up that passing.
00:21:26	So I'm writing about research that I'd done at
00:21:27	Gallaudet, the world's only university for deaf
00:21:30	and hard of hearing where a lot of mainstream
00:21:33	students, they've been very successful, they've
00:21:35	been mainstreamed into hearing high schools and
00:21:36	now they've chosen to come to Gallaudet
00:21:39	University and they're reimmersed in a kind of
00:21:42	deaf culture and identity. Many of them have to
00:21:43	learn American Sign Language when they arrive
00:21:45	on campus. They know a few signs, but they
00:21:47	don't know the language per say.
00:21:49	So I was interested in part of that study about
00:21:51	how they're negotiating learning the literacy
00:21:54	skills of the deaf community and American Sign
00:21:58	Language while they're also learning how to be
00:21:59	college students and perform college level
00:22:01	critical literacy. So that was the study that I had
00:22:04	gone there to do for my dissertation.
00:22:07	So I'm working on these two chapters that are
00:22:09	very much about this kind of parallel literacy
00:22:10	move that's happening for the students.
00:22:12	And one of the chapters was based on a student
00:22:15	who used the phrase when she finally passed her
00:22:17	English class after three attempts to pass the
00:22:19	basic writing class. It took her three semesters
00:22:22	in a row and this is very common.
00:22:26	At the time she said, "its so hard to believe
00:22:27	that you pass it." She is referring to the
00:22:31	class, but I took it as a kind of thing about the
00:22:34	whole levels of passing with identity and
00:22:36	language and deafness. And it echoed throug
00:22:39	my head and I thought, "I have this story."
00:22:41	My life story is a story of passing.
00:22:44	And one day when I was kind of stuck in my
00:22:46	office on the 5th floor of Denney Hall working on
00:22:49	this chapter, I was stuck, and pieces of my story
00:22:53	kept coming back to me. I heard them in this
00:22:55	young student's story. I sat down and started to
00:22:57	type out this other essay.
00:23:00	And I had come into graduate school as an
00:23:02	academic actually doing a lot of create writing.
00:23:05	I had written poetry, I had written fiction, but
00:23:06	I had never really dabbled in essay before.
00:23:09	So I wrote the essay called "On Almost Passing"
00:23:12	really as a kind of stress relief from the
00:23:18	academic work and then I realized how much it
00:23:19	actually fit with and answered to the project.
00:23:22	So the rest of the book I did that. I'd do two
00:23:24	chapters and then I'd do a kind of personal
00:23:25	piece that echoed with the academic chapters.
00:23:27	So I kind of set up there and perhaps people
00:23:32	were willing to go with it because I realized in
00:23:34	some ways that my deafness, my hearing loss
00:23:37	authorized me to do that. Because most people
00:23:41	don't know the story of how people with hearing
00:23:45	loss negotiate their lives. I use that word a lot,
00:23:47	negotiate, but it really is.
00:23:50	>>Do you think it's something that's become
00:23:51	more common now that you can create more
00:23:56	space for the personal within academic writing.
00:23:58	It sort of seems that way to me, but I don't do
00:24:02	nearly as much academic reading as I used to.
00:24:04	Thankfully.
00:24:06	>>I think so. I think I see it particularly a lot
00:24:10	in the larger umbrella of the stuff we call identity
00:24:13	studies. I see that going on a lot as a viable form.
00:24:16	And I think academic writing has, it's not just
00:24:22
00:24:22	a form, but it's also about re-conceiving genres,
00:24:27	it's a mixing of genres as well. Like I said, this
00:24:30	piece that I'm working on with Mabel doesn't
00:24:33	have one single generic name for it.
00:24:35	>>Because it's not just epistolary. It's something beyond...
00:24:38	>>It's not just epistolary. It's historical in a sense,
00:24:40	but boy I'm not a historian, which is why I had to
00:24:43	do it this way. Because I couldn't do a biography
00:24:45	of Mabel because I would never have the patience
00:24:49	for the historical work that's needed, but I know
00:24:51	how to invent something.
00:24:54	So I take, like any good writers of the thing
00:24:58	called create non- fiction or literary non-
00:25:00	fiction, do the research, but then you invent out
00:25:02	from there. And then it's a way to tell her story
00:25:04	but also tell some of mine too.
00:25:07	>>I'm just interested quickly in the little time
00:25:10	we've got left, how do historical writers respond
00:25:13	to the kind of writing that you've done.
00:25:15	Do you have a lot of people in the history
00:25:19	department, or people interested in something
00:25:22	like that? Do they give a lot of problem to you?
00:25:25	>>I don't know if a lot of problem, but I will
00:25:27	say that I've gone out twice to other
00:25:29	universities and read this and it does tend to be
00:25:33	a historian who comes down afterwards and wants
00:25:35	to press me on some points about how I checked
00:25:37	out this carefully and how I checked out that.
00:25:39	And I'll be honest, my best friend in the world
00:25:42	is a very good colleague who is a historian--
00:25:44	Susan Birch is her name, she's at Middlebury College--
00:25:48	and the Mabel project began because Susan and I
00:25:52	were thinking of doing a book on Mabel together.
00:25:55	And that's how it started out and we found the
00:25:59	historical approach she wanted to take with
00:26:02	Mabel, and after two days of looking at all the
00:26:04	archival material that we could get our hands on
00:26:08	about Mabel Hubbard Bell, I was done.
00:26:10	I was ready to invent her. But Susan still wanted
00:26:14	to go follow this source and track this down,
00:26:15	and get this. I was like, I got her!
00:26:18	>>Alright well that's really an interesting take
00:26:21	on writing and if we had more time I'd ask you
00:26:24	about how that translates to when you used to be
00:26:26	the director of the first year writing program
00:26:30	because I'm sure it was interesting negotiation
00:26:35	for you to go through working with students and
00:26:37	working with your own kind of writing.
00:26:40	The book again is Deaf Subjects Between
00:26:43	Identities and Places from Brenda Jo Brueggemann.
00:26:46	From the Ohio State University, thank you for
00:26:48	coming onto Writer's Talk.
00:26:50	>>Yeah, thank you.
00:26:52	>>We appreciate it. And from The Ohio State
00:26:54	University Center for the Study and Teaching
00:26:56	of Writing, this is Doug Dangler saying, keep writing!
00:27:00

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