Introduction: Deaf Lives Leading Deaf Lives
Let me begin at the beginning for the gathering of texts that make up this special issue. Let me start with the original idea for the Narrating Deaf Lives conference (where each of these texts and authors appeared) that was held November 4–6, 2004, at Gallaudet University, and with the inception of Gallaudet University Press's Deaf Lives series on biography, autobiography, and documentary.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there were already some Deaf, CODA, hard of hearing, and late-deafened autobiographies and biographies out there. Yet, as both Jan-Kåre Breivik (Deaf Identities in the Making, 2005) and I (Lend Me Your Ear, 1999; Literacy and Deaf People, 2004) have recently suggested, deaf lives and writing—placed together, particularly in relation to deaf people's own life stories—have not been common and perhaps not even condoned. Breivik summarizes the risks, rewards, and resources of narrating or identifying a deaf life via writing (in a language that feels uncomfortable, does not facilitate the process of writing for the author, and often is not the author's own). He points out that deaf people are often "engaged in identification processes where the stakes are high. To succeed in their identification endeavors, they are often restricted to a limited number of alternatives . . . because literacy has been and still is less than widespread" (2–3). Some of the standard earlier autobiographies by deaf people came from postlingually, well-educated, literary-minded individuals—English poet and professor David Wright's Deafness: An Autobiography (1969) and Chicago Sun-Times journalist Harvey Kisor's What's That Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of [End Page 111] Deafness (1991), for example. (These are also by white men.) And, as Breivik points out, "their stories often highlight the faculty of reading and writing as a specific trait of their lives and as a means of connecting to or 'making it' in the hearing world" (3). Their works constitute, then, the way in which "writing is always the hero of writing," a clever point made by literacy scholar Thomas Newkirk (1997) in a study on the performance of self in student writing.
Yet things are changing, and processes and products for literacy, as well as ways of expressing life experiences and stories, are among the advances. Digital media, video, film documentary—all of these genres are increasingly used to convey life stories. These new and increasingly visual methods of autoexpression mark what Breivik claims is an "autobiographical trend [that] is both a global trait of modern life . . . and reflects the specific transformations within the Deaf worlds" (3). The Deaf Lives series aims to capture, reflect, and promote these creative, diverse, and expressive ways of "narrating d/D lives." The November 2004 conference and the sampling of papers from it that are published in this issue gesture toward inclusive and innovative means of discovering, interpreting, and producing deaf lives in multiple genres and formats.
This issue celebrates a number of examples of interesting d/Deaf lives of infinite variety leading other d/Deaf lives, surely equally remarkable and diverse. It was imagined that others who are not Deaf, deaf, or hard of hearing—like the parents, teachers, siblings, and peers that Gina Oliva addresses in her commentary included here—might listen in or read over one's shoulders. As the first volume in Gallaudet University Press's Deaf Lives series, Oliva's text is her story—her autobiography—but it is also the stories of nearly eighty other "solitaires" (as she calls them). Oliva's book, Alone in the Mainstream: A Deaf Woman Remembers Public School (2004), resourcefully blends personal narrative with interview-based qualitative research. Moreover, she addresses the need to have the effects of mainstreaming deaf and hard of hearing students explored by the adults who experienced that process themselves long ago. When Oliva's manuscript first arrived at Gallaudet University Press, it was not a biography, a memoir, or an autobiography...
