 My name is Donna Cachitas McCallum and my name sign is a D on the palm of my hand. Let's see, well, I began interpreting in 1983. I was a student interpreter at that time. Well, it's kind of a funny story. I had seen music performances where they had interpreters by the side of the stage and then I saw deaf people talking during the break and I wondered, what is that? That's really interesting. I went home that night and I had a roommate in the apartment I was living in. A friend of hers was sitting there and saying, oh, you know, here's some signs, moon, sun, stars. I said, well, where did you learn that? Where did you learn the sign? She said, well, there's a course at my college where you can take sign language. So the very next semester I did enroll in a course and I started learning it, fell in love with it and then I took another course and another and then I decided that I would go to NTID because I heard they had an interpreter training program offered. I applied, hoped that the best would happen. I was indeed accepted and then I entered it. It was so exciting to study interpreting, but the most exciting part of the whole thing was being able to make so many friends, learn from the deaf people on campus and become more firmly ensconced in the deaf community. I do speak a little bit of Spanish. I didn't at that time. I didn't know that much, but later on I got my bachelors in Spanish. So I didn't know it at the time, but later I did major in it. I think that learning ASL, to the extent I did, opened my mind, my brain to be able to learn other languages as well. Yes, I came to enter the interpreter training program in 1982 in the fall. I graduated in 84. In 1983 I began as a student interpreter. I worked for the Department of Interpreting Services here on campus at RIT. And most of my interpreting at that time was not the classroom. It was more the social aspects of campus life. That was before VRS, before the relay services that were offered. There was a special room on campus that was specifically for interpreting telephone conversations. It was called intercom. I also provided services for dorm meetings and presentations with audiences that were mixed deaf and hearing. That sort of thing. Yeah, I know it's really funny. When I look back, it seems, let's see, my mother I think was born in 1920. And she saw so many technological changes and advances. And the same thing is true for me. All we had was intercom at that time because we're no computers. I mean, there were computers, but not like now, you know, and not relay in VRS. So it's a whole different technological world we live in now. Yeah, exactly. I think the same thing for women's rights and what it's like now compared to how women live then. My mother, my grandmother, our great-grandmothers, if you think about it really compared to now. You know, we have all these rights. We can vote. We can work. All the things that we take for granted that they didn't have at that time. Right? In terms of interpreting poetry, both signed and English poetry, hmm. I met Jim Cohn during the interpreter training program here at NTID. And he was a poet. He wrote a lot of poems. And he was very encouraging. That's how it starts. There was a black student union performance. And they were doing for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enough. And that play had several poems interspersed between the other dramatic action on the stage. So I was working on that. I was doing some translation to be able to interpret the performance. And Patrick Grable came to the performance. And he cried. He was really touched by it. I'd done so much work on the translation, really in-depth work to be able to give a clear ASL rendition of that piece. It's very powerful. It was a wonderful experience. But I don't think that was the first time I'd interpreted poetry. I think the first time I did poetry was through, well, hmm. It's hard to remember the chronology of it all. Most of my experience with interpreting poetry was Jim's work. I would interpret for his readings. He wanted his work to be accessible to deaf people. He was studying interpreting. And he realized that this could happen. You could have an interpreter who could render the same message. And he wanted to really relate with and touch and connect with this new community he was becoming a part of. He'd see deaf people doing their storytelling or performing. And he'd say, you know, that really is a beautiful language. And that really is poetry. He would tell them that. And I remember very clearly that he was encouraging people like Peter Cook to pursue that. He said, what you're doing actually is poetry. They are poems. And it seemed like there was a lot of cross-fertilization between the deaf community and Jim. He was trying to encourage this new idea of ASL poetry to take flight. And he was learning more about what the deaf people were and what ASL poetry would be. And he basically lit the match that sparked the fire that took off after that time with ASL poetry. There were lots of different venues, somewhere at Writers and Books. And there was Jazz Berries, which was a restaurant downtown. They had a stage. They had a series. I think it was once a month, Friday nights or something like that. And they would have a hearing and a deaf poet, both of them performing in turn. And so there'd be interpreters providing access for both audiences there. There was another restaurant in town at the time called Snake Sisters. They had performances also. So Jazz Berries, Snake Sisters, Writers and Books, I think those were the three primary venues that Jim was doing organization for to make sure there were poetry series occurring. Well, it was a really exciting time in terms of translating poetry because, yes, I did work by myself, but I also worked with friends. Worked a lot with Susan Chapel. I worked with you also, Miriam. You gave me advice sometimes. And also with a lot of deaf people, like Debbie and Peter Cook. And the way that would go was I would have the poem on the paper. I would read it over. I would think really hard about what it was trying to say, try to figure out how I might translate this, how I would give a commensurate rendition to be able to show the true intent. So I would show Debbie my work and I say, do you think this is clear? Do you think it works? And I really wanted to have equivalence with the poet. So I would work with lots of different people. Do you mean during the translation process did I feel that it was clear or that I could go ahead with what I was doing? I didn't feel not only that I could ask other people. I felt like I had to ask other people. I needed a lot of help with this. I had the poet's work and sometimes if the poem was very dense, very challenging, I understood the English fine. But how was I going to render this in ASL to give the commensurate meaning? How was I going to be able to provide the same images and the same resonance to a deaf audience? So I couldn't work alone. I didn't feel that was an option. Now, there were some people, well, probably for the hearing poets, but also some interpreters who looked to scans at this. They looked at our work, the group of us that was undertaking this kind of effort at the time. And we thought it was new and exciting. Let's give it a go. Let's try. We'll just give it our best shot and see how it flows. We talked to the hearing poets, the deaf poets. We're working with all of them. We were part of this wonderful hurricane of effort, but there were other people, especially interpreters, who were saying, what the heck are you doing? You don't know ASL poetry. You don't know what you're doing. You don't know what the right form is, and you don't have a template of how to do this. You don't know what ASL translation really looks like in terms of poetry. It's such an elevated usage of the language, and English is elevated that way, and you don't even know how ASL could be rendered that way. So we felt like, yes, but if we don't try it, then we'll never know what happens or how to go about it. So I mean, the question is, how do we do a new thing? Somebody always has to start this new enterprise and take baby steps, sometimes make mistakes, be a little awkward, and later on it moves out. That's the hope anyway. I feel so lucky that I was part of that, that we did do that, because those were foundational years. I feel like the hearing poets and the deaf poets at the time were really working together. They were influencing each other, and I think that that was what was going on in our group called Bridge Of. Also, we had hearing and deaf people working together in a consolidated group. Oh, I think if we talk about that later, it'd be better. First, I think I'd like to talk about the translation process, and then we'll get to the other stuff later. Yeah, that sounds good. So my process for interpreting would really depend a lot on who I was working with. Jim, of course, well, I lived with him, so I saw him every day. So I could ask him a lot of questions about it, but that gets sticky sometimes, because if I asked a poet what they mean, they've worked so hard to write this poem, they've really crafted it and picked specific words for specific intentions. And if I said, what does this mean? He'd say, well, the meaning's right there. It's already there, of course, it's obvious. So that gets tricky sometimes, but it's very important in the translation process to know that you've got the right idea in your mind. You'd fully understand it if you attempt to translate it into another language. I also quite often worked with another hearing poet named Todd Beers. And that was a very cool process because Todd was also a painter, and his poems almost looked or felt like small miniature paintings, just like miniature paintings, but in words on paper. So I would read them and I felt like that's great because I would read this and see a picture in my mind immediately because it was so much like a painting, and it seemed a little bit easier to be able to render that in ASL. So Todd would sometimes sit down with me, we would meet together, and he would even just read his poetry for me so that I could work on the timing. He would make audio recordings once in a while, and then he would give me the whole set and then I could take them home and work on it. So first I would translate and then I would have to practice the timing to make sure that I would start and end at the appropriate times for when he started and did. I would work with other poets and the timing was tricky. It's really important in your work to address that because sometimes a poem will be really long, just verses and verses and verses, but the point of it will be at the very end. So sometimes I would have to reorder the poem and take things that occurred in the end in the written form and move them up to the beginning, which required a lot of memorization. So first I would do the translation and then I would have to memorize and practice to make sure that the timing fit the spoken rendition of it. If a person is reciting their poetry, what they're trying to express has to somehow line up with the signs, but if the point comes at the end of their spoken performance, and I've front loaded it to the beginning, it's very tricky, but when I look back at that, wow, what a challenge, but so much fun. It was such an amazing time. It was very rich. Our lives were all about learning this language. And this experience of translating really, I think helped our language abilities in ASL as we were growing in that endeavor. Yes, I would feel that it definitely had a positive impact on my interpreting too, because just working with a language or a translation capability would force us to look at the form of English and then take off that form and superimpose the form of ASL that try to preserve and maintain the meaning. We would always try to imagine how would a deaf person express this idea and keep that in mind as we were translating the English poetry. So I used quite often Debbie and Peter to ask about their opinion of what I was doing, did it work, did it not work. Also down in the cellar, people who were performing down there, I would ask, folks, is this clear? Is it not clear? And get a lot of input from them. I can't remember exactly how I began interpreting for Debbie. I met her kind of early on. She wasn't living in Rochester at the time. She was living in Cleveland and performing with the Fairmont Theater of the Deaf. So that troupe came to give a performance on campus and when they were done afterwards, somebody had a party someplace and I went to that party and I met her in person. And later, I think in the semester or quarter system, she came to study, I think, graphic design and then got her bachelor's in that. So I would see her in the cafeteria. And one time I said, hey, I think I met you before at that party. And then from then on, we were friends. And we had something that, you know, friends have. Sometimes you meet a person and you think, oh, that person's gonna be my friend. I just know we will be friends. That's what occurred when we met each other. Debbie had a lot of skills. She was a clown, a storyteller, and then she added more things to her repertoire, poetry being one of them. And Jim was very encouraging to her. He was saying, look at your own work as if it were poetry, because it is. It really is a poem and she did accept that framing of it and it became even more creative as time went on. So at that time, it was Debbie and Peter and Jim and I, we were all friends. But looking back, trying to remember the first time I actually voiced for her, I don't know. Cause in my mind, I've always voiced for Debbie. But I can't remember exactly the first time that started. I think that, yeah, I think it might be that. It was either, I think the first time, maybe it was in the Cellar, the Deaf Poetry series that was occurring there. There were Deaf poets who would come to the Cellar bar and they would, yeah, wait a minute, I wanna start over. Let's start again, okay. Oh, you mean during the performances, during that, just last minute, somebody would voice something? Yeah, I did go to the Cellar. I was somewhat involved with that series. I went as a participant to watch, of course. I wasn't living with Jim yet at the time. We were friends and I helped him Well, you know, sort of get it going, do some PR, put up the flyers and posters, things like that, to get an audience. And that may be the first time that I interpreted for Debbie in the Cellar. It's possible. I can't really remember. But we did that, we did that Cellar series. And then around the same time, there was an RIT Community for Nuclear Awareness group. And often they would have these Coffee House performance hours from time to time. They would have jugglers performing, hearing poets, and deaf poets. Everything was voice interpreted or sign interpreted at the time on campus. So Debbie did perform at those events also and Jim would perform. There'd be jugglers, musicians, all sorts of acts. And I would end up interpreting for that, peering or deaf, whatever. So I did do that. So I was interpreting in that particular situation. I may have one time or another voice for Debbie during one of those events. Yes, I was there. It was incredible, really. Well, you gave me that DVD, The Sampler, and I watched it. And I recalled, oh, that's right. It was incredible because that was my classroom. I was in the interpreter trading program and that's the classroom we met in. That was the very room. And Alan Ginsberg was sitting right in front of me. There we are at our desks and just sitting right in front of there. We were so fortunate because here we were having this personal face-to-face meeting with Alan Ginsberg. It was incredible. I also remember that I felt a little trepidation because Alan Ginsberg's sitting right there and of course the hearing world looks up to him. He's this amazing, lauded poet. But here in our audience, we also had some amazing luminaries from the deaf world. Patrick Grable was sitting there. And I was wondering, okay, we know in the hearing world that Alan Ginsberg is respected, but we have this incredible deaf performer here who does the most amazing, beautiful work. And in his community, in his world, he has looked up to in the same capacity that Alan Ginsberg is. And so I felt that I wanted people to see in the hearing world how that equivalence could be made. And I knew that the interpreting process would be part of that. So I was concerned about the effectiveness of the communication about whether these two luminaries would be able to recognize each other's greatness. And of course it did indeed happen. And the DVD helped get my memory going a little bit about that, especially in terms of the interpretation. Alan Ginsberg read from Howell. Oh, let's start again. Alan Ginsberg read from his poem Howell. And Kip Webster was interpreting it. And I remember when he got to the part, the hydrogen jukebox, Kip fingerspelled it. And Patrick Grable asked the question of Alan, why did you pick those two words? And Ginsberg explained his reasoning and then asked, do you feel that there could be an equivalent translation or would it become quote, dead in translation if you tried to put it in ASL? And then Patrick Grable said, do you mind if I give it a go? And he produced this incredible translation on the spot. It was just so powerful. That moment was amazing. Oh, I just got goosebumps. I thought, wow, look what he just did. It was just an incredible translation that he rendered right there. Those words, hydrogen jukebox, just those two words became a full ASL poem that Patrick Grable had just performed. And I thought, wow, that is so cool. We have something very exciting happening here. Yes, I really felt that. That wow moment was right there. And when that occurred, that moment, I was so relieved because Alan looked and said what he said to Patrick and Patrick understood what Alan was trying to say. And I felt, okay, the communication did indeed succeed. And the interpreter part of me was very relieved and felt good because I'd been involved in some translation and I knew that it could work and indeed it did work. Some people say it can't, this could never occur, but it really did succeed. And no, I never did create my own poetry. My introduction to poetry separate than studying the classroom was for Jim because, well, Jim, his particular style of poetry and who he is as a poet, what he likes is very much informed by the beat generation. And so quite often in his own work, he'll be looking at everyday sort of prosaic things and focusing on the image of it. William Carlos Williams, it has a famous quote, I believe it's a quote attributed to him, no ideas but in things. And I take this to mean that if you're describing what you see, then you're also showing its essence and that there's something more profound in the everyday. What presents itself to us in its image or iconic form represents something much more profound about the human experience in and of itself. That's my interpretation of that quote. And that's what Jim was trying to look for in ASL poetry and what he indeed saw evidenced in ASL poetry, those images, that iconicity. So that kind of poetry, if it's written in English, seems to be something that can be more easily rendered in ASL. Well, that's interesting what you were saying about, sometimes you can provide images to people and you don't fully understand it, but what you're left with is the feeling of it. And so I feel that poetry is actually beyond the words that are used to communicate it in a sense. The meaning actually is beyond the form, beyond the words. And it's funny because we work with the words and the words are very strong. A poet works really carefully to craft and select the correct words to bring forth that image, but the resonance is beyond what you're actually receiving. So you say you were at a poetry reading or whatever or you interpreted it and you didn't fully understand it, but you could feel the meaning viscerally, even though you didn't understand it. I think the meaning itself is not in the cognitive part of your mind, it's more within your heart and how it hits you there. You understand it with your heart, not necessarily your mind. And so I think a poem which brings forth a picture that somehow resonates within you because it touches the human condition. I think that voicing for Debbie's poetry was quite different for me. If I had an English poem, I had to do a full translation to the best of my ability and I wanted the deaf people to understand it as clear as they could. Now of course they're actually seeing the hearing poet at the same time and they know what it looks like on me and they're also hearing it, but voicing for Debbie, I would write down the words and it wouldn't necessarily look like a poem. I mean sometimes what I had written on the page would look like a poem, but my feeling was that the audience, the hearing audience members can also see the images that Debbie's putting forth. So they're watching somebody perform, Debbie perform in ASL and they're hearing my voice at the same time as sort of a support for what they're seeing. So they're getting double the amount of information, they're hearing my words through their ears, they're taking in her images through their eyes and they're getting both channels. Yeah, we as interpreters had to be careful because you can't assume that just because we know sign language, we can anticipate what hearing audiences will be able to understand and what they won't. It's very hard to know that. Some things are obvious, like in Debbie's poem, Missing Children, there's a part where we're showing a boy planting seeds and the father encouraging him to keep planting and there's a body shift between the father's character and the son's character. And I feel that most hearing people would see that miming or the role shift of a father and a son and they don't need words describing everything about that action, they'd be able to figure it out. They can see what the expression of the father would look like and what the son would look like. So in my voicing, I just said the father and his son, the father and his son, I just said that, kept it simple. No, I would come up with all the words, Debbie never contributed the words, maybe once or twice, but not often. What would tend to happen is that I would video her doing her performance and that I would watch it over and over again and I would try to figure out what might be a good match in terms of what I would say. I'd do my own work and then I would ask other friends to watch it with me. I'd say, oh, these parts give me a hard time or what do you think, does this sound okay? I work with you sometimes that way, Miriam and I work with Susan also. Sometimes Jim would help me, not much, but once in a while I would ask his opinion. Kenny too, yes. Yeah, definitely Kenny. We work together quite often and I think that we influenced each other's work. In the beginning I used too many words and Kenny didn't use enough, but I think over time we evened out to where we were voicing about the same amount as each other. We both were trying to find our way, what the best fit would be. Really, honestly, in our group, I mean, we were the only people who were doing this, so we were just flying by the seat of our pants and trying to figure out how to do it right. We did it through experience, really. We did trial and error. We'd perform, we'd gather some feedback. We would incorporate that feedback and make modifications according to what people liked and didn't like. Yep, sometimes I would show Debbie. I think she was a little worried in the beginning about whether I was representing her correctly, but as time went on and we were having more success and more positive feedback, she just trusted me and she just said, go for it. You seem to be doing fine. People are responding well, so she just said, go for it. I think it was just the right time, the right place, the right people. Right, to try to match her, mm-hmm. I did, mm-hmm. Yeah, it was fun. Does she live in New York City? Nice. So when I was an interpreter, there was a class that Stefa was teaching that was called Sign Dance. I think that's what it was. There might have been another teacher. I'm pretty sure it was Stefa. She would use signs along with the dance movement and I took that class. And I don't know, I'm trying to remember if Debbie was in that class, she might have been. It was really fun. Plus we did some improv, some improvisational work and some trust kinds of dance movements. Later on, Stefa and David had a studio, it was a dance studio and it was located right downtown Rochester. So they would have these regular improv groups. I was in it, Susan Chapel, Kenny, Debbie, Peter Cook, Jim, Stefa, David. I think sometimes other people may have joined but this was our core group that tended to show up. Very, very powerful time because it wasn't really necessarily about communication with languages, about communication through your body. Very creative, extremely creative. And it also felt therapeutic at times. All of us working together and all of us having our different relationships and connecting together. And I think it also spawned some ideas for future poems, both for the hearing people in the group and the deaf people in the group. I think that experience brought us closer together and helped us create more as a group together. Nothing, nothing is documented from that time. Just our minds, just our feeble minds and our failing memories. But that was a strong impact on me. I remember some specific instances from that time and it was very powerful for me. One way it influenced me was to become more comfortable with my body. And it made me a better interpreter because when you're an interpreter you're wearing this language on your body so of course it would help in that particular way. How did bridge of come about? Well, let's see, at that time we in our group felt that we wanted to accomplish two things. We wanted to show our work to the world, to the grander world stage and audience and also we wanted to have some gainful employment and we wondered if there was a way that we could actually make a living from showing our work. And I can remember in our apartment that was on Arian Crescent Drive in Rochester, really small, cute little apartment. We had this little living room and we were all sitting on a cushion on the floor facing each other and coming up with ideas and talking about this idea, should we try it? I remember finally we all just said, let's do it. We made a brochure to advertise the group and we tried to get some gigs and we did. It was very exciting time. It was really fun, the idea of bridge of. Sometimes Debbie would read a poem that Jim had written and then she would translate it and perform it in sign while he was reading it. So you'd have a hearing poet being translated and interpreted by a deaf person. Sometimes you'd have two deaf poets but you'd have voices, voice interpreters. So you'd have deaf poetry translated by a hearing poet. So lots of different combinations within that group. Really fun. And the name came about, well, partially it was a joke. Prepositions are very difficult in, on, to, over. They're very tough for people who are learning a second language. When someone studying English the second language prepositions are really difficult. When should it be in, on, at, over, above? Those sorts of things, very challenging. So that idea of struggling with English is difficult for deaf people because they're second language learners of English. So that's what the of part was. And the bridge of course was joining two lands, the deaf and the hearing, separated by a river but having a bridge joining the two. Plus, plus with bridge of, the dot, dot, dot part at the end of it felt like we're open to the possibilities of what can be and the great beyond in the future. So that's what that dot, dot, dot at the end of the name is. No conclusion, just sort of. And then, how many times we performed? I think, let's see. I think we were together only one year. I think it was about a year, maybe not even a full year. I remember performing at the Clearwater Festival in New York, that was in the summer. And then I remember performing in Vermont in the fall, I think. So maybe it was only, I don't know, spring through wintertime, maybe that was the duration if I remember right. I don't know. It's really challenging. You reminded me this morning about where you've got a mixed audience of deaf and hearing members and sometimes one faction of the audience wouldn't be satisfied. Sometimes the other one wouldn't. So you couldn't always assume that you would be providing access to everybody. Most the time at work for a general audience and most people really enjoyed it a whole lot. And also, the five of us would be creating things together, sometimes poetry and sometimes more like performance art. Our work tended to be political in nature. We always had a message. Some of it was humorous, of course, and some of it was stories or whatever or funny, but tended to be political. Yep, that's what the five of us did. I believe that stuff as influenced was felt in Bridge of. All five of us had been in that dance group in the improv sessions. And so then we transferred a lot of those concepts to our group work. Yes. Yeah, I remember that. Oh, with the Ronald Reagan mask. Yes, and the fire. I remember that. Yeah, I'd like to see that again. It's nice that you have some documentation that you have this. Great. Oh, it's so nice. It's interesting. You sent that DVD and I looked at it and went, oh my God, that time was so precious. It was so unique. What a time it was. The way that we all worked together and how we influenced each other. It was so inspiring. Now, here. It started here. Yeah. Yeah, it was amazing. Truly. Yeah, you have good memory. Oh, right, right, yeah. That workshop. Well, I partially took it for myself, but the Wallflower Collective. Wallflower Dance Collective. It was a performance group and it was comprised of women. It wasn't the more traditional ballet. It was more modern dance and they always had a message behind their performances. It was always a point to them. Quite often political in nature. I interpreted for a performance for them in, I think it was at the Clearwater Festival. Not sure, really. It's just terrible. I don't remember. I remember where, but I did interpret for that group a couple of times and I was taking dance classes on a regular basis at the time. During the summer, that group offered workshops in Brattleboro, Vermont and I decided to take a two-week workshop with them. Every day it was dance classes for two weeks. Night, it would just kind of hang out. It would schmooze with each other. Nope. Just dance. Really, just dance. How did it start? The National Deaf Poetry Conference? Well, let's see. So it seemed that deaf and hearing poets were getting together. It seemed like there was a poetry scene here in Rochester and Jim wanted to convene a conference of people from all over the country here in Rochester. He wanted to have a formal deaf poetry conference. He invited LMA Lentz, Clayton Valley, Peter Cook, of course, and Debbie Rennie and one more, Patrick Gravel. My role was to interpret for Debbie. Now, there wasn't any relay. There wasn't any way to get hold of people. Nowadays, of course, you could go on Skype or you could have VRS or whatever, but what we would do is video ourselves, introducing ourselves, hello, I'm an interpreter. This is my name. I'll be interpreting for you at the Deaf Poetry Conference, blah, blah, blah. We just wanted them to get a visual on who we were and welcome them and say how excited they were to be coming to Rochester. So we sent these tapes to all the poets and I think that some of the poets may have sent back videos of their work for us to look at too so that they could introduce themselves to the interpreters in the same way. Some of the deaf poets were open to working with interpreters and others felt that they didn't necessarily want to do that. They wanted to use their own words and then just give a written rendition to the interpreter to read. So there were different styles for each poet. Some people wanted to just give out a piece of paper for people to read and not have an interpreter. So I was with Debbie for the whole conference, the same as I had been always voicing for her. Kenny and Peter were paired together the same way they'd always been working together. Kenny, of course, is involved with the creative process of the poetry Peter performed. So it was a little different than my role with Debbie because I don't create it. Most not, no, was separate. My role was as a strict interpreter. I mean, once in a while I might give some distance to Debbie, like it might look better if you do a little bit of this or that, but generally I kept my ideas to myself. You want me to explain that? Okay. I don't remember who named it that, but for this particular conference most of the interpreting was closed loop, meaning that if you wanted to hear the voice interpreter you had to wear special headphones so you could hear our voices. In the auditorium, I think in Jazz Berries, also I'm not sure, or maybe it was just in the theater, Panera Theater and NTID, right? What we did was recreated the structure with foam cushions, sort of a box and then covered it with black cloth and the two interpreters assigned would sit inside it. It felt like a cocoon. It was really nice to be in there. And that way, if they were hearing people who didn't want to hear the voices and just enjoy watching the signs they wouldn't have to hear our voices escaping from that cocoon. We would speak very quietly anyway but we just wanted to make sure they didn't hear it if they didn't want to. When I look back, I can imagine that I felt very protected in that little shell, very intimate with my voicing partner. It might have been hot in there. I don't remember. Do you remember being hot in there? Right, right. Yes, it was very intimate, very close. We were really right on top of each other and it was wonderful to be able to give that support. You didn't have to worry about what it might look like to the audience if they could see us going, you're doing great or like, I need to hold your hand and petting your back. You're doing a great job. Go for it, that kind of thing. It was wonderful, wonderful environment for teamwork. Before the conference opened, oh yeah, I was very nervous. I was really scared because now what we'd been doing on a local scene was gonna be open more to the national scene. People from all over the country were gonna come and see what we'd been up to. So here it is, here's what we're doing. It was very exciting of course, especially to see all the different deaf poets one after another perform their work and then there was this panel too. The panel of poets talking about their poetry, just a thrill, really, it was. I was terrified, I was on this panel, it was worse than if I'd been interpreting something because I hadn't been using my own voice in interpreting work. I would voice Debbie's work or I would sign other people's work. I was always being somebody else, always conveying something not self-generated. I mean, it was my work of course, but it depended on somebody else's ideas. On this panel, I was being asked what I thought, asking me to talk about things and so I was really scared and I wasn't used to that role. I wasn't used to people asking me what I thought about things personally. Right, very new, yes, very new. And when something new comes along, some people are thrilled and other people are more trepidatious and feel you shouldn't go there. So there is always pros and cons to these sorts of things and that's always been the case for anything new that comes along. Some people are always resistant to change. They're going to resist new ideas. Yeah, then she moved to Sweden. Mm-hmm, wow, oh, it was so amazing when I went to Scandinavia with Debbie. It was far out, so what happened was, let's see, Debbie went during the summertime, I think she went to Denmark and she taught a workshop and gave her performance and showed poetry there and there was a woman from Denmark there who was also deaf and she said, wow, I want to put together a tour for you, I want you to go around Scandinavia and show this and I want you to have an interpreter come with you. And Debbie said, well, I just happened to have an interpreter I can bring with me. Donna, I'll check and see, she said, Donnie, I said, oh yeah, and so I went and it was so much fun. So the very next year, I think it was the fall, end of summer and into the fall, early fall, I guess. So what happened was, well, she was already there. I flew and met Debbie in Sweden and each country we went to, we would first get there and we'd meet all the deaf people that we could and we would start asking them what their signs for certain words that we had in the poetry would be because Debbie wanted to take the sign language that she was used to and put in the words from the local lexicon. So, you know, she wanted to make sure that she was able to accommodate that but of course there were some things that were universal like the son and the father that I showed before. Of course, those were things that everybody would understand but she wanted to introduce it by using the local sign for a father or the local sign for a son and then the action would be clear enough. So right away, as soon as we hit the ground in a new country, we would make it our goal to find out what the local signs were so that it would fit the work better and then be more easily comprehensible to the local deaf people. And I voiced everything in English because almost everybody speaks English in those areas who would come to the performances that we were doing at the time. When she moved to Sweden, when she moved to stay, let's see. I moved to the farm in 1989. I was there till 92, 88. I went on that tour of Scandinavia with Debbie in 89. So I guess she moved in 89 also. Once in a while, she'd come back to the US and I would interpret for her a few times. And we see each other once in a while now but just a visit, just to catch up, to take friends but it's never for work anymore. Yeah. No, I haven't voiced for her for a deaf poetry in a long time but you have to know when she moved to Sweden I moved to a small farm community and there were no deaf people anywhere around there so. And the Rochester scene was still very hot and very happening, the poetry scene but I left around that time and moved and I would come back once in a while and I would see what was going on but it wasn't with the same velocity as before when I was involved. Well, I did say a few things like this before I think but I think that poetry is a way to represent feelings, bring them forth sometimes with pictures to be able to show these profound sentiments that we have within us. A poem can show something spiritual, something that's not known with the head but it's somehow within our subconscious brought forward and then tried to communicate and it's about the human experience, something that inspires us. And it's like you said before, it's beyond words and it uses words but when you hear it or see it or read it, the feeling you get transcends the words that are used so it's transmitted through words and signs that culminates in something that's beyond those words and signs. I've said many times that maybe missing children is my favorite poem. I just watched it with another hearing friend from Canada who speaks French. We were watching this together on the DVD you sent and she was so touched by it, was so poignant and I was touched by it too. I think it tells a bigger story than what is even shown in the poem and I think poetry does that quite often and that's what we enjoy about it. Yeah, I do sometimes read poetry with my kids and it's really fun because my son is now in second grade, he has this wonderful teacher, comes to the class with a guitar sometimes and sings with them but this teacher also has the children memorize poems. After they memorize the poem, then they'll recite it to the class and then my son will bring it home on a card. The poem will be printed on a card and it's so nice to have it. So there's different colors, red, yellow, purple, whatever and we have this little stack of different colors for the different poems so we have that as a record of his poetry readings from second grade. Yes, some, not always, not always but some, yeah, some rhyme and some don't. It's funny, when I started interpreting for Debbie, but yesterday I was talking with Susan Chappell about this and I think I started interpreting for her because she was doing tours of different schools and performing her clown work and Susan said, no, that was much later. She said, you started with poetry but I think it started with storytelling and then later morphed to the poetry interpreting for her. I don't know. Clearwater, you think it's the first time that I interpreted for her? Yeah, 85, I think 84, 85, maybe 83 even? 84 I think, I think it was 84. That's when I started interpreting at Clearwater, yeah. And Debbie performed, yeah, she did. She was doing storytelling there. That's true that year. So maybe that was it, but not, no, I don't think Clearwater was the first time I interpreted for her for storytelling because there were some performances in, there was this woman who was organizing the storytelling at Clearwater and she lives in North Carolina, Louise Kessel and she invited Debbie and me to come down to North Carolina twice to do a little tour of storytelling down there. Nope, I think we did it. Thank you.