 I'm Ella May Lentz. I was born here in California in the Berkeley area. My parents are deaf. My father was from North Carolina. My mother went to the Berkeley School for the Deaf. I have one brother who's deaf. My grandparents are on both sides are all hearing so it's just my immediate family that's deaf. When I was five years old I went to California School for the Deaf now called Fremont but it's located in Berkeley and then I graduated in 1971 went into Gallaudet, graduated in 75 and from then on I worked at various jobs. Directly after college I worked with Harlan Lane and Marie Phillips that was in Boston and I was a research assistant. I help with their ASL linguistic research. After that I transferred to the Salk Institute and I work with Ursula Belouji. I was just there for a few months and then I came back here back to my home where I've had a lot of different sorts of jobs. I performed, I performed poetry, I've given workshops, I teach deaf people. At Gallaudet I taught deaf people also. I teach ASL to hearing people. Primarily I teach ASL to hearing folks. I've been doing that for about 30 years. Just recently in June of 2007 I retired and now I've established my own business. I'm giving ASL consulting services and basically I present to various audiences about ASL. I present on stage and I teach people how to give high-level formal ASL presentations and in fact the company is called ASL Presents to help people be able to do that better. I feel that we need to improve our signing skills and I keep working on the signing naturally ASL curriculum. That's my work history up till now. I grew up signing. Now at the time when I was growing up we didn't call it American Sign Language or ASL. My parents were very involved in the local deaf community. We had such a strong and vibrant deaf community full of really amazingly robust leaders. We had deaf clubs. We had teachers in the schools for the deaf that were deaf still and even though oralism was taking over we still had a fair number of deaf teachers. It was a small number but a good amount and of course the clubs were robust. We had a lot of deaf service agencies. One was called Dakara that's been running for over 40 years. So that was the environment I grew up in. A lot of friends who were deaf. Everybody around me was deaf. So of course sign language was second nature to me. That's what we used. When I was about three or four I had a hearing grandmother who could sign a little bit. She just signed one or two signs. Now she was from Croatia. This was my mother's mother and both of her parents were born on the small island off the coast of Croatia and they had moved here when my mother was young and she knew Croatian when she was young and then had English of course influencing that. I'm named for my grandmother actually. Her name was Ella also. So she taught me English words when I was little. She would show me how to write the words that went with the nouns of the things that were all around me and that's how I was able to start picking up written language early before I even went into the school. When I did go into school it was an oral sort of teaching paradigm and we would only be able in the classroom to speak and we could write. But out on the playground it was all sign language and most of us had deaf parents so of course we were quite adept at signing and all the other kids who were from hearing families or whatever were so captivated and they picked it up from us and the older kids of course would teach the younger kids they would model. So the school for the deaf had from actually infants all the way up to the graduates 12th grade and the schools were right there on the same campus. So the younger kids would see those high school kids and that's where they would get that modeling. In the cafeteria everybody ate together and they'd be arrayed at different tables according to age. Each table had what they called a captain and that captain was always a senior in high school always a deaf kid and they were kind of the parental models for the kids and they would be modeling sign language too. After school we'd all hang out and if the kids were in the dorms they'd be signing and on the playgrounds they'd be signing so that was a very rich signing environment and a lot of cross fertilization of kids just signing with each other all the time all the way up from K through 12. Now as I said when I first got into school it was all oral and that was after a year you would get tested. It was really sad because you know it didn't matter if it was school for the deaf or mainstream environment they just test those deaf kids all the time and so it's as if they were experimenting on all this all the time. So a teacher who was a coda that I had at one point it was really great at signing would sign in the classroom but then after a while that teacher was fired and then we had teachers who signed and spoke at the same time all the way until I graduated. Everything was simcom and even the deaf teachers who could have just signed to us had to sign and move their mouths as if they were speaking at the same time. I had to go to speech therapy a few times a week I was pulled out of the classroom and my report cards were really funny because the first year of school turns a speech you know that speech was a grade that you got it always said oh Ella is excellent just great second year very good third year good and then it went all the way down to poor thereafter because when I first got into school you know they teach you very very easy phonetics A E P M letters that are easy to replicate and that are easy to make a speech teacher happy about but as you get older it gets much more tough and you have to have a lot more skill and I just wasn't able to demonstrate what they wanted. So my grades went downhill from there when I went into school was 1959 I graduated in 1971 and the curriculum was changing at that time. A lot of people including our parents just felt angry about the whole oral idea and said this is enough let's just stop and we kids would see the parents at home discussing this very heatedly and there was a seat of rebellion that seemed to be planted people were getting really angry about it. They just felt that it shouldn't be happening that way. So it seemed like there was a lot of animosity between the parents and the teachers the school system and then things started to get better after a while and the tension was relieved. Now my father I just had interviewed him recently about how he grew up grew up in North Carolina and he didn't even have any education till the age of about eight or nine. He did farm work he lived on a farm and then his dad my grandfather was in an accident. He worked in a tool and die shop and it was a big explosion and he became blind. So doctors were coming quite often to visit the family and help out the insurance company from the company that my grandfather were for was working out the claim and such and they discovered that my father was deaf and that he'd never had any education. So he was referred to a school for the deaf where he showed up not knowing anything and just gestured and of course as for speech there was just none of that evidence at all that he got there and even though he was eight years old he was put in with the kindergartners but he learned really quickly. They test him for speech reading ability and of course there was none of that and they thought that he should go into the slow learner classroom but he progressed quite quickly through all the grade levels until he graduated at the appropriate age with his cohort. He tested and he actually got into Gallaudet and he read and wrote beautifully. He was quite literate. That's my dad. So in the school that he went to there were two different groups of students of course the oral kids who were considered more intelligent and the other ones who were considered the slow learners who didn't talk. It's very detrimental if you didn't speak it was very looked down upon but through sign he was able to learn so much faster. They realized that even though he was showing signs of more intelligence they couldn't put him into the speech reading classes because he just couldn't do that. Same with thing with my mom when she was eight she went into school. Now when she was younger she was from a small town in California and her grandmother excuse me my grandmother her mom was evidently Native American. I don't remember what the tribe was but they lived on a reservation possibly. I don't know all the history of that but there was an Indian sign language system that my grandmother knew and so my mother's mother grew up and knew some of that language. She used some of those signs incorporated into her signs. I need to investigate that more actually. My mother's upbringing was very positive. She has a younger sibling. She went into the school for the deaf and at that time the school for the deaf was very slow to allow the oralism to take over. They were resistant to it. They had a very strong community of signers who were proud of it. A lot of the National Association of the deaf leaders came from the Bay Area said a long history of community organizing and strong leaders. So my mother went into that school for the deaf and she signed and she didn't remember any oral kind of take over at all. And the other deaf people who went to that school with my mom at the time seemed to be very happy. If they had any difficulties it seemed to be things like disciplinary of nature but it wasn't anything to do with lack of speech or people being obstreperous and not wanting to speak. Everything seemed to go along fine for my mother. My dad moved to the area met my mom at the deaf club. They fell in love married and been together ever since had their kids and here we are. I don't know. I don't know born deaf. My brother definitely was born deaf. Same as my dad. We know they were born deaf. My mother the story goes it seemed that she may have born deaf but nobody even took notice of it until she was around. Wait was it one or three? It was really young I know. It must have been I think one one and a half something like that. And so she tells the story of running around in the house. Something happened. There was a wood stove and she bashed into it. Maybe it was hot. She was burned. She did have burns on her chest and her arm but she didn't cry out or anything. And that's when the parents realized something was wrong. They saw her and they saw she was injured and brought her to the hospital and that's when they discovered she was deaf. And for a while people thought that maybe the shock of that fall was what caused her to be deaf. But it seems more likely that she was already deaf. And then when they had to finally take her to the doctor when they discovered she'd been injured. That's when the officials got on board and realized it. As for my dad we don't really know. It seems like he was born deaf also. And as for me, my mom says that when I was six months old I was taken ill. And before that it was very visual anyway. But it's murky. Who knows? I mean there were no tests at that time. So we don't really know. I mean I think I was probably born deaf. I think I always have been. I got my degree at Gallaudet. I majored in English and drama. I was a double major. Mauls. Mauls moved here from Michigan I believe. Yep. I think it was Michigan. And he worked for a newspaper or printer nearby. He had a deaf son also who was at the school for the deaf in Berkeley when I was there. And I think when I was around 10 or 12 that's when the family moved here to the school for the deaf. And I met the son who was three years older than I was. We kind of hung out a little bit. Mauls got a job teaching at C.S.D. Berkeley. I think I was in junior high school at the time. And I was captivated. He was so funny. He was so humble. He was brilliant. He was very poetic. You know both in his signing and his writing. Oh and Mauls had graduated from C.S.D. Berkeley as well. So he knew my mother. So he went off to do other things and then he came back and he already had a history with this area and the people here. At the time he moved here Bernard Bragg was also teaching at the school for the deaf where he had been teaching for many years. And I think it was in the 60s or so is when Bernard Bragg got into the TV world. He had that show called A Quiet Man. It was a mime production. It was so exciting. We were really thrilled to be able to see this deaf guy on television. Big deal. So there was a lot of exposure to theater in this area. A lot of acting at this time in the 60s. This was before the National Theater. The deaf was founded but there were so many different famous actors from this area of Alize and Bernard Bragg. A lot of people here. Who knew my parents so we were all hanging out together and I was getting a lot of exposure. Yes I had a lot of influence. National Theater for the Deaf did their tour and the first time they stopped around here the whole deaf world came. All my friends we all went to watch them. My parents said we've got to get tickets we have to go. My brother and I went and we watched them. Let's see at that time. I think it was poetry translation and sign. Something like that. Tiger, tiger, burning bright. You know how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Things like that. Jabberwocky I remember. Twas Brillig that kind of thing. And Mauls was involved with that because he was helping with them with the translation process. He was a consultant. So there were so many different threads coming together at that time for me. A lot of exposure to different language models. Mauls. Now let's see. I think it was summer school. There was this wonderful summer school program. Mauls taught there. Bernard Bragg did. A woman named Carolyn Burns also taught there and her husband Barry B. Burns. He was president of the National Association of the Deaf for many years. So a real strong community leader. And his wife was a librarian and she worked at the school for the deaf. The three of them and I think there was another man named Ralph. Ralph Johnson I think he taught in the middle school. And he was an Hispanic person. He was hearing and become deaf later. He wasn't a great signer but he was a real force of nature and a real mover and a shaker in the deaf community. So they decided that they were going to have some instruction in poetry. Have a whole class. So I thought why not. I joined a lot of my friends and I went. I think I was around 13 at that time. NTD. Let's see. What year was that? I believe it was 1967. That's when it was. So at that time National Theatre of the Deaf had done their tours for a couple of years. Bernard Bragg came for the summer. He was teaching and he was using a lot of the poems that were actually from their show and we were memorizing them, rehearsing them. We were also learning how to translate haiku. He was teaching a lot of technical information. A lot of poetry techniques to us which I just ate up. It was wonderful. I was still thinking English. I felt English was paramount and of course English was what you start with and you translate into sign. Mauls loved musicals and so often he would translate songs from musicals. That was really fun and I was fascinated with that. We get the rhythm of it and how to sign it. So we would learn these different songs. I think Oliver was one of the ones we did. I don't remember a few really famous musicals at the time. I think it was the Hammersmith. What are the names of those authors for the musicals? What is it? Oh Oscars and Hammerstein. Hammerstein. That's it. Those were Mauls' favorite. So those are the musicals he always taught us and we would learn them and he would tell us, oh you know, look at how these things are put together and listen to how they put these musicals together. We would memorize them and we would look at the descriptions of the people, the actresses who had been in the musicals and he knew everything. He read everything and he fed us everything he knew and he never looked down at us at all. He treated us as equals. He challenged us to learn all the time. So we would learn about these musicals and then we would go actually watch them at this special arena. I'm not sure where it was. They would have movies and plays both at these different venues. Oliver and Oklahoma and what we would do is we would look at the storyline before. We would read them, read the lyrics, memorize the songs and then we'd watch them. We would try to lip read what the singers and dancers were doing with their mouths and then we would explain to each other, oh I think this is that song that we learned before that we read about and we saw how the whole things were put together and that's what we did. That's we would learn it first and then we would go. Now Bernard Bragg was very staid in his signing, very clear and controlled whereas Mauls wasn't that way. He was very creative. So the technical prowess of Bernard Bragg and the creativity of Mauls were both given to me. I was so lucky because I benefited from the influence from both of them. Of course I was captivated by Mauls' personality but Bernard Bragg, his technical ability was really fascinating to be exposed to. My poetry mostly started out as written, started as written. I started in the fifth grade writing poetry and I got published in the school newspaper. Bragg would publish them. One of the earliest ones is in some of the early newspapers at that time. And Mauls, I wasn't translating my own. Let me say I wasn't translating my own. I was translating other people's work but not my own. I would write it and I just felt that there was something I couldn't do. I was thinking in English. I was writing in English. I was thinking visually actually. The back of my mind I had these images but I just had to put them down on paper in English in these, you know, well considered lines with rhythm and rhyme and such and construct them in certain ways. Mauls wrote so many poems. He wrote poems, songs, plays and he would give them to me and I actually have some of these copies. I've kept them in his own handwriting. It's really a treasure. It's amazing. So he fed me all of these different pieces that he'd written and there was a lot of translation going on and I was doing translation but not my own stuff. Not until much later. I think I started, let's see, 75, 76, 77 somewhere around there. There was some linguistics research. There was a class I took in stylistics it was called at Northeastern University. There was an English of course so I was learning linguistic study of English poems and poetry. I was looking at linguistics of ASL and other studies but this class was specifically about English. Oh, before I forget I have to go back. So when I was in college let's see in my sophomore year I took a sign language translation class under Gil Eastman and that was the first time I realized that ASL and English were separate languages but completely equivalent. Before that I thought that there was no grammar in ASL and you know you had to have perfect English grammar and make the ASL follow it but now finally I was learning that ASL, even street language, ASL was its own language and I was kind of scared to tell you the truth. I was embarrassed and I didn't quite understand it. I had grown up and I was completely co-opted by the whole idea that English was better and that it was looked at that you weren't as smart if you just signed ASL you didn't know any English. So what we used at home and what we used with each other and we didn't feel that was the same as English. And if you ever did say something like that they'd say well what's that mean in English? What's the English word for the sign you had? And if I didn't have an English word I'd say oh I don't have one. They'd say you see it's not as good as English. You don't have an English word for what you're trying to say. So I was trying to figure out like wow this is really puzzling. As I grew up I kept being puzzled by that whole idea. You were looked at as much smarter if you signed English but if you signed ASL that was cute, that was quaint but it was very derogatory attitude towards people who did. You had to prove your intelligence by signing English and speaking English or writing English and that's how you could prove that you were intelligent person. It was oppressive and it was really distressing and there was no pride in our language and we demeaned it. So in college it was even worse the English whole idea had to be drilled into you even more. So ASL was denigrated and pushed to the side even more. That one class I took helped break me free of that attitude and I'm very, very grateful to Gil Eastman for having helped me with that. So I was majoring in English and drama as I said before double majoring and there was a man named Ed, what was his name? Ed Carney. I'm pretty sure the last name was Carney. C-A-R-N-E-Y Canny, maybe it's Canny. It was a poetry class. I was taking a poetry class from him and at that time liberal, white, hearing man trying to get our game on, come on, let's just kind of experiment, try to write some poems, let's go. And kind of interesting I tried to sign and write my stuff at the same time. I thought I wonder if I could lay it out on a page in a visual way, like the way I would sign it would be spatially on the page as well when I wrote it. So starting to play with the idea of things in space, but not really in space. It had to be on paper because of course poetry had to be on paper, not like today that we see it as a more free form and that you could let it go. Of course, some poetry is just spoken not on the page but that's what we thought it had to be. So I started to think about like ASL on paper. How could I put ASL poetry on paper but it wasn't yet out in just signs yet. I went to Boston to Northeastern University to work the summer after that stylistics class and I was looking at linguistics analysis and I was checking out the rules of how ASL linguistics work and I was captivated by this. It was more of a formal science of the analyzation of a poem. And I thought, well, that's interesting because sign language has its own rules and they're not written down and that means you can analyze it in a linguistic way. So Ursula Balooji was working at that time. A lot of people were working that time to develop the linguistic rules of ASL and codify them. And I thought, wow, we've got all these different rules for ASL. It's amazing, just like any other language. So if that's true and you're signing according to certain linguistic rules, we can analyze it. You can experiment. You could play with these ASL rules like subject verb object or signing in cycles or putting things in different areas of space. Why not create a poem utilizing these constructs and these different elements? Why not play with these rules in a creative way? Because if English has this way of going about analyzing poetry and looking at how it works and how it's changed, how you can play with the different things within the different formats of English. And ASL has these rules and why not create poetry in ASL the same way you can in English. That's when I started to have contact with Dorothy Miles and Joseph Costranovo who were both in NTD at the time. And they were very independent thinkers, both of them, doing experimental work. People tended to write things first and then try to figure out how to sign it and go back and forth. They weren't fully extricating it yet, but they were on the path to doing that, which was very interesting. So there started to be some really substantive conversations going on about creatively playing with ASL in a poetry kind of way. Vally Clayton Vally, while he was getting his PhD and his dissertation was completely about the protocols of poetry and doing comparative poetry, analyzing, looking at poetics. So from our discussions that we'd undergone with a lot of different people, it was interesting. It seemed that there were parallels between written English poetry and sign language poetry. Of course, English or written poetry follows sounds. There's something called, gosh, I've even forgot what it is, assonance or what is it? Anyway, that if you had the same letter in written language like a consonant or a vowel and that you were repeating that over and over again, you could echo that in sign language by using handshapes. So in a sense, you were creating assonance and alliteration in sign language by limiting your choices of signs and focusing, controlling and only picking a few of them. Let's see, let's think of an example. Okay, suppose I see a tree and it's an old tree and it's looking old and all the leaves are falling off and now it's bare. And that's sad. Sorry to say the tree is bare. Okay, so if you wanted to make that more poetic, you could say I'm seeing this tree, it's starting to fade, the leaves have come down and are all papering the ground below it and then show my disappointment and my expression when I look at it completely bare. So fewer signs, more consolidated and I had done a comparison of, you know, English poetry and doing a lot of analyzation of that and finding out all the ways that imagery is used and all the different, you know, the elements of the metaphors and similes, all the different things. I've kind of forgotten that actually but when you do the research, you can see that everything from that class that I took, everything that's in written poetry we have in sign language poetry. We have similes. English might say this is like that or this as big as that or whatever. Metaphors as well. Metaphors don't employ the uses like of like and as like similes do it, the thing becomes the thing but the idea that you could play with those constructs in sign language the same way you could in a written language was fascinating. Also the idea of a line. Now, how would you create a line in sign language? That was a big theory of Clayton Valleys which is that we actually do have lines in ASL and I can't remember exactly how to explain that but it is written down and he actually received his PhD specifically for that theory. So there were a lot of discussions going on at that time about the structure. How would you even build a poem? What was possible? What's possible in this language? Because remember, I think I read something that a person from Czechoslovakia said one time. The more that people understand about their language, the more possibilities they have for poetry in their language. And I agree with that. I think it's really important that people delve deeply into the constructs of their language and explore them because the more you do that, if you explore the richness that it employs and that it has then from there that poetry will grow. So it was really encouraging to deaf people to study. I really feel that deaf people should always study ASL not just use it every day but really to make a concerted effort to look into it and understand it, own it, and then be able to play with it more. And then the sky's the limit. There are different poems that I've developed from writing or signing and they always have a meaning behind them. How you start, what's the reason? Of course those vary. Just playing around with grammar, just ASL grammar and thinking, I wanna create something and what should I write about to engage in this linguistic experiment? Oh, here's an image I like. Let's see if I can put that together with these different grammatical functions that I'd like to play with. My poems are very much based on the structure and later on they become more freeform. Where a story is and where a poem begins, sometimes that line is quite fluid. My poetry, oh, this poem that I do called Baseball, it's more of a prose poem because it's a story. It's still poetic within the storytelling format, but it is a poem. There's more serious issues, deep sort of ideas that I want to explore. Sometimes I'm frustrated or angry and the only way I can get it out is to cathart through a poem. You get really angry and there's something there that I have to express. It forces me to look really at what the issue is to find the right language to be able to express it. And I take these images and metaphors, whatever I'm using, hand shapes and then movement, the different kind of rhythms, and maybe not just one hand shape, but maybe if I use one repetitively then switch to another one, how I use space, whether I have turn-taking between characters in my poem, there's all these different elements that have to be married together. And my particular way of going about it is that I build it and when I find the right image, when I think it's all come together and it's more consolidated, then I feel that it's done. But I take disparate elements together and what I'm doing is trying to channel all my angst or all my anger into this one image that will adequately depict it. Yes, it's an outlet. It is definitely my outlet for all the things that happen, all the frustrations that occur in my life. You mean ABC stories with deaf themes or numbers? No, no, I don't tend to do those. I don't tend to do stories or poems or anything not having to do with deaf ideas or politics. I don't tend to do those. Again, well, why come up with a poem in the first place? What's it for? Silence, oh, painful, that's one of my poems that was half English and half ASL. I remember I wrote it in English with signs in the back of my mind, you know what I mean? Like I didn't write it first with no signs at all happening, not that one. They were both working at the same time in my mind. Sort of like Dot Miles, you know, I would look at a line and I would think, oh, I'll be able to sign that. So that's the way Dot did it. And that was a big influence of hers, English infusion on that. The other one called iMusic was written in English first completely. I just wrote the whole thing with no signs at all in my mind. And then I saw other people translating things and I thought, okay, I'll do my own translation later. So other people had translated iMusic, which I wrote in English. I thought, wow, I don't even have to be stuck with the words. I could still keep the idea. And other people had broken free for it. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. They went to a more ASL rendition and that freed me up of doing an ASL rendition of my own English poem that I'd written. There are other ones that are more personal course that I wrote and that I would sign. And again, you know, who's the audience? I think a signed poem has to have an audience. For me, if I'm going to perform this, I need to have an audience. So who is my audience? That's always an important question to ask. At that time, I think the 70s and 80s in there somewhere, ASL was out in the ether and people were taking more ASL classes. Hearing people were really interested in it. And a lot of hearing folks would come to see shows. So out in public, there'd be poetry readings. Well, they're called readings. You know, so a lot of poetry readings. So if there was an ASL poetry reading, let's see, I'm trying to remember. Remember there was this one woman. How did I meet her? I met her through Jane Norman, I think. It was some summer school thing or something. So this woman was performing some poetry in the city. I can't remember even where it was. But anyway, she'd gotten a grant from whatever city she was from to go and teach kids. And then have kids write poetry and perform their own stuff. So that was kind of interesting. This in the 70s, there's a lot of hearing artists who thought sign language was just the nuts, right? Everybody was into it. They didn't understand the history, the culture, the background or anything, but they sure loved it. So I was introduced to this woman and I was writing some poems in ASL and in English. And I met her and then she found some money so that I could travel with her and help her teach children. Yeah, we taught deaf children. So we teach them how to translate it. Well, they taught them not just how to sign poetry, but also how to write it in English. And so I accompanied her to a few classrooms. So I was a deaf teacher with deaf kids. So when you write a poem, who is it written for? If it's written, that's something that can stay personal, isolated, just unto yourselves and you could choose to show it or not. But signed poetry is not an individual isolated enterprise. It's something that you share with people. You've got to have an audience. You have to have that feedback of people in proximity. So for signed poetry, you must have an audience. You have to have that gaze of the audience on you. At that time, there were a lot of hearing audiences around and you'd have it have an interpreter and you would translate your ASL into English. And sometimes we take famous poems and we translate them into ASL. But sometimes we would tweak them a little bit so the English wouldn't exactly be the way it had been written. It fit the signs more than the signs fitting the English. So it was skewed over to the ASL side of the world instead of just to the English part of the world. Sometimes you'd have to explain the background of a poem before you'd perform it. Sometimes that wouldn't work. Hearing audiences wouldn't get it if they saw a signed poem. So sometimes deaf audiences and hearing audiences didn't react the same way. So it was interesting how to go about doing that. I always think deaf audience first when I'm creating something because that's where my heart is. So when I perform, I'm always thinking in terms of performing for deaf audiences. If I'm doing translations of English poems into ASL, that's nice, that's all, that's fine. You can put it in an ASL rendition, but I feel it's the ASL that gets the strongest response from people, which I think is interesting. Or if you have an interpreter or a person in the field who knows sign language and then they see it, they really get it. So it's interesting to gauge the different reactions of the audiences. Hearing audiences have less of a resonance with it, but the deaf audiences really get it. Or a mixed audience with more people who sign. Through the touring I've done and creating and presenting I've done, I've been noticing this. And I try different ways of performing to see how the audiences will react. I perform less and less now. If I perform for a deaf audience, I'll give a short introduction. Because in general, because of the way the education of the deaf has been in this country and how ASL has been denigrated, ASL was never regarded as a sophisticated language that was analyzed and treated as equivalent to English. And so poetry wasn't given the same sort of credence. The way people would be able to understand poetry in the deaf world is very different. And so they were never encouraged, they were never given that at the same time. The message will not always be obvious to them. So giving the little background is important. Hearing people don't understand any sign language at all. They're just gonna see hands waving in the air and they're not gonna care anyway. And so I don't necessarily do anything with a deep meaning, they're not gonna get it. That wouldn't be something that they would really appreciate. In translation, sometimes it's really, really hard to get a good English equivalent. It's almost impossible most of the time. I've tried different methods. Sometimes you can have somebody just give vocal cues or English cues. I've tried lots of different interpreters wherever I go. There's lots of interpreters there. I don't bring my own. There'll be somebody there that I will work with when I perform. Now I don't even do that anymore. I used to, but now when I'm doing ASL poems, I don't even worry about having an interpreter. Maybe I'll have somebody give a little bit of a vocal cue depending on the audience. If they don't know any sign at all, I'll just pick really easy poems or easy to translate and easy to perform and easy for them to understand just by watching. But I do less and less of that now because it's just not my thing. That's not where my energies lie. My primary focus when I do it at all now is people who are interested in learning sign language or people who know it or deaf people, of course. And then I don't have any voice at all involved with that. So I let go of the narration. It's different with a deaf audience. I don't have to give any of that narration or exposition, but with a hearing audience, they need just a little bit of a something so they know what they're watching. Then they can figure it out and interpret it themselves. It's the same as reading a poem. You have to read it over and over again to be able to understand it and all the nuances. So it doesn't matter whether it's sign language or a written language, poetry, rendition. You still have to work with it and see it many times to fully understand it. Maybe, maybe. It's the same as spoken, right? You hear it and then you forget it. Same thing. It's nice to have video. It's nice to have a way to document something so you can watch it again and again and again. But in some ways, that's kind of dangerous because that freezes it, in a sense. It makes it static in time. But as I perform it, I change it every time. When it's something that you can watch over and over again, you can analyze it, but then it doesn't change any volume. Yes, memorizing it, yeah. A lot of people have to do that. That's right. You have to memorize it. I've seen a lot of kids who are copying poems. They copy them and then they change them. I've seen a lot of kids at the School for the Deaf, especially in Fremont. Some of my poems actually, I've seen some of them out there. The kids are picking them and doing them and then they're performing them and it becomes a new poem because they change it. Now, obviously they've got a little bit more technical expertise and they would have other wives and it's really wonderful alone. Yeah, no, Valley wasn't there. Let's see, how did I meet Valley? Hmm, was it here or was it in Nevada? I can't remember exactly, wait a minute. Yeah, somebody gave me a magazine or a newspaper and it had Valley's picture in it. It was from Reno, Nevada. That's only four hours from here. Now I had started touring at that time, performing and giving workshops in ASL poetry and analyzing and discussing poetry. And then somebody who knew that I was signing ASL poetry gave me this picture of Valley in an article. I thought there's somebody else doing this, not too far from here, that's interesting. I think I contacted him or he contacted me. I can't remember. But anyway, we agreed to meet in Reno. He was working with Washo, the chimpanzee out there at that time. Wait a minute, who was with me? I don't know, someone. I went with some people and I met Valley and I had an instantaneous connection with him. It was just so great to talk to him and his work was fantastic. I mean, wow, he was already deeply involved with linguistics, studying and analyzing, thinking very conservatively about it and his personality was captivating. He was married at the time. His wife had four children from a previous marriage. They were stepchildren of Clayton's. And let's see, what was next? Oh, hold on, I have to go back and give you a little more history about this. Let's see, in 70 or whatever that, I think in Northern. Oh, what was the name of this college? What was it? There's a hearing woman who was teaching at a college and she was learning signage. She was really, really excited about it. So she heard that Gallaudet was doing some experiments with written English to the ASL translation, canny. Oh, remember, I was trying to remember that name. It's John Canny. That's the name of the professor. And he'd written these articles and gotten it in the literature reviews and talking about how we should have these discussions about ASL poetry. And he knew Lou Font and Lou Font knew me and somehow we got some money together and we decided to host this weekend workshop. It was in Northern Indiana and I think it was called poetry in the palm of your hand. I still have the brochure from that actually. Anyway, it was the idea of sign poetry. How would we do it? And John Canny was presenting and I was performing, Lou Font was performing and then a few other people also were part of this whole thing and we were talking a lot about the whole subject. It was in the late 70s, I'm pretty sure. Valley was much later. I didn't know anything about him. And then I met him in the early 80s. There was a grant from NAD for sign language teachers to undergo the special training and I was involved with some work with that curriculum. So we were going to different regions and you could come together with representatives from different regions to become a trainer. So he was at that one. Somebody said, why don't you come? And so he came and Carol Padden was there. A whole lot of luminaries were at this thing. It was wonderful six week training, lots of discussions at the University of Tennessee. That's where that was, six weeks. No poetry involved at all. But they had a special track for literature, an ASL literature and teaching philosophies and pedagogy and history and culture. What's the meaning of culture? Let's dissect this. A lot of people doing some deep studies of all these different really fascinating subjects. Everybody put together whatever you wanted. It was like a smorgasbord, a taste of everything for six weeks. Just a fantastic time. And that was a wonderful group that got together. Valley came, Carol Padden was there, like I said. And then soon after that was the NSSLRT conference. Those were sign language trainers and teachers. That was 1977, 78, 79, 80 somewhere around there. So Valley was invited to come to that. A lot of people got together and performed. And that specifically was a poetry performance. I was giving a talk about that, about ASL poetry, the meaning of it. I lectured, I didn't perform actually, but I lectured about the studies that I'd undertaken, the analysis I was doing. And that was great. And after Valley performed, that was Rose into the heavens. That was just it. Early 80s is when people started to hear about him. And then next thing I knew here, he was in Rochester, Jim Cohn got that together, Peter Cook and Debbie Renne. And there was Valley again. Let's see, 85, 86, whenever that was. Everybody got together, that group of us. And then there was Deaf Way also. So it just percolated outwards. There were a lot more classes in it. It seemed like everybody was getting on the bandwagon about what ASL poetry was. Valley, he was just an island unto himself. I think that he knew Bernard Bragg and Mauls and Joseph Castranovo and all those people. I had all that influence, National Theater of the Deaf influence, but he didn't have any of that. How do I promote myself? Hmm, I've taught ASL for years. I have a lot of students and a lot of people have heard about me. They said back in the day, oh, would you mind? Of course, now there's media, deaf media, specifically this organization called Deaf Media here in the Bay Area. And then there was a few others. There was a Deaf program. It was a talk show. And they asked me to perform on this Deaf talk show. Sometimes people asked me to translate their work, other people's work. So there was a community TV show that was from a college. Deaf Media, I got a lot of contacts from them. They got a grant to create the show called Rainbows End. I performed in there also. Very active, a real group of active, active people who are always working on something, good leaders. Just through the grapevine, everybody hears about each other. There's a woman in New York. Gosh, I can't remember her name. She gave me some contacts too about Poetry World Magazine, the Michigan Woman's Festival, the Michigan Woman's Festival. They got hold of me and wanted me to come. Clearwater, Hudson's Clearwater Revival, that festival. So it's just sort of chain-lining, right? Everybody hears about everybody else and somebody gets your name and gives it to someone else. Bookstores, small bookstores sometimes wanted to have readings, colleges, lectures about ASL. I do give lectures about ASL, how to teach ASL, how to train people. And they'll say, oh, do you mind performing your poetry? Fine, so I'll give a workshop during the day and then I'll perform at night and I'll give a lecture as well. So I think my name's just sort of gotten out there. People tend to ask me, so I don't necessarily have to self-promote. They come to me, I don't go to them. Yeah, I'm contacted just through the grapevine. Yes, DeafWay, DeafWay, that was the first place. Everybody got together. You know, it was an international gathering so everybody was bringing their own international signs. Some were translators, some just came, just signing, right? It's about a week. And everybody was talking together about the sign to use because the old sign for poetry was used in some countries. Another country brought forth the sign, poetry that came out from the heart, like expression from the heart. And we liked that. Some people said poetry with a P, like spirit coming from the palm of your hand instead of P for music. I had always used the old fashioned one, the P for music, but this one about expression I really liked. And that's the one that tended to take off that everybody liked to use. So now it means written poetry is the old fashioned P on the arm that means like music. And ASL poetry is the one that looks like expression from the heart. It seems that that's what's happening. That's the difference. One means written and one means signed. Yeah, this goes along with the point that I made before. But a straight ASL poem, what's it for? What's the reason that it even exists? What's the overriding reason behind it? Written poem can be written in isolation. It's for the writer. But you know, back in the day, poetry was spoken and it was for an audience. It wasn't written down. If you look at the history of how poetry evolved, it changed once it was written down and codified to the written word. It changed. Previous to that, it wasn't written. It was a different style altogether. And I believe that American Sign Language poetry performance needs to have an audience. And of course, we might try to tweak it to match the different audiences and adjust to who's in that audience how many hearing people might be present. But I was reading something that said poetry and culture are really inextricably integrated. You can read it and you'll always see the cultural influence. The language that's chosen, the words that are chosen are all dictated by the cultural experience of the writer and the creator and you can't extricate them. You can look at the work of other poets, other people from other countries and you will always see when you read the literature that their experiences and their cultural resonances are there very clearly. So what happens in your environment is very much a part of that. You look at the beat generation poetry, for example, very strongly reflected what was going on at the time. And so now we're looking at the 70s and 80s and we call that the resurgence time, all right? Patty Ladd, if you look at his book about deafhood, he looks specifically at the 70s and 80s about how deaf people were really looking at themselves and kind of getting their game on in terms of feeling positive about who they were. Previous to that, sign language, deafness, and whatever that wasn't so great. Back in the day in the Golden Age, it was great then it was denigrated but then 70s and 80s, there was like a renaissance of rediscovery. And so whereas before with National Theater, the deaf were sign language had to look pretty and it was nice but so what? It was just an artistic thing with an old heart behind it. There was no soul. In hearing audiences, we look at it and think it was so pretty. Oh, isn't ASL a gorgeous language? It's so nice, that's fine. But that's kind of a surfacing thing to realize. You're not really getting anything of the profound ideas that are there and that hadn't been blown off the top yet. Nobody had really gotten to that level. But during the 70s and 80s, the question was how can we mine those resources that ASL has? People sometimes say that I'm political and I say, no, I think I'm just showing personal things. I'm showing things that happen all around me, yes. But America is such a strongly individualistic culture. And so poems written by hearing Americans are all about me, me, me, me, it's all about me. I'm so important, my experience, my life, everything. But deaf folks are collective and so truly deaf poem or deaf poetry will reflect our collective experience, I feel. And that's my view of what it should be. I'm very firmly ensconced within the deaf world. I do teach hearing people, I'm out and among them, of course, but the soul of my life and my turf, my world is deaf. And I know that the hearing perspective on deaf people is extremely limited. I've worked my whole life trying to teach them so they have a better understanding, which they never completely get. They just can't. They've got the oralism that's co-opted them that then obviously had co-opted us for all those years. And so if you take a step back and you look at the dynamics of that, I wanna fan the flames. So within myself, I see what I've looked at all around about deafness. And I see how hearing people see us, which I think is an important perspective to have. Then I go back to my own deaf community. I wanna say, do you know how hearing people see us? I've looked at us from the outside more objectively. I see how they look at us objectively. Who are we? Let's talk about this. And somehow I try to exemplify that in poetry. And if I can do that and get a resonance out of the deaf people, that's wonderful. Many of my poems were created in the 80s. And now I'll look at them and I'll go, wow, there was a really strong message in these. People don't really realize that sometimes. They'll write down something, they'll create something, show it. And then once they revisit it, they go, wow, I didn't even realize I was thinking that. There's more nuance, there's more depth to this than I even knew. So things were going on in my subconscious that I put out there that I wasn't even aware of at the time. Oh, your DVD. Yours, the one you gave me, yes. Yeah, it grows, grows better and better and better. It gets better and better like wine ages. So that's the sampler you sent me. I thought one of the interesting things about it was the panel. Peter and Debbie, their comments. They were talking about deaf people and their criticism of the work that they as poets were putting out. And I remember that at that time, that comment came up, took me back and then we went on to other things, other topics, but watching it this time, you know, at that time, you know, ASL was growing and everything, but the attitude of deaf people was very oddist. They were co-opted by oddism. I mean, just completely infiltrated by it. By oddism from the oralist paradigm. And on that panel, well, Peter, Peter, the way he interpreted his experience, you know, he was oral and then he gets into NTID and people said he wasn't deaf enough or his poetry wasn't deaf enough or something. You know, it was interesting. He said he preferred to perform for hearing people because deaf people criticized him. I can't remember exactly what he said, but I was really, I was kind of hurt. I look at this comment now with new and better eyes because I understand more where he was coming from. If I could meet him now, I would say, no, you're not understanding deaf people as a community were struggling with their identity at that time and language was a big part of them, of their image. Their image was put forward by their language. So you, Peter, come at this with this new creativity and you know, you're influenced by the beat generation poetry. Deaf people in the deaf world didn't have that kind of idea yet. They weren't familiar with this and you just kind of took them by storm and they didn't know what it was. So of course they were resistant. Of course they didn't trust it. And so of course there was a conflict between you and the deaf community. I would explain now that to Peter that I would saw, I saw at that time that he wasn't necessarily engaged in his deafhood journey at the time. Sure, he got to NTID, starts doing ASL, but he didn't know what it meant yet. He didn't know any of the depths of what he was actually going through. And so I would have encouraged him, understand who you are as a deaf person first before you do that. At the time I saw that comment, I saw it and it was hurtful. And I felt like deaf people are just not going to welcome you with an attitude like that. You have to understand your own internal deafhood and place within the deaf community. And so I think that was the source of the difficulty. It seemed that he was criticizing deaf people on stage with that comment. And that was difficult and I raised my hackles. And of course I did. I understand why I did. I understand why other people did. I understood the source of the tension. Of course I did. The best thing that oralists were able to accomplish was the division of the deaf community. That's what they did. They caused gisms and they created a division that didn't exist before. So they caused all that internal attitude of people putting down each other and that difficulty between the different paradigms of deaf education of people who come from both of them. But really deaf people as individuals have to look at themselves and they have to like themselves as a deaf person first. That's the most important step of all, is to like who you are as a deaf person first. Now ASL poets, they might have written it in English and then translated it later or taken hearing poetry and done that. When you create ASL poetry from ASL, it's coming from a deaf lineage. It hasn't been mediated through the lens of hearing or English yet. And there hadn't been any history of that yet. I mean, poetry is of course any language, any time, anywhere, but it's just interesting that now there seems to be a transition where people are studying more and more what ASL poetry is and where it came from. So the poetry will evolve and will grow as more people study it, understand it better and accept it. Great, yes. It's really great with young children. Wow, so impressive, you're right. Right, I saw that. Yeah, that, mm-hmm. I've seen hearing American poets say that and that's the background and that's the training and he got the idea from them. What do you mean by responsibility? Well, not only, I mean, you don't have to, it's exposure from different techniques and you have to have that. There's tools, you have to have tools to utilize. Anger related to deaf identity. There was nothing in there about that. I mean, subjects could be politics, that's a hearing thing, I think. You know, that's about what hearing people are doing. I mean, deaf people, we've got our own stuff, you know. It's not just what's going on from the hearing people. It's great to take different ideas, but if you're gonna use sign and it becomes about looking at who you are as a deaf person and going to that place, then I think that's more of the true poetry and it becomes more personal. It becomes your own experience as a deaf person. Yes, what it showed. An outlet. So I think that's a great idea. What it showed. An outlet. So I'll have different experiences, some relating, not at all with deafness, something about the earth. You know, the environment, degradation, whatever, animals, whatever. I mean, I have ideas that don't have anything to do with deaf people, but I guess I could write a poem in ASL about that. I guess I could. But there's still so much going on in the deaf community. There's a lot of movement from the 70s and 80s and there's a lot of negativity sometimes. So if I'm gonna talk about other things and ignore my own people, my own cohort or where I'm from, I think I need to take every opportunity, every moment, every Iota of energy I have to put out things that I wanna talk about that deals with my community and not go off into the ozone talking about other things. I wanna show people what is going on in our lives. That's what's important for me and I wanna like put it square in their face and say, look at this. You can't shy away from it. I want you to look at this. I wanna put it right in their face. Every opportunity I have, I throw that right in their faces. I feel it's my calling, it's who I am. I see something because I think that nobody really understands. I mean, there's so many people out there, right? So many folks and so many causes that things you can support. Animal rights, oh, the poor animals or missing children or people getting abused or supporting different things. There's a lot of different causes, a lot of different groups out there. Stem cell research, everybody's very upset about stem cell research and everything. They think it's positive in every other regard but we're not happy about it in the deaf community. All this positivity about it but hey, have you thought a minute about how they're gonna use it against deaf people and you're actually promoting eugenics? We think eugenics is gone but with the resurgence of the idea of stem cells. That's just this nice sanitized way to be doing eugenics, which means cleaning up the race, getting rid of deaf people. You have to say, whoa, wait a minute, we think it's negative, that's not a good thing. When you look our way and you're gonna use stem cells against us. So a lot of people just don't even care if they don't even think about that there's a problem or that we have to think about deaf people at all. Oh, it's sign language, it's boring, it's nothing we have to think about. Just put them off to the side. We don't need deaf people. Let's use stem cell research and get rid of them. Somebody needs to say to them, no, this is wrong. I use poetry in different ways. People use art and media, storytelling, movies. They use a lot of different ways to get their messages across and I just happen to use poetry to get mine across. Yeah, I never said they should be taken away. Do you get that? I never said that. No, high school. Kids, you know, high school kids, you know. Come on, even hearing high school kids don't wanna be at home, right? Which one? The Children's Garden, that one? Well, now I think that my eyes have changed in a sense. I mean, I've grown and I see things differently. Again, you know, the deaf community is really small and here in the US, you know, different countries have different issues but I'm speaking specifically about here in America. We live in a very political environment. We talk about civil rights, disability rights, all kinds of things conflate or intention and now the word disability, you know, that definition has flexed over time. It has not remained static. It's always in flux. So the idea of what is disabled has changed a lot over time. It used to be it was okay to factionalize and say, okay, that group of disabled people are that group, you know, they have their different sorts of abilities or disabilities and they didn't necessarily want to mix. Then there was civil rights in the black community that was supposedly separate but equal but they weren't, they weren't equal at all. They were separate and very unequal until the protests occurred, which affected their change. Now I lived in Berkeley at that time and the black Panthers were around and wow, I mean, at that particular time it was also big hippie time, beat generation time a little bit here in San Francisco. So there were a lot of different groups who were making a lot of noise all around the same time. The school for the deaf and my house were fairly near each other and separating them was Telegraph Avenue right down the center. And that was kind of ground central for all of this. Lots of demonstrations. I was a day school student. I didn't stay overnight in the dorms and to walk right across that street and right through those crowds there were police, there were billy clubbing people. It was amazing. There were helicopters that were dispensing tear gas in the school for the deaf. We had to close the dorms, the windows in the dorms but it would get through and we'd be crying all the time from the tear gas. So I saw this. I didn't have a clue what any of it meant. There was all this excitement going on and we deaf kids were in our own little world our own little bubble, even though we saw it. I didn't really read the newspaper and understand what was going on. I didn't know what it was all about. Some of the deaf kids who were like tougher like, oh yeah man hippies, let's smoke some pot. And they didn't know what the politics were behind any of it but they thought, wow, far out because they knew something was happening but as I grew up I didn't know what it was. Now I look back and I understand it better but at the time that was just swirling around me and I had no clue. So all of that's going on. I'm trying to remember what I was saying. I was talking about civil rights, black community. Right, and all of this going around near where I grew up. And of course there's still a lot of dissension right now of course this has not been settled. But in terms of the disabled community, the schools for the deaf, there was school for the blind, there was school for other kids and it seemed like a lot of folks weren't happy with this. Some folks did prefer to be just in their own enclaves and others wanted to be with everyone else. So then everybody starts talking about mainstreaming. Everything had to be mainstreamed. Everybody has to be together and then there was the Americans Disabilities Act that was later but there were a few leaders, a few political leaders who talked to disabled people and felt that oh these other groups have more in common with each other. Maybe they should build some coalition with each other. Remember Section 504, there was a big protest here in San Francisco. I had a friend who was really involved with that. I didn't get involved, I observed it pretty closely but I didn't do anything with it. I was trying to understand it. I didn't really know what it was all about. And then that kind of led to the Gallaudet Deaf President now protest in 1988 and then ADA was passed. But back when Section 504, PL 944142 was going on, that was when everybody decided that the kids should be mainstreamed. They shouldn't be hidden away. All the disabled folks should be out and about. Now deaf people had been out in the public forever. It's not like we'd ever been hidden away. We didn't have any worries and we hadn't been put in closets or anything. We were working, we were in factories, we were out doing our own thing out in public. So this whole idea of needing to not be hidden away anymore didn't make any sense. But deaf people were looked at and we looked at each other and we're thinking, are we disabled? I don't know, are we like other people? I mean, we can't hear, we can't do this one thing. Maybe that means we're disabled. I mean, nobody ever took up the charge and said, yes, we're disabled because we can't hear. You didn't meet a lot of people saying like, wow, I just really wish I was like hearing people. I hate deaf people. There were some and that was the ones that were co-opted by the oralism idea and faction because that set us against each other and caused a lot of divisiveness. But for the most part, the whole idea was everybody had to be mainstreamed. Let's get everybody out in the regular schools. But the schools for the deaf were still there and then they started splitting. So the California school for the deaf actually split in two. There was a state-sponsored school for the deaf that was paid through state monies and the blind school was there as well. And then there was a special education school for the deaf that was mainstream. Deaf kids were under the mantle of special ed. So everything was being reconfigured because the whole idea was everybody had to have a choice. We have to have choice. So the parents were being hounded by A.G. Bell. Just trust us, we'll help you, we'll keep you together, we'll make sure your kid goes to a mainstream school and boy, A.G. Bell just really took advantage of people who had deaf kids like nobody's business. You parents now have a choice. They were pushing the whole idea of being more like American culture and not being islands into themselves. So if hearing parents had a deaf kid, they didn't know what to do. The strong American cultural influence on everybody, on everybody's thinking. You're thinking too, you have to have a cultural view because that's the cultural you come from. I mean, do hearing American people like say, I'm gonna keep my kid with me for the rest of their lives. They can never grow out in the world. They can never meet anybody. We're gonna keep them close. It's really, really bad. So deaf people, you know, deaf people are just saying with schools for the deaf, just bring your kid to us. Let us have your deaf kid and raise him in the school for the deaf so that they have some deaf culture. That's all we meant. It's not like we're stealing your deaf children. You can't have them. That's not what anybody meant to say. There were all these misunderstandings about it and that's oralism too. That's the mindset that was being promulgated by the AG Bell Association. Very, very wrong, very negative about the idea that ASL would ascend, that anybody would think that sign language was anything to be lauded. All this idea about more and more choices, whatever and babies being tested as soon as they were born used to be back in the day. You know, a kid would be born and then you'd figure out that they were deaf later on, whatever. Now the moment they're born, they're tested and they're really being stolen from us by all the infiltration and all of the cochlear implants and all the money that these businesses have to try to fix the kids. That's what I was talking about in terms of kids going to schools for the deaf. I mean, it's a really serious issue. It's almost like what deaf kids undergo or what the deaf community undergoes is like a diaspora, like the Jewish people, just being spread to the winds and the schools for the deaf were a place where they could find each other. There are oral schools for the deaf as well, but now they say, you know, the disabled children can be out and about, everybody should be out and about and if they're together, they're suffering. But I'm telling you, they're suffering horribly the way it's working now. So that poem, The Children's Garden and The Door, the other poem, were used to depict this idea of being isolated and forced to be a part. You know, it's the death of that child. It was almost like death, D-E-A-F led to death, D-E-A-T-H. Because when they're separated from their community, that is the death of that child. That's what I was trying to show. I wasn't trying to hurt people or offend people or anything. I tried to be really careful about that for 30 years or so and then I said, oh, forget it. Let's just speak the truth. You have to be honest and be blunt about it. Sometimes sugarcoating something doesn't work better and sometimes, you know, you can use poetry or prose and try to put your ideas in that and that makes it a little bit easier for people to swallow using metaphors and using those sorts of tricks. Poetic language, mm-hmm. Because it's eye language, it's beautiful. You're playing with language. It's captivating and it also affects you but it has a message, a subconscious subliminal message that's behind all that beauty and that's really the only way. Right, right. If I was extremely direct about it, I mean, sometimes in some places that's the right thing to do, be blunt, be direct but there's other ways to do that too. If you can't be direct, sometimes you have to get your message in another way and sneak it in. That's right, through the back door. It's just like Patty Ladd's story about the museum, do you know that? You don't know that story? Oh, it's great, it's from his book. It's fantastic, it's a great story and I can tell you the story. It'll be pretty much my version of it. I'm gonna tweak his just a little bit. You know, I work as a janitor. I'm deaf, always been deaf. I was looking for a job and I found one at the Deafness Museum. That's where I work. They hired me. I felt it was important I was deaf and I'm working there. What do I do? I go into this white room with all these portraits on the wall. Most of them are of white men and white lab coats, doctors. They have PhDs next to their names. They look very distinguished. None of them knows how to sign. They're surgeons. They're people who work very hard to get rid of deafness and improve deaf people's speech. There's all these other portraits in another gallery that are all women. Most of them speech teachers, audiologists. People who work one-on-one to improve people's speech. All these portraits on the wall. In the middle of a room with a special light shining down upon it is a statue of Alexander Graham Bell. So honored and so lauded as a hero. All these portraits, all these technologies, all these different cases full of instruments of torture to try to help deaf people here. Things stuck up in noses, down throats, in ears, radiation machines to show different ways to fix people throughout the ages. I see those and think, wow, that looks horrible. But gotta earn my pay. I got my job. I'm a janitor in the Deafness Museum. That's what I do. One day I went to the deaf club which unfortunately fewer and fewer people are attending. And I went to play cards as I usually do. And this one night, this old man shows up. He's a deaf man, but I've never seen him before. And he asks me, what do you do for a living? Oh, me? I'm a janitor at the Deafness Museum, I tell him. Oh, he says, you know, it's down at the intersection of that and that. Yeah, that's where it is, all right. He said, you know, if you look really hard, there's a secret door in the back of the museum. I said, a secret door? I never seen no secret door. I've worked there for 30 years and I've never seen a secret door. Oh, no, he said you just have overlooked it. You should check it out next time you work, go see. Okay, so I kept playing cards. I looked up and he'd gone. I never saw him again. Well, I worked the night shift. So I went down to work at the Deafness Museum that night, I was thinking about what he said about this secret door. I decided to go look along the back wall and sure enough, there was an outline of a door. I had never noticed it before. I gave it a push and it swung open. It wasn't even locked. Behind that door, it was dark and quiet. It was laced with cobwebs and there were portraits that were turned against the wall. There were shapes and silhouettes of things. I brushed off the cobwebs and I turned one around and one of those pictures was of Martha's Vineyard. It was a town hall meeting showing everybody signing, hearing and deaf. I didn't know about that, what a surprise. The next picture I turned around was from Turkey. The Sultan, the ruler of the land. At the time of the Ottoman Empire, the most prized guards for the Sultan were deaf people because they knew they wouldn't blab their secrets and they were chosen as guards. Such respect for them. Such respect for sign language. I turned around other pictures and there were pictures of schools for the deaf that had been founded over the years, things I'd never heard about that I didn't know anything about. I couldn't believe it. There was an old movie projector that I dusted off and when I turned it on, on the wall was projected, we will always love and cherish our beautiful sign language as the noblest gift God has given to deaf people. Wow, look at all this, I never even knew this existed. There was another door in the back of that room and when I opened it, it led to a beautiful grassy garden with a walkway paved with old stones that were overgrown with moss and weeds. And when I followed that pathway and turned around, I looked and saw that this had been the original entrance to the museum and the sign at the top said the Deaf Hood Museum. It was covered over with leaves and what have you. So the Deaf Ness Museum was actually an annex that was added on to the original museum. That big fancy place in the front with all the lights and all the beauty and the sterile rooms and the pictures and statue was what people saw but the back part was hidden and put aside and people didn't know but it's still there waiting to be discovered. And that's the same as your mind, you have to change it. You have to change your whole paradigm of how you see things. Deafness should be that, it'd be celebrated. That's the story. It needs to completely undergo a revolution, a change in the way that we look at things, movies, books, poems, everything and more and more now you see pockets of resistance. It is a revolution, not a revolution of the sense of rebellion but in a change, a complete sea change. And so that deaf doesn't become deaf. DEAF does not become DEATH, right? We have a choice. We could go this way and we could follow the status quo and go a long or merry way. Just like the Robert Frost poem, the road that is taken or we could take the road not taken and be willing to go there. But if we go that way, it's really important that we're active along the way and that we find that is the true road. You're right. So many of our leaders are deaf leaders. I haven't even looked at their own deafhood yet. They haven't looked internally. You can look out at who's working in the hearing world. Some of them are successful. You know, like you can see how maybe sometimes black people even do that. They try to masquerade as white people or something just to survive. And it's the same thing. Deaf people will sometimes issue their sign language or their deafness. Just feel like that's not my problem. I leave it to the other deaf people to take care of that. But is that really the way it should be? If you look throughout history, there've been so many oppressed people who have decided to rise to the occasion and undergo those changes and try to make them occur. There are so many deaf PhDs out there now. So many deaf people are becoming more and more affluent. Their skills, their arts, everything, they should get together and consolidate. Everybody's factionalized now. And I think that's still a legacy of oralism that still is very much entrenched and ingrained within us. But we need to coalesce. The push has to be now because time is short. We need to get cracking. We, members of National Association of the Deaf, need to make a push for that, I think. But sometimes we're kind of stuck, you know. NAD right across from them is who? The Volta Bureau. AG bail office is located directly across the street from the headquarters of the National Association of the Deaf. It's difficult. I think the National Institute for Deafness and Communication, something like that, they're located right there, too. So they have these organizations that are right there looking, staring right down the barrel of their gun at the NAD, this tiny little organization being flanked or looked down upon and controlled by these two huge behemoth organizations. And I think we need to figure out a way to affect some sort of changes in consciousness. And that whole idea of using the word deafness, that's gotta go. We need to change the language to being deaf, becoming deaf, transitioning to deaf, no more hearing loss, hard of hearing, that kind of thing, can't hear, can't hear. No more of that. We have to embrace who we are. That kind of language doesn't fit us anymore. The language needs to change to accurately reflect who we are and what we're going for. And I believe that that's the only choice that we have in front of us currently. If Gallaudet were to go under, it shouldn't happen. I guess it's possible, maybe. But we mustn't even think of that as an eventuality. We have to keep hope. We have to do something different. There has to be something new that comes down the road. All the old ways of being in the ways that we kept doing things has to change. We can't just assume the status quo is gonna be good enough to maintain. If Gallaudet went down the tubes, that would be serious. It can't happen, it can't. The whole world looks to Gallaudet. We will be fine, we can get along fine. We really need to do something. I mean, Gallaudet is undergoing some hard struggles. It's true. And that's because of oralism. Oralism equals colonialism. If you look at the history of colonialism, it's exactly the same. Paddy Ladd goes into this at length in his book. Colonialism, how different countries, imperialist countries took over other countries, it's exact corollary. And we need to understand that before we can actually affect the changes and become a post-colonialist society. We have to, otherwise it will persist. Look at Paddy Ladd's book, just check it out. He explains it, it's a difficult book to read, but it's wonderful, the message is very clear. If you understand colonialism, you understand the death situation and death society as we know it now. Done, mm-hmm. If you freeze a film, if you stop it, yeah, how can you show the world? How do you show them? This is the discussion that we have. Through the medium of film, that's great. But how do we utilize it? Do you have voiceover? Do you have captions? That's a big discussion. I'm gonna tell you my ideal. If you don't have a vision, you die, right? I'll tell you my vision. The Bible says that people without a vision is a people who will die. Did you know that verse? Do you know that? It's in proverbs, you can look it up. When there is no vision, then the people perish. So it seems that deaf people have no vision. When we become post-colonialist, we will have vision again, and that's what we're going for. Right now, we have to figure out how to get there. Right now, we're practicing to arrive in a post-colonialist society as deaf people. I would say, learn sign. I think people need to learn sign. Learn sign. High schools often offer sign language courses. I think they need to learn sign. Yeah, people have been learning sign. They were curious. There are more people in business who are deaf. Then we look at it in a more positive way. It solves more problems. That's the vision. It's that signing is what has to happen. People have to learn sign. They learn sign first. That's the ideal. That would be the best thing. So for your film, people should learn sign to understand it. But the second best thing, of course, is to have some kind of translation. They could watch it, and then they could read the translation. Oh yeah, you could put up captions, but that's a different kind of an enterprise, right? It used to be that we would read books. I read books before I saw movies. I would read the book, and then I'd watch the movie, and I'd try to figure out as it went along. So that was a technique that I used, and I had that experience. So I think that hearing people could do that too. You look at me like I'm nuts, but I'm saying if you don't have captions, people could watch the movie, read the thing before, and then go see it. Well, ideas equal access. People can't hear. How can they communicate? They write back and forth. That's what we've done is deaf people, right? So if you have deaf people translating, people who are really good at English, whatever, like people could watch it, and then somebody could write it down. That's what we've been experienced. With TV, with movies, that's what we went through. And the last thing I'd say is just add music, but no words. Have emotive music that would lead people's emotions. You know, and that could add that. The very, very, very last thing I'd say for hearing people to understand a film like what you're making is to have a voiceover. That's my idea. Yeah, music sets a mood. You know, you see something and then there's music that sort of underscores the mood. No language, not ASL is the number one. That's one thing I said. I wanted the only language to have a BSL because there's not many places where you could go to a movie and you could see that it would only be an ASL. But if you needed to put some little cues in there of music to lead people's emotions, you know, not have a translation overlaid it because then I think things get lost. Right, yeah, control the audience through the music. I know that if movies are for hearing folks, they have to have music. I know that they're really controlled. Hearing people are controlled by music. You know, like I just gotta tell you we don't. I was so shocked. Somebody told me there's music in the bathroom. People told me that when you go to the store, there's music. Like, is it getting people to buy more or something like that? There's music. All over, cults, I know. There's special cults that when they get people in the cult, they bombard them with music all day and all night to brainwash them. I was shocked to find this out. So why not use that technique to your own advantage and use music to lead people's emotions in your film if you want to? Why not? Why not? You want to? That's cool. If you think that'll help them understand it better and welcome to my way of doing things, no language, then join us. We didn't have language either. No, the music's just to control them. You know, just to get our message out, use it. Use their medium to understand our message. It's just an idea. I'm just blue-skying it. Remember, that wasn't my first choice. I said my first choice is to not have any language and have people learn ASL to understand your film and my last choice. Absolute last is to have voiceover of any kind. The medium, yeah. Before I understood myself more, well, you know, I've always looked at ASL and a deaf person and all that and I do study other groups as well and look at the mediums. And of course, you know, I realized, wow, men and women function in a really different way. They're still unequal in so many ways, even just being a woman or just being a deaf woman, you know? So it's different ways they're portrayed in the media. You know, men are the ones who bring home the bacon and women are the ones who cook and what have you. I mean, like for years, that was just expected, right? I mean, my parents have been married over 60 years and that was their traditional way. My dad always functioned that way. My mom always functioned that way. But she's a very strong woman and he had to learn that she wasn't that kind of homebody. You know, if he would say no, she would just go and do her own thing anyway. That was more of a strong deaf woman way, I think. And I had a lot of influence from my mother because she was such a strong woman. My dad too, because it's a deep analytic thinker, very studious person. My mom is very brazen. She's not afraid of anything. I got both of those influences within me, I think. I don't think there's any, well, my mother has her own special gifts and my father has his. But I think they treat each other as equals at this point. But they have to do everything the same or everything in equality, not necessarily. They go along their own separate ways and then they cross over sometimes. They each have their special ways of being. And I think that they've come down to about 50-50 or maybe 51-49, whatever. And I think that's what keeps the world turning, right? That balance. The languages are different, of course. But you can make.