 I was born deaf, and we don't really know the reasons why it's probably hereditary, but my family didn't sign at all. I was first placed into a day school program that I commuted to. It was all oral. There was no sign language allowed at all. It was really a struggle. I was always having to guess to fill in the gaps. Very difficult. What I was good at was reading body language and facial expressions, and was able to put together information from what I saw. When I finally hit the age of 12, I was put into a school for the deaf. And finally, there were no more struggles. I didn't feel as if I was handicapped at all. I felt like I was swimming in an ocean of language. It was so pleasurable, just having language around me all the time. I picked it up really quickly, and I felt at home immediately. I never had the skill as a lip reader. I just wasn't good at that at all. But with sign language, I could play back in the dorm every day, every night. We just played with language. We came up with ABC stories. We took turns sharing different ideas. Had a lot of influence on me playing with language. There wasn't TV around. We just signed. We took turns all the time just showing each other things in sign language. When I got to National Technical Institute for the Deaf, I was in theater. But the language I saw here was mostly English. People were signing more English. I came from this deaf school, of course, where it was all ASL, all the way, all the time. And I got to NTID. There was more English signing. And I think that was because of the academic educational influence and intrusion of English. When I moved to Sweden, which was in 1991, I made that decision to move. And of course, I had to jettison ASL from my expression. And I had to learn a whole new sign language. It was like starting all over again, learning Swedish sign language. Very frustrating. I couldn't communicate in the beginning at all. People didn't understand me. Took a lot of work to ramp up. Took probably around four years until the quality of my signing was such that I would call myself fluent. Now, eight years after I moved there, I was fluent. But I watched myself all some videos from about four years after I moved to Sweden. So I'd had four years of Swedish sign language under my belt. And it was interesting. I still saw so much ASL intrusion. I still hadn't completely switched over to Swedish sign language. Now, of course, I have. But the thing that I understand from all this is that when you acquire a language, it's if you have to cogitate on it, you have to digest it and chew on it. Language is just an amazing thing. I see it so clearly now. And when I go to other countries and I see all the different sign languages in each one, I get it so much more than I ever did before. I took language for granted before. But now, when I objectively look at languages the way it works, like, for instance, Danish sign language or Norwegian sign language or Icelandic sign language, when I look at all the different countries and the different sign languages they have, I realize how incredible they are and how much play there is when all of them. And what I do is I borrow ideas or borrow signs from all these different languages I've been exposed to and I add them to my own lexicon. And it's just fascinating. And I am rich in language. I have a wealth of language within me. I thought it was more natural than that. Well, ABC stories. At the School for the Deaf, of course, we had theater arts. I had this one English teacher who had a big influence on me. This person taught Shakespeare. I remember very clearly learning about Macbeth. And there were film strips that were shown in the classroom. And this English teacher would have us read the captions on the film strips and we would learn about Greek theater. We learned about films. And they were so abstract. I had a lot of art, a lot of theater training. You know, every night there was nothing to do in the dorms. There was no TV, no internet. Computers hadn't been invented yet. So every night they offered different courses that you could take. Like Tuesday nights there'd be a MIME class. And so some well-known MIME would come and would give us a workshop on MIME. That was when I was about 13 or 14 years old and I started to learn MIME and perform it. And I totally loved it. Now, of course, our school believed in speech. So if we were in a play, we had to talk and act at the same time, right? And what they would do is have the captions projected over the top of the stage for people to read. But I couldn't participate in that because I couldn't talk. So I was more of a dancer and I was a MIME. One thing I could do, body language, that fit me perfectly. So I was happy to get involved with that. And it added to my skill set, I think. The clown work I did was much, much later. That was when I was with FTD in Cleveland, Ohio, the Fairmont Theater for the Deaf. That was a professional theater company I was involved with. So both of those experience from school and theatrical background informed each other. I'm not sure when. Let's see, but my first performance here was with Paul Johnston. He was directing Comedia del Arte. So I was performing that. And I think that was before 1980. I was in Sunshine 2. I was in Sunshine 2. So this was before I was even part of Sunshine 2. So I was here. I was in the theater and everyone told me I was awesome. They applauded me. Now, of course, I grew up acting and dancing and performing. I started dancing when I was four or five. And, of course, that was internalized with me. I would be with all hearing dancers. Of course, I was always late on my cues, but I danced anyway. But as for the theater here at NTID, I really wanted to be more involved with those things. And then I went to an NTD, National Theater at the Deaf, summer school in 1980. And then I was in the cast of the first Sunshine 2 group. The first year it was formed in 1980. Comedia del Arte. There's no dialogue in that. It's all body movement. It's all mime. Like, if you were going to talk about money, you would show a big sack of coins or what have you. Everything was explained with mime and gesture. No speaking, no dialogue at all. It's Comedia del Arte. Yeah, a lot of movement. Later, let's see, there was Sunshine 2 and then FTD, Fairmont Theater at the Deaf. That's when I did a lot more translation from scripts to sign language. That was in Cleveland. Fairmont Theater for the Deaf. I don't know if it's still running or not. We translated a lot. And I learned a lot more about the translation process from that. I understood more about how to go about translation. Yeah, that's another story. That's another part of my history. I had an internship with the theater department here. And I took a creative sign language class and a Deaf literature class with Bob Panera, and then acting classes and all that sort of thing. Now, at that time, let's see, Patrick. I think it was Patrick. Some other Deaf folks, and I don't remember. Dennis Webster, I think, too, was involved in this. We would go down to the cellar, and they had a stage there. And this was previous to 1985. It was before then. And every Tuesday night, everybody would go to the cellar, and we would take turns doing some creative sign language skits and performances. Tom Holcomb, I remember, was there. And he was announcing that finally Deaf Studies was getting going. That was, you know, a really big announcement because it hadn't existed before. And I went, and I was in that group, too, so I got to perform. And Patrick said to me, you're signing to English. He said to English? Me? He said, well, how do you create your stuff? And I said, well, I write it down first. And from him, I learned that I should put the English aside completely and I should look at hand shapes and play around with the different techniques of ASL. That was fascinating to me. That's when I started to understand what ASL poetry might be, and that writing poems was a hearing sort of enterprise. And I was finding that I needed to change to thinking about signing first, because how would I show the art of a poem and sign if it started with a written version? It didn't seem like that was going to work. It was very difficult to create a poem and sign language. It was fascinating to watch that work and to start playing around with it myself. And I started then, and I'm still doing it now. And I feel that now I'm even more of a poet than I ever was, and I'm more into poetry than I've ever been. Yup, written. Because I felt that, well, I've always felt that writing poetry is my therapy. It started when I fell in love with this hearing man, and I was crazy about this guy, fell hard, and he kind of said, nope, sorry, you're deaf, ain't going to work. That just tore me apart, honestly. I just felt like if I'd been hearing, we would have been together, but that was impossible. He said, I can, I'd feel like a goldfish. I'd feel like I was swimming in a goldfish bowl if we were together. I thought, a goldfish. And I just imagined that image, what he was trying to say. And the minute I understood what image he was trying to evoke, I went home and I wrote a poem, and it felt so much better to get that out. I felt as if it was therapeutic to me. And so when something hits me a certain way or affects me, I feel like I have to do that. I have to write something down. There's current events, something in newspaper, something in a situation in my life. If it's affecting me in some way, it sparks different creative ideas in me, and it's my therapy to somehow put them out in poetry. Yes, right? I was never very good at English, but I'm a fluent signer. And so that means that my art, when I tried to write something, I would have to ask somebody else for their feedback to tell me if it was right or not. And therefore it's not really my art if I need somebody else to give it credibility and say, no, you have to fix this or change this. Where's the art in that? But with sign language, nobody can tell me I'm wrong. That's my stuff, my turf, my language. And nobody can criticize me. And that's great. So I decided that English is not the way I needed to go. I should concentrate on where my strengths lie and create in sign language and play with that. It's been fantastic. A mixture. I was playing with language, playing with the language itself. ABC stories, hand shapes, storytelling, jokes, all different sorts of genres of literature in sign language. I started out with poetry because that's what was interesting to me at the time, the art of the poem itself, how to structure it, how to sign it. I found that really interesting at the time. Yes, I was learning from Patrick Grable from classes I was taking from him in creative language. And in there, he explained more about hand shapes and the word choices you would employ and keeping things simple. And the poems would grow from those structural elements. At that time, well, yeah, in the beginning, I don't think that was much of an influence. I think it was a new idea to me. But later, around 1980, when I was involved with Sunshine 2, I was translating poems from Dorothy Miles. There was a poem called Skunk, and I was trying to figure out how to sign it. I thought I could do it in English. That would be fine, but I wanted to do something else. I felt that I needed to become a poet, but that didn't happen overnight. It took a while to develop as a poet. I had to pick up those skills along the way, and it took years. The art had to morph. It's like as somebody paints, the first time you paint, it's very naive and rudimentary, and it takes years to become more sophisticated at that art. It's exactly the same thing with poetry. And now I feel extremely adept at it, but I look at my younger work, and it looks like younger work. And so many influences over the years. Hard to name them all. I would start with Patrick, of course, and then Bob Panera, because I took his deaf literature class, and he talked about translation and how to move from a text to a signed rendition, supposed of Haiku, and what was the other one? Spoon River? Spoon River, yep. We learned from that text. So we were using literature as the stimulus material to sign creatively. Literature? I think literature is cerebral. It's from the mind. But really, it's telling stories and telling the history of a people. It's fascinating, really, that something can happen in society. Something can occur. Someone puts it down, and then it becomes a historical artifact. I just find that's interesting, and that's how literature evolves. So later, I met Peter Cook, and he, as I, was a major in graphic design. I was a little older than he was, but we were both at RIT. And there were a lot of folks in NTID at the time who were experimenting with looking at movies, and you might think it's funny calling movies a kind of poetic art form, but RIT in the art department, if there were paintings I didn't understand, I was getting more exposure to art classes where we were discussing them and analyzing art. And it just became so clear to me that it was an art form that poetry could be. Then I met Stefa, who was the dance teacher, Stefa Z. There was another teacher before her. I can't remember. Last name was Caleb, maybe. Anyway, I can't remember her name, but I remember also. And so I was learning more about dance and how language was actually a form of dance as well. Language is a dance. The way you could show maybe even a leaf falling could be a dance movement. I was really struck by that that my body actually is a form of the dance and the language put together, and that whole process could be concurrent. Stefa, the dance teacher, introduced dance to us. There was this one performance where there was a vat of water on stage and she was just twirling around in a stage light off to the side. I watched this performance. There was a vat of water and I'm watching her twirl around at the same time on the stage. Nothing else is really going on. She's just twirling around and around in the spotlight. And it really just washed all over me the experience of what this was. Being present there. I understood the way I could perhaps develop my art. Not really. My early poetry I wouldn't say you could call it art. Maybe it was stories or I mean people understood it but now people don't understand my work at all. Nowadays they really don't. It's the same as a written poem, right? A lot of people read it and get it the moment they read it. They have to engage with it more. And it's the same with my work now. I think it's more sophisticated poetry than I used to perform and I do all sorts. How it develops. If I wanted to give you an example my poems swan from back in the day. Yep you could look at it and say okay I get it, that's a swan and it's a beautiful poem but there's really more abstract concepts that could be employed in it. No one didn't. It was just a pretty image and I wanted to have more embedded abstract ideas and nuance within my art. I wanted the audience to appreciate the art and the experience of seeing it but when I was thinking about deaf people who historically had been left out of the artistic process sometimes they couldn't follow performances or understand things. They've missed the point of things. It's very frustrated for them so I feel the experience is the inspiring part of being part of a performance and watching it. If there's sorrow or hurt or joy or whatever you want that experience to be conveyed I think it's really worthwhile to make that attempt and I think it's important to put that energy out there and get those emotions out but often times people don't understand it. I had already had a lot of positive experiences performing at Jazz Berries. There were so many deaf and hearing people who were mixing in those audiences a great exchange of ideas from that really social space that was deaf and hearing. The few times I performed there, one time I did with Howie Seago Peter Cook was there, Patrick Valley, Clayton Valley just everybody together and they really appreciated what I was doing. Then I moved to Sweden. My poetry changed as a result of that move and I thought while I was in Sweden that everything would keep growing here that's what I thought so I went on my merry way and when I came back to visit I was looking for more poetry Peter Cook had moved to Chicago and there were a lot of people I knew but a lot of people didn't know who I was they're like oh you're Debbie Renny who are you? Well I hadn't lived here for a long time I would know who I was but somehow I thought they would. I did get taped doing some performances and I think that costume changes were part of that performance, the palms. I don't necessarily want to spoon feed people during my performances and give them so much exposition about what's going on oh you know I'm talking about what happened in this country a hundred men raped a mentally retarded woman isn't that awful and then explain it I just want to put the piece out there but the audience wants to ask questions sometimes and so then I have to be willing to do that so after I performed back in the day I would say are there any questions one time the Steph Man stood up and he said I don't understand a thing you're doing and I'm sure that 90% of us don't understand you in this audience it was so taken aback by that okay all right I get it you're frustrated it's very difficult to understand these sorts of things same thing is reading a book and you don't understand it at the moment you have to engage with it I do get it sometimes you have to read something again and again until the meaning becomes clear and you appreciate its art and it's the same here with performance and so discussion is really great so I asked him you know what's the meaning of orange he kind of couldn't answer and then other people started kind of jumping into the discussion and then other questions were asked and I think that it was great because as we were able to have this dialogue more people understood the idea of art and what poetry was and Peter Cook was so relieved that this was going on because the fur died down and everybody calmed down but it was really kind of funny and this didn't happen once I mean this was something recurrent and I experienced this in Europe too audiences being very frustrated not understanding what I was doing and so sometimes I would provide a workshop and we'd have these discussions then they would see my work and understand it better and through that process they understood more of what I was up to it was really a good thing overall I was so fortunate that I moved to Sweden because they really believe in me there it's great they believe in me it wasn't easy when I first got there oh who's this American what are you all about one of those egotistical Americans again who had to be very patient who worked really hard and showed them who I was started out teaching children and then over time as my teaching grew and my name grew over the years they finally knew who I was as a poet not as an actor I'm known there as a poet that's funny because here I'm known more as an actress you know and that's kind of what I was known for in the states but over there I'm known as a poet I started let's see 1996 developing an educational video and this video is used in all the schools for the deaf in Sweden to teach deaf children sign language and poetry the curriculum embeds poetry within it they feel that Swedish deaf children need to learn sign language poetry in their own language the same way they have to read written Swedish poetry in the same way we do that with English here so all the schools the deaf in Sweden actually use this curriculum and in the video is my work having created this DVD the teachers use it they show the poems they discuss with kids and it's really amazing from teaching just a class at a time now there are five schools for the deaf in Sweden all over the country who utilize this DVD with a whole unit about sign language poetry within it and that's just so cool that's a real positive development and so it means that poetry is still alive there and it's not going to die that's great identity is really crucial I think that sometimes sign language quality and I use this sign for quality rather than a cue on the chest I use this sign because quality to sign anyway is more of a tactile feeling like an example of it would be an American sign language you might sign a ball hit me and you might sign the ball this way or this way or this way and you can see the difference in what those balls would look like hitting me on the head by the different signs I use and I feel those nuances are being lost somehow I think that speech is always more important as preferable to sign in Sweden they have a very strong idea that Swedish sign language and written and spoken Swedish are completely separate they think they're equal somewhat well it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next 10 years whether they're seen as equal or if the sign language will be maybe demeaned a little bit but the quality of the signing is respected for this moment anyway and it's very much tied into the notion of one's identity there's a lot of cochlear implants I know many people who have them and they still sign at the same time seems like 50% of them sign and 50% don't there's a lot of kids who can talk who have cochlear implants but they still prefer to sign and they'll sign in Swedish sign language of course my daughter is deaf she does not have a cochlear implant and she signs in her sign language quality how she signs is quite different because she doesn't speak a cochlear implant it makes a big difference if you have deaf parents or not so a lot of deaf parents sometimes still implant their kids but they're signing at home and they have both so the Swedish intrusion on the language will still be there but they're still signing I think that it depends on who the person is very individual but sometimes the art is lost by having more of the written and spoken language overlaid it means that there are fewer poems being created all over the world yes I feel my identity is very much tied to my poetry I can sign just prosaically my everyday sign language and it's very different than the process of becoming a poet because through poetry I've found so much more richness I mean ASL or any sign language it's incredible idea before like oh you're signing well enough sign is okay it's just functional whatever you know realize it's a head to toe language I mean every piece of your body screams sign language the way you would sign a person standing but then you could have them moving around it's the same way that people use intonation when they speak English or they speak any language it's so iconic there's so many pictures I can build a mountain and stand on top of it then I can move that down and show another camera angle that's even with the person on top of the pinnacle of that mountain I kind of feel like I'm deaf so what it's part of my identity and identity for me is very much tied to the poetry that I create which is great I'm deaf yeah okay it's a problem it happens so what I think that every person has some sort of difficulty in their life doesn't matter who they are but I feel fine about being deaf I want to proudly show that I don't need sympathy for it so my identity and my poetry they're tied together and I feel that I can use those to show more to deaf people about how they can feel pride as well I feel pride myself as a deaf person and I can share that Tim Cohn well he did have influence on me for sure his art was written of course the way he created poetry how did I meet him I remember that he was with Donna and the two of them were in that breezeway between building 7a and 7b I think that they were coming down the ramp and it was so beautiful they were coming down this ramp together and they're both just such beautiful people and Donna had that amazing brilliant smile and she and Jim were walking towards me and they were just so beautiful and we started talking they said oh you're a performer I said yes and what's your work like I mean I still have that picture of my mind of that day seeing them approaching me I think all of us went to writers and books it's not where writers and books is now it was this other place their previous location yeah it was writers and books for sure it wasn't another place it wasn't where they're located now and there's this big audience and we were waiting and waiting waiting for Jim to come because I was going to listen to watch him to read it I'm kind of confused like why are we waiting I didn't really understand that not until much later looking back that that was Jim and it made perfect sense that we were waiting but he was nervous he was out there smoking and he finally sauners up to the stage you know starts getting his mic ready and reading and it was so interesting it was great there was an interpreter there I can't remember which interpreter it was from back then whenever it was interpreted his poetry reading and it was just amazing I can't say I understood it but the experience again not understanding but just the feeling of it was really profound so later over time he would come and ask me once in a while you know why don't you tape your work come on I was resistant I didn't want to I was really afraid that somebody else might even copy my work and I didn't want that really nobody can copy my work but that's what I was worried about back then he was coming up with publications at the time and he had this one book and it was featured Patrick, Peter and me and he wanted us to write our poems we had each written a few poems that he was publishing we each had a column arrayed next to each other in this book put in like a series and Jim organized this I was so honored that he wanted to include me in this because I didn't tend to write my poems it wasn't my art so I found it interesting that he wanted me to write it down in a written format and then he's the one who got the whole National Deaf Poetry Conference going first ASL poetry conference and that had a huge impact on me we were trying to show everybody what we were doing and what ASL poetry was and people came from all over we had discussions LMA Lens was there, Valley was there Patrick, me I don't think Howie Seago was there he wasn't in it I think Howie Seago was with Chaz he was performing with Chaz they had sort of a night club routine thing that they were doing they weren't part of this let's see three four five of us right there was the five us there and it felt like finally we had found each other we all were so excited to have found each other all these poets Clayton Valley believed in me it was amazing he saw me as a poet and what I was doing as literary and he validated me I was so fortunate to have him now he was a linguist of course and he was trying to prove that ASL had poetry and that poetry could be part of ASL and this wasn't just this crazy fly by night idea we were coming up with that he had linguistic validation it's so sad that he's gone that we lost him and he was a very important person to me I want to tell you in Sweden it was not easy to get a poetry scene going there in Stockholm the university there the deaf people there basically said I don't want to hear it we don't want to know anything about this poetry thing there was no respect for it there was no belief in it not at all so it wasn't easy to get that idea going and get it some traction there is a person from Stockholm University who actually came and saw Valley perform and actually saw him give a lecture one time they asked Valley who is a true poet in your estimation a signed poet and he named me he said Debbie and so this guy went back to Stockholm and told everybody Debbie was a poet so he agreed with that and I was so relieved because I've been working tirelessly to try to get this idea some traction and I mean it might have seemed like it was easy but it was a long slog of being very patient for years it was a brave thing to do but I have to do what I believe in even though it wasn't easy influences well I'm influenced by ideas I look at other poet styles and it's just as if somebody who's a hearing author would look at different styles of writing and look at those and make comparisons I do the same thing and look at other peoples some peoples I like and some other folks I don't like and I have to judge which of those influences I want to take in to my own work I really like metaphor somebody's really good with metaphor that strikes me and I want to use more metaphors in my work rhythm a lot of rhythm in her poems and I wonder how can I play with rhythm more in my work also Patrick has this interesting simultaneous use of different hand shapes which is really cool he's got the one in reflection with the rocket going up and the tear going down the face very carefully choosing the signs and constructing the poems Peter has a lot of movement place to place so he'll talk about something going on in the US and something going on at the same time in South America and be able to switch from different locations just in his body so it's interesting to educate people in Sweden about these different techniques that I've seen rhythm and simultaneous sign production form movement repetition just a myriad of different techniques that I've incorporated in my work another influence I have to say is Peter Peter Cook we work together and also Kenny Lerner was involved in this three of us would come up with ideas Kenny would suggest something he had a Stevie Wonder song that he was explaining to me one day I didn't know anything about it of course but he showed me the lines and then we changed the lines around of the song so that the story was more cohesive he said why don't you change stuff around in your poems like reorder what you're doing so that the story is told in a different way so we thought okay let's do that so we had this one story and then we moved things around we literally did so there was more repetition of certain of the elements and then the last part would bring it all together and tie it in in this really neat way and I still use that technique I still use that idea sometime it was really nice that poem was called Hamburg and that was one of the best ones Hamburg Peter and I performed that together we worked on that and that was just amazing we haven't done it since then the other one I'm trying to think of what the title was Smoke Big World to Small World I think something like that Big World to Small World that was really neat we did that and I showed that one in Sweden and that was so cool people were completely floored by it it was great now later Peter and I worked teaching in Norway we had this workshop we were putting on we found that the poetry would be interesting if we talked more about classifiers because classifiers are an integral part of sign language expression and they're really rich and they're linguistic capabilities there's a lot of mime involved in it with classifiers if you're walking down the street I'm watching myself walk down the street like a young kid that's a gesture not a sign really or you can show somebody walking on an icy surface you've got the surface but what's the sign that you're going to use to show that more sign language has so many different nuances and such richness everybody knows when you're walking down the street if you mime it but if you're going to show it from different points from different angles with your hands like that you can show the trees going by then we know a person's walking so you're changing from different perspectives and classifiers help us with that Peter was talking a lot about film techniques in his work and how that developed in the same way that poetry develops so film of course if you think about the matrix and how that show going backwards and forwards I mean the imagery and how imaginative that was and how we can show that in sign language too it's amazing that whole idea of you know in the matrix when Neo is flying and he slows down but something goes by him that's a lot of play and you can put that in sign language too so a lot of filmic styles can go into it Peter and I wow when we get together it's great but we live so far apart now it's nice to bump into him again and again here and there it's really cool when we do and then it always kind of springs up new ideas for us we grow more I've taught with deaf kids hearing kids adults everybody and I always get new ideas and it always sparks new ideas within me when I meet different people I believe that everything in the world inspires me the news, current events, everything gives me ideas there's not just one influence that gets me going poetically let's see when I became a vegetarian it was let's see I was at a poetry festival no no oh it was it was the Clearwater Festival that's what it was somebody was handing out brochures about animal rights and animal welfare and I took one and they were looking for members you know people who had become part of this vegetarian society and in this brochure talking about veal now I had no awareness of where veal came from at the time I didn't realize we were eating baby cows baby animals you know they take them before they become adults and then they process them and we eat them so I wanted somehow to create a poem that would show calf, c-a-l-f, c-a-l-f again and again fingerspell that word over and over again and that's how I came up with the different elements of that particular poem because I wanted to show that we definitely eat calves I hadn't known anything about it myself I didn't know where veal came from I didn't know it came from calves so it really hit me hard learning about that yeah it's a pretty powerful poem a lot of people are pretty shocked by it and a lot of them were inspired to stop eating veal so I guess it worked boycott veal is the title of it and it did work yeah yes I wanted to fingerspell the word many times you know sometimes with fingerspell stories or word loan stories they're cute they're funny there's one about piano p-i-n-a-o and there's some way you do that to show how you're playing a piano so they're fun and they're witty but I decided I wanted to do something a little bit more powerful so calves are cute but you know ironically they have a life full of pain and it's a contradiction life is full of contradiction so I wanted to emphasize that and juxtapose that yes Donna and I were driving I remember and I was looking at the beautiful scenery I was really thinking about mother earth all that was arrayed around me as we drove down the road it was really taken by the fluttering of the trees and the branches so I was looking outside the windows of the car you know we're just driving down the road I'm just really thinking about nature and I was taking different elements of nature kind of putting them together really focusing on the idea of mother earth well what I would do is I would create my poetry and then I would tape it and then Donna Cachitas would watch it and she would take notes as she watched it I just left that part up to her to come up with the words I would create it she'd show me the words, I would approve them you know then we would practice together she would match the word to my performance and it took a long time and this was in her free time there was no pay involved at all it was a lot of work that's very rare today you won't find people willing to do that and now I don't even have a voice interpreter from my poetry back then because I felt it was a really worthwhile thing to have everybody in the community involved deaf and hearing people could enjoy a performance together the deaf people watching the signs and the hearing people hearing a voice there were discussions, arguments dissensions in the community about whether it was right or wrong to add a voice at the same time as a poem was being presented so a lot of discussions ensued from that but for me I felt it was really important to have everybody in the community participating in this event I didn't want anybody excluded I'll be performing in January of 2009 and it's going to be a really big venue and it's a really big deal for me it's a solo show a solo performance Sweden has a professional theater the deaf it's called the silent theater and they actually hired me and they purchased my work my poetry it's going to be filmed I'll have costumes I have a director it's a huge production really I'm so honored that they pursued me and wanted me for this it's a traveling show they didn't ask me if I wanted a voice they're not going to hire anybody because back in the day like I said Donna worked for free and didn't expect any pay at all nor did she get any she just translated this for no pay at all that's just what it was back then it would cost a lot now because you'd have to be for instance paying two actors me and a voicer so we came up with a brilliant idea of having captions so first what will happen is on the side of the stage there'll be a screen and there will be the words the text of what I'm performing in Swedish so people can read that and then once they finish reading the screen it'll go dark and then they'll watch me and they'll try to put that together themselves of course the deaf people if they read it and then they watch me it's helpful to them too because they'll be learning to read Swedish better too so it's nice it's great it's having two performances in a sense it's great it's a very neat concept yes Kenny mostly Kenny and Peter and I the three of us because we were roommates at that time we were always just going to town and creating things all the time and I can't remember which let's see there was one poem that I think Kenny he was talking about maybe it was Jim I'm thinking Jim was involved in this anyway one of them was working at a mental hospital and he told me the story and I took that story and then use that in juxtaposition and overlap with the holocaust with what happened to Jews in Germany so we worked on that one together trying to remember the other ones Kenny was more he was an idea guy the ideas within the language well here's a good example we tried to put this one image in a poem of hands scratching down a wall okay that's hands scratching down the wall so we saved that idea but the first thing you see is not that picture you see somebody lining those scratches in the wall with their fingers so you're suggesting the idea you don't know what caused those lines in the wall but you're just seeing these lines in the wall that are being outlined by hand you don't know that it's a hand that scraped down the side of that wall and caused it until later and then you realize that it was from the showers or what they said was showers during the holocaust when they gasped the Jews so the story itself could embed these interesting techniques you know if I showed that right away it wouldn't be as interesting Kenny said save it till later save the big reveal until the end so the audience is puzzled and they have to think about it a little bit and work a little harder and at the very end it all comes together and they understand so I outline those lines on the wall and then you don't know what it is till the end of the poem sometimes Kenny was too hearing I mean by that not too hearing but I mean you know I didn't know about these things I had no education about some of the things he talked about and I thought that you know I've got the signs I knew how to sign but I didn't have those ideas that he was able to give me Kenny's a very creative person he was always coming up with new ideas but they didn't necessarily connect with deaf audiences so he was more of an artist but an artist of a different sort I think deaf culture moves along and it's safe I have to think about this for a minute more about deaf culture those within deaf culture know the rules they know the norms it's a comfortable world and it kind of goes along safely compared to their perception of the hearing world where they don't know the rules it's all new, new thoughts, new ideas and they're somewhat taken aback by those things when they're presented in a certain way but Kenny taught me a lot about that and then I in turn felt I could pass that along to deaf audiences and teach them yes yes, right, right at that time and this was a really long time ago it's hard for me to remember and be able to explain it I'm just trying to think about how it's like if you were going to paint with watercolor you open your tubes you lay out your colors on your palette and then you just see what happens as you play around on the canvas something happens, something pops up on that canvas and for me it's the same thing with creating poetry I'm just messing around, I'm playing suppose I wanted to show cold how would I show what cold is or hot how would I be able to depict that how do I show temperature how would I show it sorrow or anything like that I want to be able to depict it somehow so I take an idea and have to figure out how to represent it in sign iconically for instance a leaf falling from a tree okay, there you go, you got a leaf falling from the tree how would I show it's cold show it shuddering in the cold that's playing, right how about hot, how would I show it's hot is wilting as it falls from the tree so just searching for the right way to show the idea I still work that way today I'm thinking something of mine what did I want to say oh, before I left for Sweden I actually made a video the group called Sign Media in Washington DC invited me to come and they disseminated this video I was excited to go, it was great and we made this video, it was part of a series and then I left it's kind of funny, it's like I just sort of left that all behind, I created this thing and then I absconded so I left the US and that was not an easy move for me because ASL poetry was here and then I was going to a place where there wasn't any poetry I got there and I had to learn the language before I could create any poetry and play with the language, you're going to play with something that means you have to put in the time and be patient so I had to take some time to learn the language, of course and that takes a lot of time and effort whereas here, when I left the US I already had that and it wasn't easy it was an anguishing situation for me to go there but it ended up to be such a positive thing and such great things happened anyway when I moved so I moved in 1991 and in 1993 I signed it the Swedish way in 1993 there was a TV production company that asked me to perform for them it was with children kind of like a Sesame Street thing here but for there it was for deaf children so they wanted me to perform poetry for children, perfect it was a great way to practice because I was just learning the language and I was creating but I didn't sign that well yet in Swedish sign language but it didn't matter and I was performing for kids so I could be sort of awkward, make a lot of mistakes and be goofy and that was funny so it was a perfect fit actually it was poetry for children I created all different ones for them and it was a great process to be involved with oh maybe that was the seller maybe Jim organized that oh that must be what it was okay oh I remember now, yeah Jim was part of that right bird brain I forgot about bird brain yeah he encouraged a lot of people to take part in that in the birds brain society I feel I just love doing it, what can I say it's that simple really, I just love it it makes me feel wonderful I love playing with language my writing is so bad in English it's much inferior and it makes me feel inferior when I try to do it it depletes me it hurts me to try to do it but I'm replenished with sign I feel so much better, it's great to be able to sign my poetry and I feel that I'm able to grow from it it's really simple I just love it I think it's really cool I feel spiritual about it it's wonderful it's inspirational things are hard, things are painful things are difficult sometimes but when I do poetry it feels like just jumping in refreshing water, it's replenishing I enjoy it and that's all it's art, performance art dance, theater, any of those things they're just wonderful makes me feel wonderful Bridge of was like well it was a group we did group work to develop you know to group things group performances it was very hard it's not easy so we would get together and we were trying to sign things together it's much easier to work solo of course or maybe even as a duo just two people but we would do two or we would do three people at the same time and become this performance group so we were trying to focus on the language somehow but as a group it was very difficult each of us contributed different talents to it sometimes Jim would stand and read a poem and someone would interpret it for him or Jim would have somebody next to him and he would sign it or Kenny would sign something and Peter would actually voice it so we'd switch up the roles it was a very short lived group and then I left I do remember this one night it was so funny we were all sitting around hanging out and talking and then Jim comes into the room and says hey guys we're supposed to be in Binghamton we had all completely forgotten it was so funny we were supposed to do some poetry down at Binghamton we weren't there the poem missing children came about because I was watching TV and there was a story about Ireland I don't remember the sign for it an American sign which I'm using the Swedish sign but anyway Ireland and there was this program and it was showing you know the Catholic and the Protestants difficulties the time of troubles and anyway in the show they were showing a family that actually did an exchange to try to understand each other better later on not long after that I was studying I was taking an elective course it was a political course and it was dealing with the history of South Africa and in South Africa at that time the police had come and they were shooting marchers in a funeral procession and shooting them in the back and then right on the heels of that I learned about how in South America quite often children are forced to be child soldiers at the same time this is going on there's these milk cartons with pictures of missing children on them so I made the linkages between all those different stories and Kenny helped me with that and I put them all together in this one piece of work yeah I'm still actually using that poem I feel like where's childhood it's gone for so many I really wanted to emphasize that how the children suffer South Africa South America Ireland and in other places in the world too it's still happening there are many missing children to this day still I feel like in the 80s a flower was blossoming I thought that seeds would emanate from these blossoms and scatter and take root it didn't really happen I guess and I don't know I don't know what it looks like now I'm so far behind in terms of the scene now but I yanked out some of those plants and I took those seeds of poetry to Sweden I think it's important for me you know because if there hadn't been that time then there wouldn't be any me well I don't really mean that literally it's not like I wouldn't exist but it's just the language of poetry that have so strongly within me I mean I see so clearly what ASL poetry is and it came to fruition that time and it continues I would write poetry before that time but I wrote it in English but that particular time that ASL poetry explosion in the 80s was when I really feel I got it that's what ASL poetry is and it occurred in the 1980s I have to read it oh I have it I'm just imagining my voice said can you get did I ever give Kenny any voicing ideas I just thought that was funny I'm fascinated by any kind of performance art deaf culture has wait a minute what do I mean let me start again performance art hadn't been much in deaf culture previously out in the hearing world there's a famous woman named Laurie Anderson very well known performance artist she plays around with sounds, noises different sorts of techniques and when I was at RIT there was a hearing professor who was talking about contemporary art and mentioned performance art and there's this one person who painted who made peanut butter sandwiches all along the street this is a hearing person right I found that really interesting that their art was making peanut butter sandwiches and that kind of got me drawn in in a sense that was a hearing thing and anyway I learned that through getting educated about that but I thought okay hearing people do that great but I want to be part of that too I loved working with hearing people it's very challenging lots of new ideas different perspectives which really helped me see in different ways as well so yes you know deaf people would say what's up that's not deaf and that's right because deaf culture didn't necessarily contain those aspects of performance art like somebody doing making peanut butter sandwiches on the sidewalk and what's that all about so that was a difficulty was this cultural clash that would occur from just a lack of experience with that particular art form so through discussions and through deliberations we were able to bring those two together by bringing performance art into the deaf community sometimes people don't understand what it means to be deaf they looked at me and they think I'm weird I always was people thought that I was European back in the day I was into art and they thought I already looked European I belong more there I think in Sweden there is more art just in general and the quality of the art is superior especially for deaf people in Europe it's just a European thing you know US movies they shoot them up bang them up action kind of films adventures very obvious and not so nuanced but in European films you have to work a little harder and that's more interesting to me and I love them I think in that particular you know quadrant art is stronger in Europe than it is here in the US my responsibility no I believe that education in the schools is the key really I think that's crucial now in my time I never heard anything about these sorts of things there was no TV there was no radio there's all these mouths moving around me if I went to a restaurant everybody's talking around me about different things but I missed all that information I missed a lot there's a lot of information that goes on all around us cultural information especially or even Shakespeare words used in Shakespeare things that are quotes from Shakespeare things that I just missed so a lot of things in the art world that I missed too and I need to find those things that I think are lacking and put them into the schools it's not my responsibility no but something I try to do and I feel that I don't know what's important to show what deaf people are missing try to make up for that first of all I create my poetry for myself I'm very selfish that way it's all about me playing me having a good time and then I want to present it to others finding out if they like it or don't like it it's pretty important if they don't like it I'm disappointed if they do like it I'm thrilled so there's always a message within it political sometimes I have a new poem it's about the fact that 100 men raped a mentally retarded girl she was only 14 years old 100 men just using her she was very accepting of it she didn't know any about her but that's just sick I'm sorry that's something I wanted to show what's the purpose I want to see say to people what do you think of this it's not necessarily for deaf audiences it's for male audiences right in general or you know a mix of information it's not always just for deaf people I wouldn't say my works for deaf audiences it's for a global audience it can include deaf people of course but my poems aren't necessarily related to deafness or being deaf at all the first thing I want to do is share the experience yes it is very important of course my name is Debi Z Renny it started with Sunshine 2 I was given a text it was by Dorothy Miles and I translated it it was hard I wanted to respect the poem itself and the form so if I tried to replicate that form it was really difficult and I found it impossible I mean maybe I could but it was very difficult I wanted to preserve the artistry what I created also had to be artistic and still maintain her meaning by taking off that form and creating something else so I don't know I didn't feel like it was necessarily a successful translation but somebody told me it was wrong or criticized me but I did translate some poems from ASL to English I don't know what I did if what I did was art or not I was thinking about how important it is to keep your mind open to the process to the experience you might not understand something but it's about the experience of being there and being open to the possibilities experimentation and being constantly in a quest searching the language itself, sang language itself is so incredibly rich and I want to help further that I think that the first National Deaf Poetry Conference had a huge impact on me I felt like everything just exploded at that moment because Patrick was there Valley was there, Ella was there Peter, the five of us Jim Cohn Jim as this hearing person who was this hearing poet who got this ball rolling and it was a really big moment, it was a big impact it was just this one weekend of sharing with each other different ideas floating about it really hit me hard ASL poetry this is what it is I think that everything previous to that was really interesting and experimental people just sort of seeing what would happen as they played and all this playing with language I've been writing it, I've been playing with signing but at that moment it was a turning point everything changed, it just exploded really it coalesced and that really hit me the differences in all the different poetic styles that I saw then I went to Deaf Way and it was even more intense what happened there it was just incredibly cool