University of Regina Press, 2019
ISBN: 9780889775930
$18.95, 162 pages
Reviewed by Marion Agnew.
The first time I heard the term “voice” in relation to a book was in high school. The definition remained fuzzy, far harder to pinpoint than theme, setting, point of view, and characterization. A writer’s voice seemed somehow part of her style, but I didn’t really know what that meant, either.
Mostly, an author’s voice seemed extremely important: Voice helps distinguish one writer’s work from another and makes a writer unique.
Okay. But what is it?
I got a better sense from trying creative writing myself. Early, I’d try to “sound like” other writers on purpose, partly for fun and partly to try on identities. (Hemingway, anyone?) I paid attention when other people lauded a writer’s “unique voice” (like Barbara Kingsolver or Miriam Toews). I developed opinions: I enjoy a voice that serves a work’s characters, instead of spotlighting the writer herself.
When Voice: Adam Pottle On Writing with Deafness came along. I knew I had to read it.
Voice is available from University of Regina Press.
And wow, this book. It combines creative nonfiction, memoir, and sage writing advice. Searingly honest, it’s full of rage and beauty and a palpable, energetic love of the written word. It’s transparent and full of longing to be “heard.” It commands and rewards a reader’s reflection.
Adam Pottle began losing his hearing in childhood and wore hearing aids relatively young. In Voice, he describes how those facts have affected, and continue to affect, his relationship to language and writing. Of course, it’s impossible to completely separate language from other elements of his life—his love of hockey and music, his ambivalence toward others in the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community whose experiences are different from his, and his family relationships.
He describes his path to learning language and developing his voice—both literal and literary, his speaking voice and his voice in writing.
Like a hearing person, he grew up speaking English. Learning ASL at an older age meant he’d always be somewhat “outside” the Deaf Culture’s core of fluent, native ASL speakers. But like a Deaf person, he found (and continues to find) the hearing world too impatient and thoughtless to adjust to his communication needs. Even institutions that “mean well” are reluctant to provide accommodations unless constantly reminded and pressured to do so.
He writes, of his work with a speech therapist in grade five,
“I didn’t want to speak like him. I wanted a dynamic voice, my own voice, a voice that could barrel through the air and make any room I spoke in seem like an arena, a voice that pinged people on the ear and forced them to listen, a voice that could thwack people’s funny bones and crack their hearts in two, a voice like Rodney Dangerfield’s or Marie Fredriksson’s or Krusty the Clown’s.”
In the second part of the book, he addresses writing and writers directly, considering topics such as stereotypes, ideas, text, and observation. He points out that the hearing world has an uneasy relationship with silence, but that silence can be a very effective storytelling tool. He describes the Store of Stereotypes, where many writers “shop” for typical characters, and he enumerates his strategies to avoid those stereotypes while he wrote a novella about the Holocaust.
His descriptions of how he uses language encapsulate how carefully he has reflected on language itself. Because he experiences English through captioning and through senses other than hearing, his relationship with English is “uneasy,” similar to those for whom English is a second language.
I write according to how words feel rather than how they sound. Words are tactile. I feel like I can hold them in my hands and throw them at people; I feel like I might scratch myself on their edges; they roll around in my mouth like barbed marbles. I shove and bend and crank words to form images and rhythms that I hope snag the reader’s attention.
He is certainly successful: This book captures and holds a reader’s attention.
In recent years, the term “voice” has also developed a broader meaning: in an #ownvoices book, a person writes about an experience they’ve personally lived through. Because Voice shares Pottle’s unique relationship to language and the hearing world, it’s is a valuable contribution to this definition of “voice” as well. It demonstrates the ongoing, grinding issues around accessibility, and the hoops through which people have to leap, again and again, to access a world that’s readily available to hearing people.
Writers should read Voice for its thorough contemplation of and love for language. Non-writers will find interest in its generous open window into Pottle’s life.
And anyone organizing an event, especially as the pandemic recedes and in-person gatherings become more possible, should add “all forms of accessibility” as a value to incorporate into their event from the earliest planning stages. Books like Voice show us what we’re missing out on.
Marion Agnew studied American Sign Language for several years. Her essay collection, Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s, came out in 2019. For more about her, see www.marionagnew.ca.