Writers I’ve read and re-read within the past two or three years whose work I like very much are: Kate Grenville, Helen Dunmore, the plays of Arthur Miller and Don Hannah, Richard B. Wright, Edward P. Jones, Michelle de Kretser, David Guterson, Charles Frazier, Gabriella Goliger, Robert Graves, Sharon Butala, Kaye Gibbons, Ian McEwan, Bonnie Burnard. There are more, of course, but these are writers whose work I’ve recently read.
“What I probably use most from family is a certain way of understanding language.”
In Leaning, Leaning Over Water and in Deafening, you admit to drawing on your family experience for imaginative inspiration. Why are you attracted to such experience as a basis for fiction?
I am blessed to be part of a large extended family—particularly the family of my late deaf grandmother. She had eleven hearing children—seven of whom are alive—and each of these had children and grandchildren. When there are more than a hundred people in your background as a small child, of course you are going to absorb the many facets of human experience that surround you. But I don’t write about my own family!
In actual fact, as a writer, what I probably use most from family is a certain way of understanding language. Language and voice. I use and value and know the voices that are and have been around me all of my life, particularly the voices of my mother and my aunts and uncles. A certain way of using speech, the expressions of an area, the particularities of a wry kind of humour and a toughness and ability to laugh through sorrows and woes. All of my relatives on my mother’s side use language in an exaggerated way because of my late grandmother’s deafness. I grew up watching the people I love motioning and waving their hands, words spilling from their lips, fingers spelling through the air for my grandmother or hands tugging at her sleeves, feet stomping the floor or fists pounding a table to create vibrations—and I was surrounded by much laughter. All of these things made up what was normal for our family—our everyday language.
“All of my relatives on my mother’s side use language in an exaggerated way because of my late grandmother’s deafness.”
A note, here, about my next novel—working title Celebration—which will be about four mothers and daughters. Each is the mother or daughter of the next, and together they span four generations, their ages being from 25 to 103. Unlike my preparation for Deafening, I plan to do no research whatever except for checking occasional details of a period. I have already begun, and this novel is spilling out of my imagination—and I hope it will continue!
Readers of the novel have commented on your remarkable ability to create a believable emotional world for a young deaf girl at the turn of the century. What were the challenges for you as a writer in creating such a world?
The biggest challenge was voice. I did not know the inner voice of a young woman who had been deaf since early childhood. I knew from the beginning that if I was going to create a deaf character, I would have to get to know people who are deaf. In 1998, I contacted several associations in Ottawa and began to learn ASL (American Sign Language). I studied for several years and was welcomed into the community of the Ottawa Deaf Centre. When I felt comfortable enough to cope with the communication barriers, I began to conduct interviews. Many deaf persons were helpful and generous, obliging and candid; I could not have written the novel without their help. They answered intimate questions about childhood and offered detailed information about their inner lives—lives I could never have imagined. It was in this manner, and by compiling the sensory detail, that I was able to create my character and to work with the inner voice of Grania O’Neill.
“The discovery of the voices of children from almost one hundred years ago was moving and interesting and exhilarating.”
I also used actual writings from deaf children (1900-1919), which I found in bound newspapers from the archives of the former Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville (now Sir James Whitney School). As I began to read these old papers, the children’s voices began to emerge without any help from me. The deaf children were, in fact, telling the stories of their time. I used these school newspaper excerpts exactly as I found them, to head most of the chapters of my novel. For me, this part of the research—the discovery of the voices of children from almost one hundred years ago—was moving and exhilarating.
Background Notes to Deafening
My maternal grandmother (1898-1987) was profoundly deaf from the age of about eighteen months as a result of scarlet fever. Born in Deseronto, Ontario, as a young child she was sent, for seven years, to live at a residential school that had been built in Belleville in 1870. At the time she entered the school it was called the Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. In 1913, it was renamed the Ontario School for the Deaf. It is now known as Sir James Whitney School. Belleville is the small city where my parents, my late sister, my four brothers and I were born. My grandmother married my hearing grandfather, and they had eleven hearing children, of whom my mother is eldest.
“I was driving with my husband along old Highway 2 in Belleville, and as we approached the school my grandmother had attended, I suddenly veered…onto the property.”
The beginnings of Deafening seem accidental enough. In 1996, I was driving with my husband along old Highway 2 in Belleville, and as we approached the school my grandmother had attended, I suddenly veered through the gates and onto the property. Unannounced, I found my way to the main building, and there I was offered a tour. When I was taken to the various buildings, including the girls’ dormitory where my grandmother had lived, I was very much aware of tracking her footsteps through the residence, probably walking in and out of her very room. During that visit, a document confirming my grandmother’s admission to the school was found in a ledger next to the main office, and I was given a photocopy. Even though I was finishing another book at the time, I knew that I was hooked. As it turned out, I had entered the school and found the document on my late grandmother’s birthday. I wept.
Deafening was never intended to be a book about my grandmother’s life. Indeed, from the day the school document was turned over to me, I began to create a fictional world with the school as part of its setting. My grandmother never spoke about her years at residential school, and I had no knowledge of her experiences there. I did, however, become interested in the way the voices of the children began to emerge through school newspapers of the period, preserved and bound in the school archives. As I read, I realized, with rather a sinking heart, that if I were to tell a story set during the period 1900-1920 it would not be possible to ignore the First World War. Virtually every aspect of the children’s lives was affected by that war.
“As it turned out, I had…found the document on my late grandmother’s birthday. I wept.”
I returned to the school many times during the next several years, travelling between Ottawa and Belleville by car. In the meantime, I finished writing Leaning, and then I dived headlong into full-time research for what would become the background for Deafening. Some of the research I did in preparation for the writing of the book included learning American Sign Language (ASL). When I was able to communicate in a rudimentary way, I began to conduct interviews. I had also begun to read the broader history and the literature associated with the deaf community.
In a parallel way, I started to research the First World War. It was easy to see that I could be overwhelmed by material, but I read histories, memoirs, letters, journals, telegrams, etc. I attended lectures and spent one summer at Vimy House in the Archives of the Canadian War Museum. I pored through photographs, interviewed veterans at the local veterans’ hospital, inspected surgical field kits and medical paraphernalia and tried to kick open a very stiff stretcher used in the First World War. Because I have a medical background, I decided to approach the war sections of the book from the point of view of a stretcher bearer serving with a field ambulance unit. I felt that I needed to see the terrain of the Western Front, so I consulted a First World War expert in Ottawa and then travelled to France and Belgium with a friend to visi
t battlefields, museums and military cemeteries. When I returned home, I learned that word was getting out: people began to approach me to tell me where I could find one more journal, one more photograph album, a rare book or pamphlet. I received phone calls from descendants of war casualties, everyone wanting to tell me the stories of their grandfathers or fathers or uncles.
“Word was getting out: people began to…tell me where I could find one more journal, one more photograph album, a rare book or pamphlet.”
For the Deseronto research, I began to visit and walk around the small town, staying at a local bed and breakfast close to the hotel which my great-grandfather once owned on the Bay of Quinte. Although much changed, the old part of the building is still standing. I was permitted by the then owner to go inside the sealed-off original section. The staff at Deseronto’s Town Hall provided much help, and gave free access to old documents and town photos. I was even taken up into the clock tower of the beautiful old post office building on Main Street, and learned, along the way, that my deaf grandmother’s aunt and uncle had once lived in the now empty tower apartment. I interviewed a 100-year-old woman who was a first cousin of my grandmother, and she described the apartment as it had been in the early 1900s. I was so taken by this, I decided to set several important scenes of the book in the apartment as it was described to me.
Throughout the six years of researching and writing the book, I knew that I was working with two parallel and separate worlds—the war experiences of the stretcher bearer and the inner world of a young deaf woman at the turn of the last century. I trusted my instincts, hoping that the two worlds would intersect. Sound and silence, words and language, love and loss—in particular the love between the two main characters, Grania and Jim—eventually provided the connections I was seeking. But I was also exploring other kinds of love: between sisters, between child and grandmother, between war buddies, parents and family members, and school friends who were deaf.
“I knew that the larger story would tell itself if I could get the fine detail right.”
The way I approached my story was to use densely layered detail that would drop the reader into the world I was trying to create—one that might have existed a hundred years ago. I used every level of experience I could muster from my own life and from lives overheard, and I worked very hard to recreate this world. I knew that the larger story would tell itself if I could get the fine detail right. Always at the back of my mind was my love for my late grandmother, whose life I hoped to honour.
Read on
Recommended by Frances Itani
This is a small sampling of the many books I read for research purposes.
Books on the First World War
Letters of Agar Adamson (1914-1919), ed. N.M. Christie
These detailed letters from Adamson to his wife provide a remarkably intimate portrait of the war.
Other books by N.M. Christie helped to fill in details of battles and battlefields: The Canadians at Mount Sorrel, The Canadians at Ypres, The Canadians on the Somme, The Canadians at Cambrai, The Canadians at Vimy, The Canadians at Amiens
The Great War As I Saw It by Canon Frederick G. Scott
This book gives another intimate portrait of the war, particularly of Canada’s loyalty to the Empire and to Mother England.
Ontario and the First War, ed. Barbara M. Wilson
This publication by the Champlain Society permitted me to check historical documentation and social conditions of early twentieth-century Ontario.
Letters of a Canadian Stretcher Bearer by R.A.L. (1918), ed. Anna Chapin Ray
History of No. 1 Canadian General Hospital: Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1919 by Kenneth Cameron A wonderfully documented, detailed medical history.
The Great War in Verse and Prose, ed. J.E. Wetherell
Canadian Poems of the Great War, ed. John W. Garvin
These are two examples of the kind of language, rhetoric, propaganda, sentimentality and public pain in Canada at the beginning and during the long years of the First World War.
A Diary Without Dates by Enid Bagnold
Good-bye to All That by Robert Graves
1915: The Death of Innocence and The Roses of No Man’s Land by Lyn MacDonald
Books about hearing and deafness
Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks
This moving and informative book provided me with an extensive and important bibliography when I was beginning my research into the deaf community.
Deaf Heritage in Canada by Clifton F. Carbin A well-researched history, which includes a lot of information about the Belleville school and about political and social conditions during the last century, conditions that profoundly affected the education of deaf children.
The Sign Language: A Manual of Signs by J. Schuyler Long
This rare book provided me with proof of authentic sign language of the period. Sign language is always changing, and these early signs are often considerably different from today’s ASL (American Sign Language).
Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard by Nora Ellen Groce
Ear Cleaning; When Words Sing;The New Soundscape by R. Murray Schafer This collection of writing on music education helped with my investigations and understanding of sound.
Wired for Sound by Beverly Biderman
Novels and Memoirs
The First Man by Albert Camus
Ghosts Have Warm Hands by Will R. Bird (memoir)
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road, a trilogy by Pat Barker
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to staff members of Sir James Whitney School (former Ontario School for the Deaf), Belleville, Ontario, for welcoming me and permitting archival access to school newspapers of the period 1900-1919. Excerpts from The Canadian are, by and large, as I found them. Special thanks to Keith Dorschner, Archival Coordinator, and his wife, Christina, who responded to my many questions and arranged to meet me each time I travelled to the school; also to Cheryl Manning and former Superintendent Paul Bartu.
I acknowledge the generosity of Louise Ford, Executive Director of the Ottawa Deaf Centre, who arranged for me to work within the volunteer program and directed me to important resources; and Jon Kidd, President of ODC, and head of Sign Lines Canada, a skilled and insightful teacher of American Sign Language. Many others tolerated my barrage of questions as I struggled to learn ASL. Among these, Bonet Hebert, Les Sicoli, Maria Bossio and Carol Fowler. Warm thanks to Sherri Cranston for sharing her many insights during our weekly interviews; and to Oliver Sacks, whose Seeing Voices was helpful for its extensive bibliography.
Some of my accomplices as I researched Irish settlement in Tyendinaga Township: Bernard and Annie Freeman, octogenarians who responded to my ad in the Napanee Beaver and welcomed me to sessions around the kitchen table at their farm. Bernard’s amazing memory filled in gaps about the history of pioneer farms along the Ninth Concession and my great-grandfather’s Deseronto hotel. For help with Irish names, thanks to Dr. Mary Comerton, Barbara Lunney, Maura Strevens and Ronan Murphy. In Deseronto, Ontario, a big thanks to Bev Reid at the Town Hall for help at every turn. Thank you, Dennis Vick, Floyd Marlin, Stan Marek, Ken Brown (Archives Coordinator), and Irene and Tom Usher at the Town’s Edge B&B.
For First World War research I am indebted to many friends for sending or lending documents, among them Margery Dexter and Wendy Scott, and Karen Fee for permitting me to read the war diary of her grandfather, William George Oak. Michel Gravel and I swapped books, letters and information. Carol Reid offered her considerable expertise and goodwill at the Archives of the Canadian War Museum; documents read include “A History of No. 10 Canadian Field Ambulance.” I am especially thankful for permission to track the footsteps of Joseph H. Macfarlane of No. 9 Canadian Field Ambulance (Ref. 19800281) while I created my own fictional character Jim. Thanks to Jack Granatstein for permitting me to sit in his office and turn over my qu
estions like slow stones, and Dennis Fletcher for his enthusiasm in locating war photographs at Vimy House. Thanks to Barbara Norman, Music Division, National Library of Canada, for her personal interest and remarkable expertise in First World War music. Lyrics from “Dear Hame hid awa’ in the Glen” are by A. D. MacIntyre, 1904. A special thanks to Norm Christie in Ottawa, publisher of CEF Books. Of the many helpful CEF books, I acknowledge Letters of Agar Adamson, The Canadians at Mount Sorrel, and The Great War As I Saw It by Canon Frederick G. Scott.
Thanks to Bruce Cherry of Back-Roads Touring, in London, England, who toured me through the battlefields of France and Belgium; Susan Zettell, Jane Anderson, Terry Gronbeck-Jones, Rita Donovan, Joel Oliver, Jean Van Loon, Merna Summers, Fran Cherry and Larry Scanlan for sending or suggesting materials. Jackie Kaiser, my agent, was first to read the manuscript, and her support and enthusiasm are appreciated more than she will ever know. Thanks to Nicole Winstanley, agent, for her energy and goodwill on the international front. I am very grateful to my American editor, Elisabeth Schmitz at Grove/Atlantic, and British editor, Carolyn Mays, at Hodder & Stoughton, for their helpful comments.
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