I'll tell you later The most damaging promise a hearing family member can make to a Deaf person.

For centuries, Deaf people were expected to sit quietly at the table when their hearing families shared a meal. Some might have asked the person sitting nearby, What are they saying? The usual response? I'll tell you later. When the meal is done, the Deaf person would naturally follow up: What did they say? The usual response? I'm sorry I forgot. Only recently was this transgression given a name: Dinner Table Syndrome.

In this anthology, nineteen Deaf and hard of hearing writers share their DTS experiences of anguish and defiance through essays, short stories, and poems, all of which illuminate what it means to be left starving at mealtime.

A.J. Chilson Michael Davidson Pamela Decker-Wright Donald A. Grushkin Kristen Harmon Cristina Hartmann Christopher Jon Heuer Jer Loudenback Raymond Luczak Dominic McGreal André Pellerin Kris Ringman Doris Says Tonya Marie Stremlau John David Walker Jacob Waring Steven Wilhelm Rachel Zemach Garrett Zuercher

In this anthology of Bear poetry, we go further than celebrating sex between men. We explore what it means to have our imperfect bodies rejected, accepted, and loved as we are: queer and trans men challenging and transforming long-held notions of physical beauty amidst our youth-obsessed culture.

Featuring fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics by 48 writers from around the world, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology proves that intersectionality isn't just a buzzword. It's a penetrating and unforgettable look into the hearts and souls of those defiant enough to explore their own vulnerabilities and demonstrate their own strengths. Here is a gathering of people with the transformative-and political-power of love that transcends gender and ability. Ignorance is the biggest barrier. An anthology often creates a community. In this respect, QDA is truly groundbreaking because it brings two wonderful communities together. There is not a single style, genre, or opinion in the book, but an orchestra of voices. Their seminal works mirror-and do not mirror-each other. Taken together, they light a brilliant path of honesty. -Jennifer Bartlett, co-editor of Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

In this groundbreaking collection of sign language gloss poetry, the first of its kind to be published, Raymond Luczak explores the dynamics of written English poetry and ASL gloss by communing with the animals living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Having lost much of his hearing at the age of nine months, Luczak was not allowed to use sign language until he was 14 years old, when he demanded to learn it. In the mining town of Ironwood, Michigan, Luczak felt isolated among his hearing peers at school and his family members at the dinner table. More at home in the woods, he discovered a place both wild and welcoming, with no need to guess at meaning through lipreading. Sensing a kinship with the array of animals there, he believed they understood him in ways the hearing world could not. Knowing Deaf people had historically and wrongly been outcast as languageless and wild, Luczak reclaims the woods as a source for his own natural language and sense of belonging.

As a Deaf writer giving English poetry readings in American Sign Language (ASL), Luczak faced the challenge of performing his work in ASL, so he developed his own system of notating ASL gloss on the page. It is this deeply personal, interior language that Luczak uses to animate this moving collection, making his poems legible -- knowable, accessible -- across communities too often separated by a lack of knowledge.

What is the language of home?
This short story collection offers readers many possible answers that reveal the Deaf experience in all its complexities. Written over nearly forty years by celebrated Deaf author Raymond Luczak, this collection of thirty stories paints a vivid panorama of Deaf lives. From a young DeafBlind boy feeling lost within his hearing family to a hearing son of Deaf parents caught between their infighting and a hearing mother realizing in the split second of her own death the full impact of the missteps she has taken while raising her Deaf son, Luczak crafts narratives that resonate with authenticity. Other stories feature an ASL interpreter feeling conflicted about a Deaf neighbor and a Deaf woman who becomes blacklisted as a backstabber. These characters often navigate the murky waters of the hearing world, sometimes with a touch of ASL gloss. The Language of Home is an exciting literary contribution that offers rare, nuanced representations of Deaf characters.

Sometimes the best way to learn about a unique region is to listen to the stories told by those who've actually lived there. You learn things that no guidebook would ever tell you. You meet unforgettable characters who've strayed far off the beaten path. And you see clearly again how the power of memory is so strong that they can still recall incidents decades later. Michigan's Upper Peninsula has always been filled with remarkable sensations and indelible stories.

With this anthology, the editor Raymond Luczak sought to include poets who not only live in the U.P., but also who used to live there. What did it mean to be a Yooper then? What about now? Even for those who no longer abide there, the U.P. is indeed a special place, and it isn't just thanks to Mother Nature. The Yooper mindset requires a particular kind of faith in resilience against persistent odds.

The poets in this collection have never forgotten what it means to be a Yooper. Come partake in our celebration!

Featuring Martin Achatz ◾ Jennifer Elen Bríd ◾ B. Harlan Deemer ◾ Chad Faries ◾ Deborah K. Frontiera ◾ Kathleen M. Heideman ◾ John Hilden ◾ Jonathan Johnson ◾ Kathleen Carlton Johnson ◾ Ellen Lord ◾ Raymond Luczak ◾ Gala Malherbe ◾ Beverly Matherne ◾ R. H. Miller ◾ Jane Piirto ◾ Dana Richter◾ T. Kilgore Splake ◾ Suzanne Sunshower ◾ Russell Thorburn

Yooper Poetry is a very thoughtful and beautifully published book... Some of the best Yooper writing reaches toward the poetic heights that resonate with danger... I love the resonance that exists and helps to feed our various literatures across time and distance. -- Mack Hassler, U.P. Book Review

RAYMOND LUCZAK is the author and editor of over 30 books, including U.P.-centric titles such as Far from Atlantis: Poems (Gallaudet University Press), Chlorophyll: Poems about Michigan's Upper Peninsula (Modern History Press), and Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories (Modern History Press). His poetry collection once upon a twin: poems (Gallaudet University Press) was a top ten U.P. Notable Book of the Year for 2021. His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A proud Yooper, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Encompassing some 130 years in Ironwood's history, Compassion, Michigan illuminates characters struggling to adapt to their circumstances starting in the present day, with its subsequent stories rolling back in time to when Ironwood was first founded. What does it mean to live in a small town--so laden with its glory day reminiscences--against the stark economic realities of today? Doesn't history matter anymore? Could we still have compassion for others who don't share our views?

A Deaf woman, born into a large, hearing family, looks back on her turbulent relationship with her younger, hearing sister. A gas station clerk reflects on Stella Draper, the woman who ran an ice cream parlor only to kill herself on her 33rd birthday. A devout mother has a crisis of faith when her son admits that their priest molested him. A bank teller, married to a soldier convicted of treason during the Korean War, gradually falls for a cafeteria worker. A young transgender man, with a knack for tailoring menswear, escapes his wealthy Detroit background for a chance to live truly as himself in Ironwood. When a handsome single man is attracted to her, a popular schoolteacher enters into a marriage of convenience only to wonder if she's made the right decision.

RAYMOND LUCZAK, a Yooper native, is the author and editor of 24 books, including Flannelwood. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

These are stories of extremely real women, mostly disappointed by life, living meagerly in a depleted town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Sound depressing? Not at all. Luczak has tracked their hopes, their repressed desires, and their ambitions with the elegance and precision of one of those silhouette artists who used to snip out perfect likenesses in black paper; people 'comforted by the familiarity of loneliness, ' as he writes.
--EDMUND WHITE, author of A Saint in Texas

Learn more at www.raymondluczak.com

From Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com

For over a decade, Raymond Luczak, author of Silence Is a Four-Letter Word: On Art & Deafness, has been interviewing Deaf and hard of hearing artists and their allies about their creative and arts accessibility work. This volume features over 70 people sharing what it means to be an artist who happens to be different. When I was little, I never really quite questioned all those millions of sound norms I'd inhabited. -Christine Sun Kim, Non-Traditional Composer With the vast bulk culled from his nine years of interviewing artists for SIGNews, Luczak has added 19 new interviews that offer contrasting views against historical snapshots still relevant to artists everywhere. These lively interviews provide new insights while bringing the reader closer to understanding the extraordinary talents of the participants. It was important to go through that period of rage and rebellion, but is it worth sustaining forever? -Jeremy Quiroga, Sculptor and ASL Poet Interviewees include: Leah Angstman * Robert Arnold * Jill Beebout * Deborah M. Blumenson, Ph.D. * Alex Chu * Warren N. Churchill * Sue Clancy * Adrean Clark * Joe Clark * John Lee Clark * Ryan Commerson * Bill Creswell * Perrine Dailey * Jules Dameron * Ronald Dans * Jennifer Dans-Willey * Linda Dratell * Mark Drolsbaugh * Patti Durr * Bex Freund * Frank Gallimore * Oleg Golovushkin * Antoine Hunter * Matthew Jenkins * Ilya Kaminsky * Russell Kane * Missy Keast * John Kinstler * Christine Sun Kim * Arthur Luhn * Kellie Martin * Rachel C. Mazique * Rosie Mazique * Dan McDougall * Lewis Merkin * Shanny Mow * Louis Neethling * Michael Northen * Patty O. * Sharon Pajka * Andr Pellerin * David H. Pierce * Michael Pimental * Jeremy Quiroga * Mary Rappazzo * Stacia Rice * Kristen Ringman * Nancy Rourke * Steve Sandy * Orkid Sassouni * Brian Selznick * Ethan Sinnott * Louise Stern * Shoshannah Stern * Dawn Stoyanoff * Nick Sturley * Charlie Swinbourne * Pia Taavila-Borsheim * Rosa Lee Timm * Madan Vasishta * Vanessa Vaughan * Anna & Sean Virnig * Robert Walker * Cynthia Weitzel * Michele Westfall * Robbie Wilde * Morgan Grayce Willow * Pamela E. Witcher * Robert Wittig.

In Far from Atlantis, Raymond Luczak makes use of traditional poetic forms to tell the stories of two vastly different worlds: the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which often looks like an island on the map, and the fabled island of Atlantis. The poems in this collection are rooted in the natural world, with the power of water as a means for escaping the cruelty and tedium of an ableist society. While recounting his troubled childhood as the only deaf person in a large hearing family, Luczak aligns himself with mythological, monstrous, and superhuman beings who, like him, exist on the margins. The narratives invoked and the worlds created in these poems are both autoethnographic and speculative, and include figures lost to history like Lucy Frances Fitzhigh Hooe and Frances Peterson, along with 1970s pop culture icons like the Six Million Dollar Man and Wonder Woman.

In The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips, Raymond Luczak recounts his unrequited love for a gardener while examining how Walt Whitman (1819-1892) lived as a gay man 150 years before. Inspired by the earthy passions abundant in Whitman's work and the vast social changes between his era and ours, the story becomes an urgent love letter in more ways than one. The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips is an unabashed celebration of one man's relationship to Walt Whitman: poet, publisher, lover, impromptu nurse, artistic creation, organism, man in full. Like Whitman himself, Raymond Luczak arrives at an unified vision of love in all of its poetic manifestations: sensual, sexual, and textual, a source of electric vistas and voluptuous possibilities of spiritual renewal. He provides precisely the kind of tender reassurance we cannot find words for some nights, but which we so desperately need. -Eric Thomas Norris, co-author of Nocturnal Omissions In The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips, Raymond Luczak has awoken entwined in the arms of the American bard. And here is the bed chat and letters from one poet to another, a communion of fleshly living. Luczak has created a work in the tradition of Ginsberg's Odyssean dreaming of the lost America of love-a vibrant examination of what Whitman called a 'richest fluency' of historical gaiety and modern loving, and a clear transmission of honest affection across the ages. -Dan Vera, author of Speaking Wiri Wiri

The Kinda Fella I Am continues Raymond Luczak's extraordinary string of outstanding books. Delving into our deep needs for human connection, Luczak imagines the world as seen by queer disabled men.

The breadth of Raymond Luczak's writing leaves us dazzled. -- Michael Thomas Ford, author of Lily

The Kinda Fella I Am takes us on a captivating dive into the lives of these disabled queers. We follow them from kitchen to bedoom, from coffee shops to sex clubs.

Fighting the flattened stereotypes of gay men in literature, Luczak offers us an audacious array of people and situations. From delight to depression, his characters leap off the page in bold and honest representations.

These short stories are 'performance-art arias' of desire, anxiety, and hope Jack Fritscher, PhD, author, Mapplethorpe: Assault and Gay San Francisco

Throughout the book, characters come alive sharing their intriguing lives with us.

I used to be the kinda fella who was expected to sit quietly in his wheelchair by the sidelines ...

So begins Raymond Luczak's title piece. We follow his characters as they reawaken their sexual desires after injuries. Initially rejected by gay communities, they create their own sex play rooms until they build the confidence and skills to re-enter gay communities with self-assured sexuality.

tender, queer, innovative -- Jillian Weise, author of The Amputee's Guide to Sex

Through a variety of characters with disabilities, The Kinda Fella I Am explores the disabled queer male experience. Raymond Luczak, author of the award-winning novel Men with Their Hands, goes boldly into bedrooms and other places where most able-bodied men fear to tread.

a rare glimpse behind the curtains of queer disabled men - Robert McRuer, Ph.D., author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and co-editor of Sex and Disability

Raymond Luczak is a multitalented writer, artist and publisher. The Kinda Fella I Am adds to his already impressive stable of 19 books and plays which have received awards from the Lambda Literary Awards and the Samuel Edwards Deaf Playwrights Competition.

Ghosts are everywhere.

The Deaf community today doesn't seem to be what it used to be, so a small group of people must decide whether to sell the last Deaf club in America. As its board of trustees reflects on what it means to be Deaf, a few ghosts return to share stories of what it was like when Deaf clubs truly mattered: Mabel Hubbard Bell, the wife of the Deaf community's nemesis Alexander Graham Bell; Nellie Zabel Willhite, the first Deaf woman to earn a pilot's license; Olof Hanson, the first Deaf architect in America; and George Veditz, a charismatic activist who defended the Deaf community's right to sign. Raymond Luczak offers a compelling look into the Deaf community then and now.

Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of over 20 books, including The Kinda Fella I Am and A Babble of Objects. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

If objects could talk, what sort of things would they say?

Through a rapid-series of short poems Raymond Luczak, author of seven acclaimed poetry collections such as Mute (A Midsummer Night's Press) and The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips (Squares & Rebels), imagines the inner lives of inanimate objects. We learn what it's like to be a dressing room mirror, a bobby pin, a discarded mattress, a stapler, a credit card, a hearing aid, and a bagful of marbles among other things.

As a boy growing up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Raymond Luczak delighted in the mysterious attractions of nature in a huge expanse of abandoned woods and fields known as across the street. In This Way to the Acorns, he remembers encountering unexpected guests of the woods: a scraggly fox, a starving doe, an industrious chipmunk, all enveloped against the backdrop of nature. If he remembers the first shimmers of spring, he does not forget the stark reality of death, or, ultimately, the forgiving power of the seasons. This Way to the Acorns is a flinty-eyed ode to that overpowering sense of childhood wonder. An afterword by the author is included in this tenth anniversary edition.

With the ghosts of Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Sappho, and Walt Whitman leading the way, How to Kill Poetry showcases a highly selective overview of Western civilization poetic development from its oral traditions to the silence of pixels. The narrative then jumps 200 years into the future where the unfortunate consequences of global warming create a dramatic backdrop against which poetry--if it is to have any redeeming value--must survive.

In Among the Leaves, 18 queer male poets share stories what it means to live in the Midwest. We learn what it's like for them to play football and come up short. We feel their lingering effects of bullying. We experience the undeniable power of seasons affecting their moods as they ache for a meaningful connection. We learn what it means to celebrate in spite of the odds against them. But more than anything, we discover anew through their poems the redemptive power of love and renewal among the leaves growing and falling.

In 2002, Raymond Luczak handed us his call to arms for deaf artists everywhere. Ten years later, he revisits the book that challenged assumptions about being an artist. Has anything changed? Yes and no. Luczak's meditations on what makes art art and deafness deaf asks artists everywhere to rethink their work and live differently. This tenth anniversary edition incorporates new observations made over the past decade. Written in the form of quick bursts of opinion arrived at over his many years as a poet, playwright, and filmmaker, Luczak seeks to shake deaf artists out of the cages built by the hearing world . . . There are plenty of opinions to argue with in this volume. Yet Luczak calls us to ask important questions of ourselves. - Emily Drabinski, Out

Encompassing some 130 years in Ironwood's history, Compassion, Michigan illuminates characters struggling to adapt to their circumstances starting in the present day, with its subsequent stories rolling back in time to when Ironwood was first founded. What does it mean to live in a small town-so laden with its glory day reminiscences-against the stark economic realities of today? Doesn't history matter anymore? Could we still have compassion for others who don't share our views?

A Deaf woman, born into a large, hearing family, looks back on her turbulent relationship with her younger, hearing sister. A gas station clerk reflects on Stella Draper, the woman who ran an ice cream parlor only to kill herself on her 33rd birthday. A devout mother has a crisis of faith when her son admits that their priest molested him. A bank teller, married to a soldier convicted of treason during the Korean War, gradually falls for a cafeteria worker. A young transgender man, with a knack for tailoring menswear, escapes his wealthy Detroit background for a chance to live truly as himself in Ironwood. When a handsome single man is attracted to her, a popular schoolteacher enters into a marriage of convenience only to wonder if she's made the right decision.

RAYMOND LUCZAK, a Yooper native, is the author and editor of 24 books, including Flannelwood. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

These are stories of extremely real women, mostly disappointed by life, living meagerly in a depleted town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Sound depressing? Not at all. Luczak has tracked their hopes, their repressed desires, and their ambitions with the elegance and precision of one of those silhouette artists who used to snip out perfect likenesses in black paper; people 'comforted by the familiarity of loneliness, ' as he writes. -EDMUND WHITE, author of A Saint from Texas

Learn more at www.raymondluczak.com

From Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com

When Raymond Luczak was growing up deaf in a hearing Catholic family of nine children, his mother shared conflicting stories about having had a miscarriage after--or possibly around--the time he was conceived. As an elegy to his lost twin, this book asks: If he had a twin, just how different would his life have been?

Join me on a journey to the unspoiled forests of Upper Michigan...

A long time ago young men wishing to be tall

scaled the mast of my octopus arms

and scanned the horizon of Lake Superior

for a glimmer of Canada. Usually we were cut down ...

For many of those who've lived there, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan can seem like a magical place because nature there feels so potent and, at times, full of mystery. After having grown up there, Raymond Luczak can certainly attest to its mythical powers. In Chlorophyll, he reimagines Lake Superior and its environs as well as his houseplants as a variety of imaginary and historical characters.

Ghosts dress in only gray and white.

This is how they camouflage their volcanic selves.

Lake Superior is bottled with them.

You can't see them but they move like fish ...

In Raymond Luczak's Chlorophyll, the devastating natural beauty of Michigan's Upper Peninsula is imbued with passions its reticent human inhabitants are loathe to express. Trees, lakes, and stones air their infatuations, their grudges, their mythologies and griefs. Through this forest of the otherwise unsaid, we catch glimpses of a speaker who knows there is no line to blur between 'person' and 'nature.' -Emily Van Kley, author of Arrhythmia and The Rust and the Cold

Spring is a girl who's cried all night

only to find that morning easily forgives

the coldness of him having left her

stranded among the thicket of evergreens ...

Giving voice to the natural world, Raymond Luczak allows the rocks, trees, lakes, insects, and flowers that are part of flora and fauna of the region to speak for themselves, and they remind us that we are human, living in a more than human world. -William Reichard, author of Our Delicate Barricades Downed and The Night Horse: New and Selected Poems

Upper Michigan is, indeed, a magical place of great beauty and is truly worthy of the best hymns and poetry that nature can inspire. -- San Francisco Book Review

Raymond Luczak grew up in the Upper Peninsula. He is the author and editor of numerous titles such as Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories. His book once upon a twin: poems was chosen as a U.P. Notable Book for 2021. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Learn more at www.RaymondLuczak.com

From Modern History Press (www.ModernHistoryPress.com)