Raymond Luczak

An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selves Honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and nai¨ve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others. In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.

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.

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 the 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.

Timm Gay Johnson was an unrepentant nudist. He didn't care whether anyone saw him naked. In fact, if anyone appeared at the front door, he never bothered to put anything on. "Just in case the Jehovah's Witnesses pay a visit," he always said. Likewise, when guests came over for dinner, he never put on his clothes. "My birthday suit's my best outfit . . ." - So opens WIDOWER, 47 SEEKS HUSBANDWhen a legendary Minneapolis florist with an oversized penis the stuff of legend in the local gay community suddenly dies, his partner Howie Dwight Taft has a real problem when he dates for the first time in 30 years. How does a perfectly average-sized, overweight, and predictable middle-aged man try to find a new husband of his own? Covering some 40 years of gay Minneapolis history, the novel explores what it means to be an older gay widower.

In this collection of essays, Raymond Luczak once again offers readers powerful and deeply personal reflections on his experiences as a Deaf gay man. He begins his journey with the printed word where lipreading is not required, and discovers a family of sorts through the writings of Walt Whitman and others; he ventures deeper into the queer community with thoughts on ageism, disability, and radical faeries. Luczak explores the many nuances within the Deaf community and the audist attitudes of hearing people, particularly in the media, and takes a detour into ASL gloss poetry. He speculates on what the Deaf community will look like a century from now and ends with a long bike ride that celebrates the ongoing questions of being a Deaf gay man.

Join me on a journey to the unspoiled forests of Upper Michigan..."A long time ago young men wishing to be tallscaled the mast of my octopus armsand scanned the horizon of Lake Superiorfor 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 nightonly to find that morning easily forgivesthe coldness of him having left herstranded 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 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.comFrom Modern History Press (www.ModernHistoryPress.com)

Join me on a journey to the unspoiled forests of Upper Michigan..."A long time ago young men wishing to be tallscaled the mast of my octopus armsand scanned the horizon of Lake Superiorfor 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 nightonly to find that morning easily forgivesthe coldness of him having left herstranded 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 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.comFrom 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?

Spontaneous combustion occurs when Bill, a forty-year-old barista and a failed poet, meets James, a disabled factory worker and a daddy hunk, at an OctoBear Dance. For six months they share weekends of incredible passion at James’s house up north in the country. Winter has never seemed hotter in their flannel sheets. But on the first day of spring James abruptly informs Bill over the phone that it’s not going to work out and hangs up. No further explanation: just the static of silence. Feeling haunted like Djuna Barnes while she wrote her novel Nightwood in the 1930s, Bill searches for answers in his recollections of James and others who’d departed too early from his life. When he does discover why James left, the answer comes from a mysterious stranger with secrets of his own.

No one gives you a manual on how to be a Deaf gay man. Raymond Luczak shares stories from his days growing up as a Deaf gay man in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

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.

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.