So Is Yours: Ross Showalter

My novel, My Grandfather's an Immigrant, and So Is Yours will be out Tuesday, September 14, and the pre-sale is going on now! To commemorate the book's release, I'm sharing the "So Is Yours" interview series in which I share insights from other authors about their creative work as well as the role of family in their own stories.

Ross Showalter is a Deaf queer writer based in the Seattle area. His stories, essays, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Strange Horizons, Catapult, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. His work has been included in Entropy Magazine's Best of 2019 Online Fiction List. He holds a BFA in creative writing from Portland State University.

MICHAEL CHIN: The two of us met over social media, where you’ve been a regular, vocal presence on Twitter, with a lot to say about writing fiction, writing essays, and perhaps most interestingly to me, your experience operating as an artist who is deaf and queer. Some of your commentary on Twitter, as well as your recent essay published with Catapult, “Learning to Write My Truth as a Deaf Queer Writer,” really opened my eyes and helped me think more critically about issues around accessibility and dimensions of difference in the creative community. I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about writing about issues of identity? How did you come to do so in such an insightful fashion? Were these topics you avoided or that others steered you away from at any stage, or did you always know that you wanted to communicate about these matters in your work?

ROSS SHOWALTER: I think I truly started writing about identity when I stopped caring about trying to represent identity in my work. I roll my eyes now whenever someone says the word representation, because, to me, that word has always been a synonym to tokenism. There would be shows or movies that would make a big deal about a deaf actor being involved, and I would think, “Great, they’ll probably be on screen for five minutes, contributing nothing to the plot, in a ninety-minute film.” And I grew tired of seeing that happen again and again. In the long run, I’m not as interested in expanding representation as I am in exploring power dynamics. We live in an incredibly ableist society, but I don’t see much literature that examines that and what we can do to move past those unfair dynamics. I don’t see much literature that, for example, addresses the expectation of lipreading and the burden of communication. All these situations between disabled folks and abled folks have different power differentials and dynamics, and I’m interested in exploring just how much power each person has in any given situation and why.

MICHAEL CHIN: The first piece of yours that I recall reading was “Night Moves" via The Black Warrior Review. It’s a short story unlike anything else I’ve read, as sign language becomes a vital piece of the narrative, asides to the reader feel like a clever homage to Carmen Maria Machado’s work, and a compound sense of lust, vulnerability, and inherent complications of human connection all permeate the text. I’d love for you to share a bit about the crafting of this piece—perhaps how it evolved over drafting and revision processes, and what you may have been thinking about as the story developed?

ROSS SHOWALTER: Thank you so much! I wrote the first draft of “Night Moves” in summer 2018, and I edited it over the next eight months, off and on. I loved the idea of a hearing person being so devoted to learning sign language that he starts signing in his sleep—several ASL students I’ve tutored have told me that this happens to them. Then I read Christopher Coake’s story “All Through the House” and I just loved the way that Coake uses time and flashbacks to build a fractured narrative of a toxic relationship, with different tenses and font changes, and I decided to try something similar. When I was working on it, I tried to see if I could include sign language in a way that didn’t slow down the story. Sign language is so central to the narrative, but I was working on a draft that had few sign descriptions! It felt so incomplete! And so I turned to Kelly Link’s “The Hortlak” and, yes, Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” as examples to how I would include signs in a way that felt relevant to the story and its themes without slowing down the story.

MICHAEL CHIN: I understand you’ll be starting a new position teaching at UCLA Extension in the near future. (Congratulations!) The balance between writing and teaching is something I think about a lot in my own life. I was curious if you could share a bit about how your writing and teaching lives may overlap, complement, inform, or complicate one another?

ROSS SHOWALTER: I think writing and teaching are similar in that they’re both ways to guide people to connections they may not make on their own. You can bring in different ideas, different elements, different lens on how to read or inspect things. They both come from the same kind of place, for me, with trying to make sure people are given all of the tools they need to see their thought process through. I’m a very technical fiction writer, and I try to be the same way as a teacher. I never try to move forward without understanding the mechanics of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. With that being said, I think teaching has taught me that sometimes fiction just works without needing a technical justification. I’ve learned that I can sometimes abandon that technical approach and act on instinct. Sometimes, things simply work in a narrative. Everyone’s brain, with their reading tastes, their experiences with fiction, vary so much and I’ve learned to not use technicalities as a crutch but more as a framework for how you can view something.

MICHAEL CHIN: You’re based in the Pacific Northwest, one of my favorite parts of the country. I’d love to read a bit about how this region and communities you’ve found there may have informed your creative work?

ROSS SHOWALTER: There’s actually a sizable Deaf community in Seattle, believe it or not! There’s been this really cool push for accessible theater in Seattle, and I’ve been able to see a bunch of different productions through Deaf Spotlight, which is a media production and advocacy company. I’ve seen a lot of d/Deaf actors and characters in different stories and contexts through Deaf Spotlight’s events, and seeing the situations that have transpired have made me more aware of the situations I choose to place my characters in. But, as far as the region itself, I think the kind of the dreary overcast weather we’re famous for has pushed me in the direction of writing more horror stories and stories in the Gothic tradition, because everything’s just so cloudy all the time. Since the environment is so lush and yet unchanging, it makes me think about how I could pay closer attention to the nuance in my own work, and how the smaller details separate one story from another.

MICHAEL CHIN: My new book is called My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours and as a tie in to that project, I’m asking other authors about their relationships with family. I’d like to start with grandparents—what kind of relationship you had with yours and how that may have influenced you as a person, or even as a writer? I’d be interested to hear about ways in which other family (be it biological, adoptive, chosen, etc.) may have impacted your identity and your work as well.

ROSS SHOWALTER: My mom’s stepdad, my grandfather, wrote stories as well. When he died, I got his copies of Strunk and White’s books on writing, like The Elements of Style, and I learned that he was a writer. My grandfather never published stories, just wrote them. And I think that forced me to see that writing had to be for myself first, before it could be for other people. I grew up the only deaf person in my family. I grew up the only queer person in my family. Sign language is my first language, but English is my sister’s first language. I was born different from the rest of my biological family, and I take in things differently today. I think my love of genre fiction stemmed from the fact that I would just tap out as a child at holiday parties, church services, family dinners; I would go into my own head and my own realities, because I was exhausted from working in social settings. I would imagine ghosts in church and demons in our basement. More recently, I’ve made myself a Deaf family as well, a group of Deaf folks who are closer to me in ways my hearing family could never be, and I get a lot of validation from them. I’ve learned that it’s truer to myself if I write stories for my Deaf and disabled queer siblings, rather than trying to impress hearing, abled straight counterparts with the work I do.