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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

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