Raymond Luczak discusses his works:
A Quiet Foghorn
Widower, 48 Seeks Husband
Men with Their Hands
About A Quiet Foghorn:
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.
About Widower, 48 Seeks Husband:
When 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.
About Men with Their Hands:
Growing up different is never easy, but Michael, a deaf young man from a small town, knows that he must find his true family beyond his biological one. He struggles and fails to find others of his kind until he attends college in New York City.
There, we meet a variety of people from a deaf gay family of sorts: Eddie, an older accountant aching for love; Lee, an effeminate dishwasher with a pronounced weakness for red-haired men; Vince, a charismatic dancer who lives intensely no matter the state of his health; Neil, a brooding woodcarver who becomes a deaf woman’s obsession; Stan, a lanky stock boy at the A&P on Christopher Street; Ted, a hard-of-hearing college student with ambivalent feelings about the deaf community; and Rex, an ASL interpreter who avoids his own emotions during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
***
Raymond Luczak was raised in Ironwood, Michigan. He received a BA from Gallaudet University.
He is the author of several poetry collections, including How to Kill Poetry (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013), Road Work Ahead (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011), and St. Michael’s Fall (Deaf Life Press, 1995). The poet Stephen Kuusisto writes, “Raymond Luczak’s How to Kill Poetry offers a history of imagination, drawn delicately as scrimshaw, penned broadly as the biography of lyric. At once serious and playful, Luczak’s poems reveal the sustaining power of verse.”
Luczak was featured on The Deaf Poet Society, a website designed to honor deaf poets.[1] Raymond Luczak has been advocating for the expansion of accessibility to the disability community by transcription and ASL translations.[2] Raymond Luczak also commends other disabled artists over his own work, as the recognition of any creator with a disability who understands how it feels to exist is preferred over poets who use the disability of others as a writing piece, a practice he is working against.[2] Raymond Luczak is currently an editor and transcriber to help spread the use and accessibility of poetry and literary arts to others.[3]
***
Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. This event will be simultaneously live streamed on our YouTube page!