I am betting you are wondering why I am a Deafiant writer, and why the wonky spelling. I will tell you about that with some background as well.

The wonky spelling happened accidentally when I was telling a friend I tend to be defiant when faced with adversity. That determination has aided me in my journey as a deaf person becoming culturally Deaf. We’ll get into the deaf/Deaf thing in later articles.

I grew up with difficulty speaking well and understanding others. I was born with some measure of hearing loss. At age 16, maybe closer to 17, I became ill with a high fever for a couple weeks. After that my hearing was well-shot and I got my first hearing aids.

Man, oh man! The discoveries of sounds I never knew existed and the clarity of the sounds I knew of but had always sounded like they were coming from the depths of muddy water.

From those muddy depths of sounds to actually understanding speech! Alas, that lasted only a short number of years before I needed ever stronger hearing aids until 2005 when a dosage of Avelox, given to me for Whooping Cough finished off my hearing.

After a year of writing notes back and forth, and half ASL/half home signs with my son and partner I decided to explore getting a Cochlear Implant (CI). It turned out I was a viable candidate for one so a few months later I was implanted.

For three years it was a cool little gadget. Speech comprehension was touch and go but music played on an iPod directly into my CI processor gave me back the music I had been missing since the late 90s.

And then the CI failed due to a staph infection. I had the device removed and have been stone deaf since 2009. The freedom I felt upon becoming deaf has been a gift to me in ways unexpected.

Gradually, and with lots of intentional learning, I have grown into Deaf Cultural understanding. I have so much more to learn. As I have been learning the novel I started thinking about around 2014 or 2015 has gone through similar changes and growing pains.

This website, DeafiantWriter.com is part of my intentional journey as I write Deafiant, a novel with Deaf Heroes. I will be posting ASL videos of my posts about Deafiant; the process of thinking of the characters actions, backstories, dialog, and so on.

I hope you come along on my journey so that when my manuscript for Deafiant is completed that you will be as excited to read it as I will be to publish it.

Thank you,

Jc