arts
h ear i n g h ealt h foundation
Getting the Details Right A bestselling author reaches out to the hearing loss community to create his latest protagonist. By Brad Parks The first time I ever saw a cochlear implant, it was on the shaved head of my new neighbor, a kindly retired librarian. I actually thought it was some kind of fancy Bluetooth device. I was that clueless. My education came quickly enough, though. We had moved to Staunton, Virginia, just down the street from the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind. Thanks to the school, a thriving community of people with hearing loss had built up in the area—students, teachers, and alumni who decided to settle there. Living so close to the school, watching the kids play outside and catching glimpses of their classes, I gained a new awareness of—and appreciation for—what modern hearing loss actually looked like. Or I’d go downtown, where the Shenandoah Valley Club of the Deaf had a storefront and adults with hearing loss were an everyday presence. It wasn’t unusual to see conversations that flowed easily between spoken and signed language, based on whatever allowed for greater expression. Then my wife took a new job and we moved to another town in Virginia, where one of my new neighbors was
Melissa, a librarian with a hearing loss. It was like the world was trying to tell me something. At this point, I was in the midst of brainstorming the manuscript that would eventually become “Interference,” my latest novel. Part of that process was filling it with characters who would become real to me—people with skills and quirks, foibles and fortitude. My characters are usually hybrid creations, a combination of my imagination and tidbits stolen from people I’ve met. (I always warn friends and relatives: If you don’t want to see parts of your life in a book someday, don’t tell me about them.) But if there’s one rule I have for my protagonists, it’s that I can’t spend 400 pages with a jerk. I have to like them. Enter my new neighbor, Melissa. It didn’t take long to discover she’s an absolutely delightful person. Funny. Smart. Warm. By then, I was used to being around people who might have to see me wave hello rather than hear me say it, so it was easy for us to fall into a friendship. And then one day it clicked: Brigid Bronik, the heroine of my new novel, would have a hearing loss, too. I knew characters like this were not often found in
Far left: Brad Parks with his grandfather, who in later life struggled with his hearing, in 2004. Near left: Parks’s neighbor Melissa Schutt helped inspire a lead character in his crime novel.
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hearing health
hhf.org
