Katie Booth teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Catapult, and Harper’s Magazine, and has been highlighted on Longreads and Longform; “The Sign for This” was a notable essay in the 2016 edition of Best American Essays. Booth is a former Kluge Fellow and worked on “The Invention of Miracles” during that fellowship.
Andrew Breiner: Could you start out by giving us an introduction to your new book: “The Invention of Miracles: language, power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s quest to end Deafness”?
Katie Booth: Sure! It’s essentially the story of Alexander Graham Bell’s lifelong work in relation to deaf people. He was the son of a deaf woman and husband to another, and was at the forefront of a movement in deaf education called “oralism,” which sought to teach deaf children to speak and lipread while simultaneously withholding and punishing any use of sign language. His promotion of this type of education also led him straight into the very earliest days of the eugenics movement. Early on, he advocated that deaf people shouldn’t marry each other, and later he became involved in the American Breeders’ Association, an early eugenics group, and ultimately chaired the ABA Eugenics Committee’s Subcommittee on Deafness.
AB: To many, Alexander Graham Bell is simply “the inventor of the telephone.” What is the most important way that you hope to add to or complicate that image?
KB: I hope that people will understand that for many people, that’s not who Bell was—he is still, today, seen by many as a major villain in deaf history, and for good reason. It’s important that we understand him as a complicated historical figure because to continue to resist that is to erase the very real, and often traumatic, experiences that many deaf people have lived through because of Bell’s work and legacy.
For hearing people, it is important for us to understand this other part of Bell because in many ways he laid the groundwork for hearing people’s understandings of deafness today—understandings that many of us never question. Learning about Bell and his influence is a productive first step in hearing people coming to terms with the privilege that we carry with us through the world, and the ways that it can do real damage to the deaf people in our midst. We have a lot of reparative work to do and we have barely begun.
AB: What about your work and life led you to focus on Bell?
KB: Well, I grew up in a family with here