Exquisite, Imperfect Communication: Lindsey Felt on Rachel Kolb's memoir, friendship, and d/Deaf culture
In early April, the Notation in Cultural Rhetorics, with the support of the Department of English, hosted former Boothe Prize winner (2009) and author Rachel Kolb ('12, MA '13) whose new memoir, Articulate, was just published by Ecco (2025).
Praised by the Washington Post and named one of Audible's best audiobooks of 2025, Articulate explores “layers of deafness, language, and voice. [Kolb] tells the story of how, over time, she came to realize that clear or articulate self-expression isn’t just a static pinnacle to reach, a set of words to pronounce correctly, but rather a living and breathing process that happens between individual human beings.”
In an event hosted by the Notation in Cultural Rhetorics, PWR’s Lindsey Felt was in discussion with Rachel on April 8 in Margaret Jacks Hall. Here she shares with us about the poetry of ASL, the fluidity of signs and attention in an abiding friendship.
You’ve known Rachel for a while, long before this celebration of her first book; what role has your friendship played in your writing, teaching, living life? I’m asking this thinking about the ways friendships can sustain us in extravagant ways even as there are few places where we record it.
LF: I first met Rachel when I was a PhD student and she was finishing up her co-term program for her Master’s degree in English as well at Stanford. Our connection, as you can imagine, was immediate. At that point in my life, I had never met another Deaf scholar and writer. Those early Coupa cafe lunch chats planted the seed for our friendship, which grew over many emails and long Zoom calls while Rachel was away at Oxford for her Rhodes scholarship and later, at Emory for her PhD in English. Though I feel this way about my PWR colleagues too - only we can know the unique grind and joys of conference weeks - with Rachel we had a shared vocabulary and set of strategies for teaching, researching and writing as d/Deaf scholars. [Note: lower case 'd' connotes a community of people with hearing loss; capital 'D' refers to a community that is linguistically oriented around sign language and Deaf culture, and views deafness as a valued identity.]
Rachel and I were always thinking, writing, and eventually teaching similar topics - from body language and nonverbal communication to reflecting on captioning as a kind of rhetorical technology that shapes language and communication practices. She’s a true intellectual collaborator and interlocutor whose ideas I value deeply. I felt so privileged when Rachel asked me to read an early draft of Articulate. As I read her work, I remember thinking to myself that she had written the book I had always yearned for — that so precisely and poetically captured the deaf experience in words – I felt so seen and held in that work.
As we’ve gotten older, Rachel and I have deepened our friendship and my kids have gotten to know her as well, which is amazing because now they are starting to learn about the broader d/Deaf community. I’m itching for the day we can collaborate on something bigger together.
What did you discover in discussion with Rachel at the event that you hadn’t known before?
LF: Our conversation was perhaps the first time I’ve seen Rachel fully in her element as a native ASL speaker. Let me explain: Rachel has always accommodated me by communicating with me orally as I am not fluent in American Sign Language. In our moderated book conversation, Rachel chose to give her remarks entirely in ASL, though I was voicing my questions to her. This language choice was by design, one that we discussed beforehand, and that reflected the argument she was making in Articulate about how we conceive of “voice” as typically constrained by an oral – and ableist- rhetorical tradition. Rachel was also keenly aware that we had a large Deaf audience in attendance, whom she actively recruited herself, and that our conversation would be supported by ASL interpreters and captioners.
I am not by any stretch an expert in ASL, but I have seen a lot of ASL signers in my lifetime – and when Rachel signs she is a poet — showing us how form can meld into meaning. There’s something so precise, elegant, fluid, and structural in the way Rachel signs, and I found myself entranced at several moments during our conversation. Her joy and freedom were just distilled so powerfully in this expression of her voice.
What do you wish all of us in PWR could have heard or seen signed?
LF: I think I had an out of body experience while moderating the event because there were so many information inputs coming in - from listening to the ASL interpreters’ voice for Rachel to reading the captions, gauging the audience’s attention, and figuring out where I wanted to take the conversation next.
But one thing Rachel and I talked about was the sign for “cochlear implant” (CI), a medical device that we both chose to get in our adulthood. I had been taught that the sign for “cochlear implant” was something like two fingers bent like air quotes – or fangs – stabbing the side of your head. This sign was very intentional, because the Deaf community felt very strongly that implants were going to be a death knell for sign language and Deaf culture. And there’s certainly some evidence to suggest that it reduces the opportunities children have to learn sign language and participate in Deaf cultural practices. But I was surprised to see Rachel’s sign for the cochlear implant was different, something like [two straight fingers - index and middle finger - placed firmly on the side of the head]. It was much more neutral, so I asked her about when that sign changed, and what it reflects about the Deaf culture’s evolving - perhaps slightly more accepting attitude towards CIs. It’s such a crystalline example of how language’s meaning can be molded by its users over time.
When Rachel reflects back on her time as an undergraduate at Stanford and then as a Rhodes Scholars at Oxford and then as an English Literature grad student at Emory, she tends to write about her entry into and then the social life of these spaces—with other students, professors, community. I wonder if you might share with us what she or the both of you talk about when you talk about what needs attention now in the classroom, if not the writing classroom in particular?
LF: Well, it may come as no surprise that we primarily talk about GenAI and LLMs - and how we can teach and write with, without and around it. Rachel’s teaching days were before Chat GPT was released, so she often tells me that she “can’t imagine what it is like to teach writing now with AI,” and is often curious to hear how I approach it pedagogically. [My answer: I’m still trying to figure it out, and I have more questions than answers.] But going further back, we also are accessibility nerds, and love to strategize about how to make our communication environments - and students’ learning spaces - more accessible.
But we’ve also talked about disability disclosure, that is, how we talk to our students about our own positionality and lived experiences as deaf people - how that shapes how we communicate. We both have always made this explicit in our classrooms and writing, but we reflect on how that moment of vulnerability often cracks open the door for students to disclose too: students will often share their own experiences with us more freely, or come to us as mentors or disability “elders” who can help them navigate their disability journeys as well. And at best, that emboldens students to bring more of themselves into their writing.
After reading the book, I came away with such a clear sense of how a robust support system can lead to a successful life: for Rachel, both parents learned ASL, they were able to relocate to a better school, one parent quits work to support her learning; she has access to a horse, riding lessons, speech therapists, and gains access to a Stanford and Oxford education. I wonder if there are other memoirs or narratives you might point us to that you love, that tell stories without such financial abundance and additional academic support? I’m thinking about this for us as readers as much for us as instructors wanting to point students to further reading and a deeper understanding of a diversity of experiences.
LF: You are absolutely right that Rachel’s story stems from a certain privilege, and Rachel herself has acknowledged this.
I’m distressed to say that there are not many of those narratives that abound, at least to my knowledge and I’m somewhat of a collector of d/Deaf memoirs. I can cite several disability and even Deaf memoirs, but most authors do emerge from some level of privilege or language support. Josh Swiller’s The Unheard, Michael Chorost’s book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, were the first two deaf memoirs I ever read and have a central place on my personal bookshelf. But more recent excellent contributions like Haben Girma’s Haben: The DeafBlind Women Who Conquered Harvard Law (she was born in Eritrea), and poet Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (from Odessa), fictional works like Girl at War (by Deaf writer Sara Novic) and her most recent book, True Biz, have begun to diversify these narratives.
In her memoir Rachel describes the challenge of speaking through interpreters who can tend to be intrusive, unprofessional and distortive. Regularly lost in translation she says are her humor, wit, knowledge and confidence.
The way she described her interpreters made me think of the Assistants in Kafka, the absurdist precursors to AI. A student last quarter wrote about a version of this, where a brain-computer interface (BCI) records and then decodes neural patterns for patients with tetraglia: “Willett’s system clearly moves toward that freedom [of expression]; it opens a channel where there might otherwise be silence. But it does so by passing intention through [auto correct or] stages of interpretation, thresholding, and correction before it reaches the page. The miracle, then, is not simple transmission; it is mediated restoration.”
I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on what gets in the way of what we need to say?
LF: Ooh, I love the comparison to Kafka as an absurdist precursor to AI - and I’m equally impressed by your student’s reading of BCIs as “mediated restoration”!
This is both such a big and simple question. I would borrow from Rachel’s argument here, which is to say that all we need is human connection and empathy, which can create the conditions for meaningful communication. I’ll add that time is also a necessary scaffold, as it can create the space for us to slow down, shape our message, and listen to one another, taking efficiency and productivity off the table. Rachel also talks too about the near ecstatic experience she has when she clicks with her interpreter after “developing a regular tempo of working together,” being able to let herself go, or even fly . I’m also thinking here of my former student Aya Hilal’s powerful Lunsford Award presentation on stuttering, as she herself is a disfluent speaker, saying that stuttering moves us out of time, creating the conditions for us to listen empathetically and creatively.
But in another, perhaps more practical, answer I might offer, I think we will always have to navigate communication access. I’m reminded of a radio essay I teach in PWR2 that was composed by disability activist Alice Wong, who became a nonspeaking person after receiving a tracheostomy. She talks about how her text to speech app allows her to still have a voice, but bemoans that the voice options are “robotic, clinical, and white. It mispronounces slang and Chinglish, a mix of Mandarin and English which is part of my culture.” But she also revels in the simplicity of her body to communicate: she can still roll her eyes, grin devilishly and flip people off (students especially love this part!). What I appreciate so deeply about Alice’s story, and the lessons I’ve learned from Rachel and the disability community, is that we accept imperfect communication, because that is what makes us human.
Note: Rachel Kolb's memoir, Articulate, is available to borrow from the PWR library. You can find it by the "new books" display on top of our borrowing library along the back wall of the third floor.
