A Q&A with Terry Galloway

Author photo: Alan Pogue. Cover design: Louis Roe

The anniversary edition of Terry Galloway’s Mean Little deaf Queer is finally here! “Told with understandable rage, quirky humor, and extraordinary humanity” (Booklist), her memoir invites readers on her journey from “child-freak” to exuberant performance artist. With a new epilogue that covers her life over the last fifteen years, including her major decision to get cochlear implants, Mean Little deaf Queer is as fiercely original and laugh-out-loud funny as it was when it was first published in 2009. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with her to chat about it. This is part one of two. Read part two.

Christian Coleman: Congratulations on the anniversary edition of Mean Little deaf Queer! What does the memoir mean to you fifteen years on? How has your relationship to it changed or evolved over time?

Terry Galloway: Thank you. I’m so honored that Beacon has published this anniversary edition. They love writers at Beacon, and even though I’m a one-book writer, I’m glad to be caught up in their regard.

As for rereading Mean Little deaf Queer—oh my god! I could see every flaw, every misstep, every mouthy sentence. And not just that. I was blithely writing about things I wouldn’t have admitted to a therapist (if I had one). I can’t believe my mother, Edna, read all of that about my sex life. My mother-in-law, Marion, kept encouraging me to change the title. Marion was kind of afraid to read it, so my sister-in-law, Kathy, read it and gave Marion a summary, leaving out the sex. A very good decision. 

So, yeah, it has its flaws. But I love me for writing it. I was trying so hard to get at something, say something, share something that’s not just all about me and more about the grand teaming web of time and being I found myself caught up in. 

My wife, Donna Marie, who taught Gender Studies as a professor at Florida State University, told me that in rereading Mean Little deaf Queer she was amazed by the strong trans narrative embedded there. She asked me if I were growing up now would I be trans or on the trans spectrum. And I had to think about it. Because I always wanted to be a boy-girl, like the e. e. cummings poem. I miss the boy body of my youth. I still have such disagreements with the kind of body I was born to, but so many of my trans friends had a determination to be who they felt themselves to be. They let nothing stop them. I don’t have that kind of determination to become a male, although I still have the desire to play the role.

Of course, the huge change in this last decade was suddenly regaining my hearing. And in regaining my hearing, I also regained the crispness of my speech, its full intelligibility.

CC: You narrated the audiobook for this edition of your memoir, too! Tell us a little about what that was like after having written it.

TG: I didn’t get to narrate the first audiobook, probably because I was still profoundly deaf at the time and my speech wasn’t clear enough for an audiobook. Or so I imagined. 

I didn’t exactly seethe with resentment but felt a burst of righteous glee when I was asked to read this latest one. I have a long, long love affair with sound and radio and all those things I couldn’t hear but imagined and romanticized. I thought doing an audiobook would be really sexy. And it was! My voice saying all those things I wrote into the ear of a stranger. I might as well have had my lips right over that open orifice. I developed a huge buddy-crush on Jeremy Bartlett, my sound engineer and editor. He has a beautiful voice, and we developed a teasing relationship—joking and swapping stories and histories back and forth while we were doing the work. It was perfect because I could imagine him being the one constant listener, the one I wanted to please. We both knew we wanted the voice to compel rather than demand attention.

He was so patient. He told me that some writers get really bored with their own writing and equally bored with their own voices and that was something to guard against. I never thought that could happen to me, but at times it did. I’d hear myself in the earphones and think, “Oh, shut the hell up!” He would admonish me back on track. 

The whole idea of it was thrilling, even though passages of my own writing did bug me. I had to stop myself from editing, changing, making a sentence more clever than it was. That part drove me nuts. Really, really hard not to do that. But there were times when I would just fall into the language, realize I meant every word, awkward or not. Jeremy and I worked hard so the listener could feel the memory, the story, the moment, bloom. It was an odd kind of conjuring. I love it. If I could do it for a living I would. Although I still worry that my brain will suddenly forget how to hear.

One last thought. I sometimes wonder if I should have been allowed to do that first audiobook when I still had that touch of deaf-speak. Wouldn’t that have given a more authentic representation of who I was, how the words, the thoughts in my memoir should be heard?

CC: How much of your experience as a stage performer did you use for narrating the audiobook? Did narrating it put you in a similar headspace and give you a similar thrill you get from performing on stage?

TG: It’s not a totally different experience when you are up on stage. But there is this distinction for me. I was told that Shakespeare’s audiences went to hear a play more than to see a play. Before my cochlear implants, I loved Shakespeare but couldn’t completely hear the words. I had to feel them, the way my high school speech teacher taught me to feel them—as breath, as part of my breathing, as my body shaping air into meaning. But that also lead me to love slapstick—cartwheeling over a bench, bumping on my backside down a flight of stairs, getting used as a battering ram. 

So, it was hard for me to settle down with just the words. And to hear the words as words and not just as indecipherable noise. I was afraid of the process at first but after I settled into it, I found it more fascinating than frightening. Now when I first started recording, I was worried about being too theatrical. I reigned myself in too much. I was leery of being too melodramatic and over the top. But I remembered a technique my high school speech teacher taught me. Think of each word individually and give each word its weight. So I did. Some words had more weight than others and I could feel that in them. It helped me shape the feeling in the sentences, the paragraphs, the chapters. And when I shaped it particularly well, I could feel it. So could Jeremy.

Sometimes in the process, I’d freeze. My brain would get stage fright and forget how to hear.

Read part two.

About the Authors 

Known for her cross-dressing roles in Shakespeare and at Austin’s legendary Esther’s Follies, Terry Galloway has toured internationally as a solo artist and with P.S. 122’s Field Trips. As a giant rodent, she heads up Mickee Faust, a community theater for Tallahassee’s weird, queer, disability community. When not touring, she lives in Tallahassee with her wife, two cats, and a bevy of friends and family.

Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.