Language Shaped by Silence

Every language is foreign to me,” Adam Pottle writes. Born with sensorineural hearing loss, he got his first hearing aids at six. He learned to fill in the gaps with the help of lip-­reading and captioning devices, and today he speaks with a “deaf accent” — prompting some to ask if he’s Australian or Irish. He and his family learned a bit of American Sign Language, but growing up in Kitimat, British Columbia, with a population of about 10,000 at the time, he didn’t have much occasion to use it. There were no other deaf, Deaf, or hard-of-­hearing people in his life.

Voice is the second book in Writers on Writing, a University of Regina Press series in which authors grapple with formative questions of their craft. With his contribution, Pottle explores a relationship with language shaped by silence. “I write according to how words feel rather than how they sound,” he explains. “Words are tactile. I feel like I can hold them in my hands and throw them at people...