THE BUTTERFLY CAGE: an interview with Rachel Zemach

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We're just a few days from September, Deaf Awareness month, and we have a wonderful guest to kick it off for us. Diana Todd, a/k/a Bibliophile, is a long-time commentor here who is also part of the Deaf community. She offered to interview Rachel Zemach about her critically-acclaimed memoir, THE BUTTERFLY CAGE.

Diana and Rachel are also giving one lucky commentor the chance to win a signed copy of THE BUTTERFLY CAGE. Thank you, Diana!

 

DIANA TODD: So excited to introduce Rachel Zemach here on Jungle Red Writers blog.  Rachel was living in England with her sisters and parents, themselves authors and illustrators of children's books, when she suddenly lost her hearing at the age of 10.  She learned Sign Language at school in America after her family moved back to the States. She has written a memoir, THE BUTTERFLY CAGE, about her experiences as a Deaf teacher in a Deaf classroom at a public school.  

Welcome, Rachel!

Your poignant memoir, The Butterfly Cage is about your experiences teaching Deaf children at a public school and at a residential school where all of the students are Deaf.

How did you come up with the title "The Butterfly Cage"?

 

Rachel:  I was looking for a title, and I had just written two chapters:  one titled "Blood" and one (that I later deleted), that had a description of a time in my classroom when we had some butterflies hatch from caterpillars then released them. To our surprise, when they first came out of their cocoons, we saw spots of blood.  We thought they were hurt, but it was a natural part of their growth process.

The title "Butterflies and Blood" suddenly hit me and I was excited.  The beauty and tragedy combination reminded me of my experiences in Deaf Education.  Though there were mixed reactions to the title.  While some loved the title, others hated it and I eventually changed it to "The Butterfly Cage".  The metamorphosis the butterflies go through is like my students learning American Sign Language. The "cage" is the mainstream school.  The title fits better and sounds less like a horror flick.

 

What kind of challenges, besides the lack of American Sign Language interpreters, did you face since publishing your memoir?

 

Rachel:  Oh my goodness. The hard part is hiring a publicist or a book marketer who knows about book marketing AND who knows the world of the Deaf community. (It’s icons, values, major institutions, and resources).  I have not been able to find that, so either I work with hearing people, who have no knowledge of Deaf Culture, or Deaf people who have limited experience with marketing.  For me hearing publicist, fighting for me, and for my friends in the Deaf community to have access, including when I am on the radio, is a new experience.   It is a steep learning curve for outsiders.  

Another tricky issue is deciding whether or not to use my voice.  I do not want to alienate Deaf people but I do not want to rely on an interpreter to voice for me either. The ability to speak is a privilege for sure, but the decision of whether to do that does not come lightly at all.  I myself had the gut punch experience of seeing someone I’d always signing, suddenly speaking with their mouth.  It is a disconcerting and alienating feeling.  

 

A recurring theme in your memoir is about ableism.  Can you tell us a bit about that?  

 

Rachel: I loved that quote "I read books, not lips" by Brendan Stern, that you shared with me.  

 First, there is the unconscious assumption that speech, hearing devices, and being mainstreamed in hearing classes makes the person smarter and better somehow than if they sign and are in a Deaf class, or proudly Deaf-identified.  

Second, that same assumption is applied to Deaf staff members.

Third, is the lack of accountability the Administration and staff have with evaluating problems.   The assumption is always that being Deaf, or knowing ASL is the problem.  When in reality, the root causes are language deprivation due to families not being encouraged and required to learn ASL early on in their child's infancy. Also, poor quality of education, and the dearth of Deaf teachers in public, mainstream schools, which 85% of our students attend.

 

Speaking of families, I read about a couple who found out their baby was Deaf before it was born.  The hearing couple decided to learn ASL before the child was born, and they also made friends with other Deaf people.

 Rachel: WOW, that’s fantastic!

 

As a Deaf Author, what have you learned since you published your memoir in April 2023?  

 

Rachel: I have learned that marketing is a full time job!  It is totally worth it, just like all of the work writing the book was.  Also, do not write a book with the expectations of making money.  There are other rewards, including stunningly passionate and powerful letters from readers telling me how my book impacted them.  One feels more connected to the human race, in very positive ways.  

As a Deaf Author, I learned that the Deaf community are absolute champs about spreading the word about my book.  Even though I wrote the book for hearing people, I held firm to my principles.  When hearing editors wanted to remove the Deaf POV, I refused to do that.  It's always been clear to me that if my book did not earn the respect of the Deaf people— whom I respect—then I would not have done my job. I treasure their opinions.

 

You are organizing a dinner party.  Which writers, dead or alive, would you invite?

 

Rachel: Wow.  Tears sprang to my eyes at this question.  All of your questions are great.  My answer is not hard.  Paddy Ladd, Mary Karr, Mark Drolsbaugh, Ayelet Waldman, Sara Novic, Michael Chabon, Joyce Maynard, Jason Rezaian, Raymond Carver and Anne Lamott. And there are many more! I would also invite an ASL interpreter (or two).  I would also like to invite all of my brilliant Deaf and Deaf-adjacent friends who want to, or have started, writing their own books.  I want everyone to write books now, especially those who can help get the word out about the Deaf experience; to help hearing people understand what it is and what it is not.  

One word of warning about this dinner though:  I am not much of a cook.

 

THE BUTTERFLY CAGE

Joy, heartache, and corruption: Teaching while Deaf in a California public school

This book is tender, funny, surprising, and disruptive. You'll be a fly on the wall in a Deaf classroom in a public school, watching a Deaf teacher struggle with staff, administration, and aides who sabotage the teachers at every turn. You’ll also see the children struggle with a principal who removes their textbooks, a vindictive, power-hungry speech therapist, and a system that leaves them defenseless against it.

You'll also meet a language-hungry boy who will capture your heart and run away with it and the political, fiercely intelligent elite members of the Deaf community who rally to change legislation after his life takes a shocking turn. Learn from these true stories of individual students and their quirky, fallible teacher, what the deepest feelings and dilemmas of Deaf and hard of hearing people are, and why 90% of our students around the country are being unnecessarily set up for failure.

Rachel Zemach was hearing for half of her childhood, until an accident left her Deaf at age ten.  But it was not until later, over a ten year period when she taught Deaf classes at a hearing public school, that she began to identify as Deaf with a capital D.  Rachel Zemach's parents were also authors and illustrators of children's books. 

 

You can find Rachel's memoir, The Butterfly Cage here. You can find out more about Rachel at her website, you can friend her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter as @rachel_zemach and enjoy her Instagram posts at @mezemach.

All Summer in a Day

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Today is arguably the last Monday of summer - next week is Labor Day, which is always bittersweet as it heralds the end of the season (if not, for some of us, the end of suffocating heat!) This week on JRW, our attention is going to turn to the World Mystery Conference, Bouchercon, but before we do, let’s take our traditional accounting of what summer pleasures we did and did not manage to fit in between Memorial Day and now.

What I did: Saw family. I saw SO much of my family, I’ll be happy not to spend any more time together until Thanksgiving. I love you, kids.

Went to a Sea Dogs game in Portland, with much of the aforementioned family. It was a rare perfect sunny day in what’s been a wet, cool summer here in New England, and we had a great time, even though the Sea Dogs went down 7-5.

Celebrated the Fourth of July by watching Independence Day with the Maine Millennial on Monday and had an amazing indoor (that rain again) BBQ at a friend’s house on Tuesday.

Took a mini-writing retreat with Jessica Ellicott and had the great pleasure of spending a whole day writing and talking craft and business under the shade of her gazebo in utterly perfect July weather.

Went to the movies in person, which used to be a summer standard, but has become rare for me since the pandemic. Youngest and I saw MEG 2: THE TRENCH, which was the perfect tongue-in-cheek action flick.  I even bought movie popcorn: I know it’s all oil and chemicals, but it’s so tasty.

I had a whole watermelon to myself!

What I didn’t do: It’s a long list. No trips to the beach, no grilling outdoors, no summer theater (which I managed to do even during the shut downs in ‘20 and ‘21.) No swimming at Celia Wakefield’s Lake House, or in the nearby Saco River - there was so much rain my area was closed to swimming due to bacterial contamination!! No Chamber Music Festival. No hanging out with a book and a glass of chilled rode on the patio. No garden other than what sprung up from last year. 

All I can say is, 1) this fall had better be spectacular, and 2) the next time a family member calls with a crisis, I’m pretending I broke my phone and hiding until it passes.

How about you, Reds?

RHYS BOWEN:  I always have plans for the perfect summer: picnics at the beach, a book beside the pool, an adventure once a week. And then suddenly it’s September! What happened? Our summer in Marin County had not been stellar. A lot of cold foggy mornings. And I have escaped to the beach a couple of times. But still…. Not that perfect lazy, hazy days of summer 

I must confess that five weeks of it were spent in Europe so no whining here! England, Jersey, Brittany. All good. And lots of family encounters. Also good. And a new irrigation system that now has plants covering my bare hillside. I’m off to Bouchercon on Wednesday and hoping to steal away to the beach when no one’s looking!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I have no idea what I did. Yes, I do, it wrote. And was on book tour. It was great, and wildly successful, and hurray, but yikes, it’s about to be September. We didn’t grill, because it seemed to be raining all the time or SO HOT!

A new house went up next to us, so we were in a constant din–truly one day, there were TEN guys on the roof next door with nail guns. Just imagine. And they started at 7. AM. 7 AM!!

We didn’t sit by the pool, because see above. But we had so many bunnies! BUT I did do some fantastic full-house signings, really amazing, and interviewed Shari Lapena in person, taught at the Writers Digest Convention and saw Hadestown with Hallie–she mentions it below, too! AMAZING, as she says.

AND sold two more books, book 16 and 17 no under contract! So yay. Somehow, even with all the rain, it was still lovely.

JENN McKINLAY: This was not the summer to miss out on a trip to my mom's cottage in Nova Scotia but I did miss it and lived through every day that was over 110+ here in AZ. Blerg.

Instead, it was the summer to spend repainting the interior of our house, rebuilding the catio, revising the next romcom, and swimming with the dogs in the pool every single day. I also got to spend a glorious time literally up in the trees with the Hub and the Hooligans in Flagstaff, where we did an extreme obstacle course 30-60 feet up in the air which included jumping from swinging log to swinging log, climbing fishnets hanging in the tops of the pines, and zip lines. Truly, it was like something out of American Ninja Warrior. Hooligan 2 also turned 21 and wanted to visit a casino. Kid won $600 off a slot machine. We told him he could never go again because he’d never be that lucky again. LOL. 

HALLIE EPHRON: Oh, Jenn, you were due for a good summer. Hope you’ll blog about what that obstacle course was like. Sounds terrifying.

My summer began with July 4 on Peaks Island (off the coast of Portland Maine) with family. Fireworks and barbecuing, long walks and swimming.

After that, I taught at a bunch of writing conferences, including an old favorite on mystery writing at Book Passage in Marin. And another favorite, at the Willamette Writers Conference via Zoom.  And I was thrilled to get invited back to the Writers Digest Annual Writers Conference in NYC at the Hilton in Midtown. Great meals, and I got to hang out with Hank(!) and went to see Hadestown which was AMAZING! 

Next week I go back to Peaks for a Labor Day weekend relax-athon and hangout with the spectacular Franny and Jody, my grands.

So all in all a pretty terrific summer. Oh, and I also got named my town’s Writer in Residence for 2023-2024. Which gives me lots of good stuff through to anticipate.

Life is good. A year ago I would not have said that.

 

DEBORAH CROMBIE: The traveling part of the summer was terrific! In early June I flew to LA for the California Crime Writers’ Conference, my first conference in three and a half years, and it was wonderful to see friends, make new friends, and talk writing again! I didn’t mind the “June glooms” a bit. Then a whirlwind week at home, then off for almost a month in London. What a great trip. Mostly nice weather other than a couple of too-warm days, loads of terrific research for the book in progress, and an unexpected side trip to Bath.

Alas, I arrived home mid-July just as the triple-digits-no-rain remainder of the summer set in, and have spent the last six weeks just trying not to melt and to keep the poor plants alive. 

One fun thing–we’ve done a lot of work on our pond and added new fish (after losing all but one of our huge koi last October) and have really enjoyed watching the little swimmers in the few minutes we can stand to be outside!

 

 LUCY: I think you've already heard about our multiple family visits and the lovely food I've been eating, so I won't belabor that. Most unusual and fun event? I played in my first ukulele "gig" last weekend. Remember the band I hired for John's big birthday bash? Turns out one of them runs a ukulele club at the Scranton Library and my pal Steve and I have been attending. Fred the leader encouraged us to play in public at a festival on the town green. It was very low pressure (read, low attendance) and super fun! Other than that, writing, writing, writing.

JULIA: Hallie definitely wins the award for "Best Spent Summer," with Debs in the No. 2 spot. How about you, dear readers? How was your June, July and August?  

 

Photos courtesy of Rebecca from Pixabay, freepix and Flagstaff Extreme

Mark Pryor on Strong Women in Fiction

DEBORAH CROMBIE: First, a REDS alert! Five of us (so disappointed that Julia and Hallie can't make it) will be attending Bouchercon next week in San Diego, and we'd love to have a get-together with the REDs community. We'll be in the hotel lobby at 9 on Friday morning, so do come by for a chat!

Now, for today's guest, Mark Pryor has some thoughts on creating strong female characters in historical fiction. (And we are very flattered to be mentioned!)

Mark Pryor: The wonderful women who run this blog and write the books that we devour style themselves as "smart and sassy," which is absolutely true. Thing is, I've met most of them and they are so much more. The words "strong," "intelligent," "independent," and "charismatic" are just some of the descriptors I would add.

The same is true for so many of the writers that they feature on their blog, and that's one of the many reasons I'm a fan and have bugged them (more than once) to be a part of their literary world. That's always been my world, I think -- growing up, I was surrounded by strong women and I like having them in my life, they make the world richer, more diverse, and just more interesting.

Which is why, when creating my new Henri Lefort series, I ran into an unexpected problem. You see, the eleven novels I published prior to the first Henri book (called DIE AROUND SUNDOWN, below) were all set in the modern world, whereas Henri is operating in Paris, in 1940.

 

This means that with my first eleven books, if I wanted a detective, prosecutor, diplomat, or politician to be a woman, I could happily invent that. And did so, many times. In my Hugo Marston series, two of the leading (and strongest) characters are women.

But history, as it turns out, was not good to women when it came to power, prestige, and jobs. I mean, duh, right?! But this was not something I'd thought deeply about before as a writer, partly because of the modern setting of my books, but no doubt also partly because of my gender.

So when I was creating this new series, I was flummoxed, baffled, and bamboozled as to how I could include believable strong female characters in a book set in Paris in 1940.

And that's where reading came in. You know reading, that thing we all long to do more of, that thing that leads us to buy three more books when we already have 23 waiting for our attention. Some people also call it research, but I prefer to stick with reading, especially because history is itself so fascinating.

 Anyway, I was reading about Paris in the 1930s and 1940s when I came across the name of a woman I'd never heard before: Princess Marie Bonaparte. Obviously, I'd heard of her great- great- uncle, of course, Napoleon himself. But Marie? Not at all. And yet it turned out that she was an incredibly intelligent, ambitious, and utterly fascinating character in her own right. She became a student of Sigmund Freud, then his friend, and then helped him escape the Nazis. She had all manner of theories about women's sexuality, and generally took no guff from anyone, men especially. What's not to love?

I read the biography about her and I ended up shaping a crucial part of DIE AROUND SUNDOWN around Marie Bonaparte (or "Mimi" as the characters call her). Her psychological interests, life experience, and the strength of her personality helped me unlock and reveal the major plot revelation at the end of the book. And throughout the novel, having the tension between Henri, a strong character of his own, and a woman as independent and smart as he ever was, I think adds both tension and depth to the story.

In the second book, THE DARK EDGE OF NIGHT, which came out two weeks ago, I kept Mimi as a major character but also went looking for another woman from the history books to add to the mix. 

 

While reading about the Second World War I found Virginia Hall, an American one-legged spy who was cleverer and braver than just about anyone in her world. So after reading A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, a book I recommend to everyone now, I made sure to work her into the plot. She provides a touch of romance, a smidgeon of humor, and generally speaking more color and depth than if I'd not included her.

So now a question: when you're reading books, historical fiction or otherwise, do you notice or care about the demographics of the characters? Do you agree that a story is more interesting if it contains the inherently varied perspective of non-(white) male characters? Until writing these two novels I don't know if I'd even been aware of this issue, so I'm fascinated to learn what people think.

I mean, come on: Deborah Crombie as an arch villain? Who wouldn't love to see that...?!

DEBS: Mark, I once had an editor tell me that I was too "nice" to write crime fiction (not meant as a compliment!) so I would love to be a villian! Also, I loved Mimi and can't wait to meet Virginia! 

Here's more about THE DARK EDGE OF NIGHT.

Paris Detective Henri Lefort is about to investigate the murder of a Parisian when the occupying Germans order him to find a missing person – an SS doctor recently arrived from the Fatherland. Irritated (because one missing Nazi isn’t nearly enough in Henri’s mind), he does both jobs, and adds a third task when he starts looking into the disappearance of local children.

His prowess as a detective, and his smart mouth, don’t endear him to the Germans and while tracking down leads he uncovers some truths the Nazis would rather stay hidden. But once Henri sets out to do a job he does it, though he’s clever enough to know that the trap he sets for the killer has to be foolproof. So, with the help of a whip-wielding dominatrix, a French princess, and several members of the Resistance he unravels all three mysteries, which are connected in a finale that NYT best-seller Jeffrey Deaver (author of THE BONE COLLECTOR) called “genius.”

Mark Pryor is the author of the Henri Lefort series set in Paris in the 1940s. The first, DIE AROUND SUNDOWN, was published in August 2022 and the second, THE DARK EDGE OF NIGHT, on August 15, 2023. Mark is also the author of the Hugo Marston series, set in Paris, London, and Barcelona. And he has two books set in Austin, HOLLOW MAN and DOMINIC.

Away from books Mark is a retired prosecutor, and now a partner at a criminal defense firm in Austin, Texas. He began his career as a journalist in England, where his beat was also crime-related - the police blotter. He is a guest analyst on CourtTV and he has appeared on CBS News' 48 Hours, NBCs' Dateline, and Discovery Channel's Discovery ID: Cold Blood.