Böcker av Raymond Luczak

"Far from Atlantis is the latest collection of poetry by deaf author Raymond Luczak. In Far from Atlantis, Luczak makes use of traditional poetic forms to tell the stories of two vastly different worlds: the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the fabled island of Atlantis"--

Sometimes your own family isn't enough. Growing up different is never easy, but Michael, a deaf young man from a small town, knows that he must find his true family beyond his biological one. He struggles and fails to find others of his kind until he attends college in New York City.There, we meet a variety of people from a deaf gay family of sorts: Eddie, an older accountant aching for love; Lee, an effeminate dishwasher with a pronounced weakness for red-haired men; Vince, a charismatic dancer who lives intensely no matter the state of his health; Neil, a brooding woodcarver who becomes a deaf woman's obsession; Stan, a lanky stock boy at the A&P on Christopher Street; Ted, a hard-of-hearing college student with ambivalent feelings about the deaf community; and Rex, an ASL interpreter who avoids his own emotions during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. It is through these people that Michael, no longer a smalltown boy, begins to create a new family of his own. Taking place from 1978 to 2003, his story will open your eyes and heart to what it means to be different in an indifferent world. The first place winner of the Project: QueerLit 2006 Contest, this second edition features a new foreword by the author.

Timm Gay Johnson was an unrepentant nudist. He didn't care whether anyone saw him naked. In fact, if anyone appeared at the front door, he never bothered to put anything on. "Just in case the Jehovah's Witnesses pay a visit," he always said. Likewise, when guests came over for dinner, he never put on his clothes. "My birthday suit's my best outfit . . ." - So opens WIDOWER, 47 SEEKS HUSBANDWhen a legendary Minneapolis florist with an oversized penis the stuff of legend in the local gay community suddenly dies, his partner Howie Dwight Taft has a real problem when he dates for the first time in 30 years. How does a perfectly average-sized, overweight, and predictable middle-aged man try to find a new husband of his own? Covering some 40 years of gay Minneapolis history, the novel explores what it means to be an older gay widower.

"This is an essay collection by deaf writer Raymond Luczak"--

When Raymond Luczak was growing up deaf in a hearing Catholic family of nine children, his mother shared conflicting stories about having had a miscarriage after-or possibly around-the time he was conceived. As an elegy to his lost twin, this book asks: If he had a twin, just how different would his life have been?

Ghosts are everywhere.The Deaf community today doesn't seem to be what it used to be, so a small group of people must decide whether to sell the last Deaf club in America. As its board of trustees reflects on what it means to be Deaf, a few ghosts return to share stories of what it was like when Deaf clubs truly mattered: Mabel Hubbard Bell, the wife of the Deaf community's nemesis Alexander Graham Bell; Nellie Zabel Willhite, the first Deaf woman to earn a pilot's license; Olof Hanson, the first Deaf architect in America; and George Veditz, a charismatic activist who defended the Deaf community's right to sign. Raymond Luczak offers a compelling look into the Deaf community then and now.Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of over 20 books, including The Kinda Fella I Am and A Babble of Objects. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips, Raymond Luczak recounts his unrequited love for a gardener while examining how Walt Whitman (1819-1892) lived as a gay man 150 years before. Inspired by the earthy passions abundant in Whitman's work and the vast social changes between his era and ours, the story becomes an urgent love letter in more ways than one. "The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips is an unabashed celebration of one man's relationship to Walt Whitman: poet, publisher, lover, impromptu nurse, artistic creation, organism, man in full. Like Whitman himself, Raymond Luczak arrives at an unified vision of love in all of its poetic manifestations: sensual, sexual, and textual, a source of electric vistas and voluptuous possibilities of spiritual renewal. He provides precisely the kind of tender reassurance we cannot find words for some nights, but which we so desperately need." -Eric Thomas Norris, co-author of Nocturnal Omissions "In The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips, Raymond Luczak has awoken entwined in the arms of the American bard. And here is the bed chat and letters from one poet to another, a communion of fleshly living. Luczak has created a work in the tradition of Ginsberg's Odyssean dreaming of the lost America of love-a vibrant examination of what Whitman called a 'richest fluency' of historical gaiety and modern loving, and a clear transmission of honest affection across the ages." -Dan Vera, author of Speaking Wiri Wiri

In 2002, Raymond Luczak handed us his call to arms for deaf artists everywhere. Ten years later, he revisits the book that challenged assumptions about being an artist. Has anything changed? Yes and no. Luczak's meditations on what makes art "art" and deafness "deaf" asks artists everywhere to rethink their work and live differently. This tenth anniversary edition incorporates new observations made over the past decade. "Written in the form of quick bursts of opinion arrived at over his many years as a poet, playwright, and filmmaker, Luczak seeks to shake deaf artists out of the cages built by the hearing world . . . There are plenty of opinions to argue with in this volume. Yet Luczak calls us to ask important questions of ourselves." - Emily Drabinski, Out

This collection presents four signing-driven plays depicting Deaf characters in situations that illuminate their community in fascinating detail.