About the Book:

Jessica White has been deaf since she was four years old. Through ecobiography, which dwells on a person’s interaction with their ecosystem and how this shapes their sense of self, she considers how deafness encouraged and moulded her relationship to the natural world. Unable to hear easily, she became observant, exploring her environments through the tactile and olfactory. In these poetic essays, she describes her responses to bodies of water, the university, the archive, the bush, and the quietened realm of the pandemic. She writes of burnt trees amidst the devastating loss of her mother. She finds a flock of deaf women writers who help her fly. White reveals that deafness, although it brings fatigue and isolation, is also a portal to a rich, contemplative, and creative life.

About the Author:

Jessica White is an academic in the field of literature and a writer of novels, memoir and essays, with a PhD from the University of London. She won the 2020 Michael Crouch award for Debut Biography for her hybrid memoir Hearing Maud and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award and the Queensland Literary Award. Her first novel, A Curious Intimacy, was published by Penguin in 2007, and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award. It was shortlisted for the Western Australia Premier’s award and the Dobbie award for a first book by a woman writer and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. Her second novel, Entitlement, was published by Penguin in 2012.

ISBN: 978-1-7637331-2-1