Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical essays

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A tactile and olfactory journey through a silent ecosystem Jessica White has been deaf since she was four years old. Where an autobiography or biography narrates the story of a person's life, an ecobiography dwells on a person's interaction with their ecosystem, and how this shapes their sense of self. The essays that follow detail how deafness encouraged and shaped her relationship with the natural world. "Deafness made me observant and quiet. Because I could not hear enough to join in on conversations, my attention often wandered or was absorbed by sensations other than sound- morning sun on my forearms, the thick, sweet scent of flowering oleanders, the triangular shadow of a flock of galahs flying overhead. On the long bus trips between school and home, I watched the sorghum burnishing as it ripened, and kangaroos bounding through wheat stubble in the late afternoons, into trees that cast long shadows. I felt the bus shake as it rattled over cattle grids or veered into the corrugations on the gravel roads." These essays consider how deafness shapes the interfaces between the writer and particular environments, given how she can only hear particular sounds, as she navigates the world through the tactile and olfactory.

Author Bio

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 female writer and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. Her second novel, Entitlement, was published by Penguin in 2012.