March 19

Tags

Where Butterfly Came From by Adam Pottle

Posted by on March 19, 2024 in Author Posts | 7 Comments

Like many Deaf people, I grew up in a hearing family. Sign Language didn’t exist in our house, so I had to do things my family’s way, which meant wearing hearing aids and enduring speech therapy. Because I couldn’t hear myself speak, I’d sometimes mumble or mispronounce something and be chastised for it. My brother’s nickname for me was “freak.”

I never believed there was a place for me in the world, because I never saw it. I didn’t have a Deaf community where I lived. I was the only Deaf kid in my class at school; sometimes,the entire class would stand up at once and start to file out the door, and I’d follow them, wondering what was happening, not knowing that the fire alarm had gone off. 

Although I was clearly meant to be a reader—I knew my ABCs when I was eighteen months old—I didn’t read books thatfocused on Deaf kids. I couldn’t: none were available. Not in our house, not at my school, not in the library. Instead, I read Robert Munsch and Mercer Mayer and Judy Blume and R.L. Stine. Books are a visual medium. They were and are loaded with magic, and reading came naturally to me. I’d sit on my bedroom floor with a pile of books on my left, and an hour or two later, that pile had shifted to my right. Books became my safe space. 

The one story that I saw in my childhood that had a Deaf character was a book called Helen Keller’s Teacher, which was more about Annie Sullivan than it was about Helen Keller. I didn’t see myself in that story at all. The closest I came to seeing myself in any book was Calvin and Hobbes. I had a heated imagination, and I related to Calvin’s struggles with reality. 

Still, I never saw myself on the page, and I never had community, so I wondered whether I belonged anywhere.

 

In addition to loving books, I loved monster movies. Many of the movies I watched growing up lacked captions, so I had to try and understand the plots through the visual action. Monster movies were the clearest to me, because the plots were simple. Monster shows up. People get scared. Monster terrorizes the city. People fight back. Monster dies. Things return to normal.

One of my favourite movie series was the Godzilla films. My brother and I would stomp around the living room doing our best to imitate Godzilla’s iconic roar. 

One day, we were watching Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, which my dad had recorded on VHS. (Younger readers can ask their parents about this wondrous technology.) At one point during the movie, a scene arose where the natives of Infant Island performed a ritual. They wore colourful costumes. They chanted. They danced. They seemed to be performing for someone. Or something.

The perspective shifted, and there she was. 

Mothra. Queen of the Monsters.

This giant moth lay on the ground—the natives’ ritual was meant to wake her up so she could carry them off the island. Her blue eyes glittered. Her size reduced the natives to ants. She was a deity. A god.

Eventually, the ritual worked, and Mothra stirred to life. She began flapping her wings, generating a powerful wind as she rose into the air and carried her people off the island and away to safety. 

Years later, when I’d finally begun learning American Sign Language, I became more involved in the Deaf community. As I watched Deaf people socialize and argue and tell jokes, I realized that, in their own way, they generate winds with their hands. The winds may seem small, but collectively, they could shift mountains and rearrange rivers. Those winds bore the power of our voices.

Most butterfly species are deaf, and, as it turns out, butterflies are a central symbol in Deaf culture. They capture our community’s strength, persistence, and beauty. 

The images of Mothra and the winds stirred by Sign Language crashed together in my head, and Butterfly on the Wind was born.

 

(A brief aside: it may seem odd that someone who has written horror novels, as I have, has also written a children’s book. While Butterfly on the Wind is different from my usual kind of writing, the two are not that different. Both horror and children’s books require a depth of imagination that provokes the suspension of disbelief. Dinosaurs, ghosts, fuzzy creatures, magical settings—horror and children’s books share these things. More to the point, both genres are inclusive. Anyone who has ever felt like a misfit can find a home within both horror and children’s stories.

Horror had an enormous influence on Butterfly. Not only was the central concept inspired by monster movies—and, to acertain extent, chaos theory—but the main character, Aurora, is named after the little girl in Guillermo del Toro’s vampire film Cronos.)

 

What, in the end, does this story mean to me?

​At this moment, as I sit on my living room floor typing these words, I’m thinking of my seven-year-old self, who had white-blonde hair and wore dinosaur shirts and had fewer tattoos. All around the world, there are kids just like him, wondering when they will see someone like themselves gallivanting through the pages of a book. 

​I wrote Butterfly because I know what it’s like to wonder whether there’s a place for you in this world. 

​I wrote it because I have a voice, and I have stories to tell. 

​I wrote it because Sign Languages are among the most beautiful and expressive languages in the world, and that expressiveness needs to be shared. 

Most of all, I wrote it because Deaf and hard-of-hearing children deserve to have adventures on the page (and in life),just like everyone else.

Born Deaf and raised in a hearing family, Adam Pottle spent much of his childhood searching for magical portals and pretending to be Godzilla. He is an award-winning Canadian writer, with books in multiple genres, including the acclaimed memoir Voice and the adult novel The Bus. His groundbreaking fantasy play The Black Drum was performed to rave reviews in Canada and France and is the world’s first all-Deaf musical. He has a PhD in English Literature and has taught English and Creative Writing for nearly twenty years. When not writing, he is usually found at the boxing gym, the library, or the park with his goldendoodle Valkyrie.