Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Horror: Interview with Michael R. Collings
Michael R. Collings, named Grand Master by the 2016 World Horror Conference, is an educator, literary scholar and critic, poet, novelist, essayist, columnist, reviewer, and editor whose work over three decades—more than one hundred published books and chapbooks, along with thousands of chapters, essays, reviews, and poems—has concentrated on science fiction, fantasy, and horror, emphasizing the works of Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, C.S. Lewis, and others. His books for Starmont House, beginning in 1984, were among the earliest serious scholarly appraisals of King. His 1990 study of Card was the first book-length exploration of Card’s fictions.
His wide-ranging publications include a Wildside Press best-selling horror novel, The Slab; a 6,500-line Renaissance epic in full Miltonic style, The Nephiad: An Epic Poem in XII Books; two discussions of writing, The Art and Craft of Poetry:Twenty Exercises toward Mastery and Chain of Evil: The JournalStone Guide to Writing Darkness; literary analyses, including C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy: A Study in Genres; and unusual collections of poetry, such as Averse To Horrors: An Abecedary of Monsters and the Monstrous, an alphabetical treatise on horror’s favorite creatures, written in limericks…which, along with Writing Darkness, was a finalist for the 2012 Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association.
He has served as Guest, Special Guest, Academic Guest, Guest of Honor, and Guest at a number of cons, professional as well as fan-oriented, including Academic Guest of Honor at MythCon (Conference of the Mythopoeic Society), where he presented the Keynote Address on Orson Scott Card; Academic Guest of Honor at EnderCon, celebrating the novel’s 25th anniversary; Special Guest at the Salt Lake Comic Con (2014); and three-time Academic Guest of Honor at the World Horror Con (2008, 2012, and 2016). He is a triple finalist for the Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association; and has been three-times nominated for the Bram Stoker Award® from the Horror Writers Association, once for non-fiction and twice for poetry.
Beginning in the early 1980s, he attended Brigham Young University’s annual “Life, the Universe, and Everything” symposium for nearly thirty years, becoming almost a regular fixture on the campus. During that time, the BYU science-fiction magazine, “The Leading Edge,” published a number of his stories and poems.
He completed his Ph.D. studies in Renaissance literature, concentrating on Milton and the Epic, at the University of California, Riverside. After a year as Lecturer in English at the University of California, Los Angeles, he began a twenty-seven-year career at Seaver College of Pepperdine University. His teaching responsibilities there included writing at every level, from remedial to advanced; English literature from Beowulf through the eighteenth century (with frequent forays into “Myth, Fantasy, and Science Fiction”) for undergraduates as well as graduates; and, for nearly two decades, helping to coordinate the Creative Writing Program and serviing as Director of Creative Writing. He served as Poet-in-Residence residence at the University from 1997-2003.
In 2006, the twin burdens of increasing deafness in both ears and cripplingly severe tinnitus, along with the equally severe depression they exacerbated, forced his early retirement from Pepperdine, which recognized his contributions to the school by awarding him the rank of Emeritus Professor of English. During his retirement, he worked with Borgo Press and Wildside Press to bring into print a number of works written decades earlier as well as multiple volumes of original fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. More recently, he has published extensively through Amazon’s CreateSpace.
Dr. Collings now lives in Idaho, his native state, with his wife. They have four remarkable children, four delightful sons- and daughters-in-laws, and seven grandchildren ranging from coming-into-their-own to out-and-facing-the-world.
What attracted you to the horror genre, and what do you think the genre has taught you about yourself and the world?
I was born into a family of voracious readers—we four children and two parents who encouraged and supported our hunger for words, even when we began fighting over who got to read the milk carton at the breakfast table. We were enrolled in the Weekly Reader Book Club at the earliest possible opportunity. By the time I reached high school, our parent had purchased a set of seven hard-bound volumes containing the myths and legends of other cultures…our introduction to the Fantastic in its many forms. Somewhere around then, I discovered Poe and Lovecraft through one of my favorite books at the time, the thousand-page Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.
My fascination with the Fantastic continued through high school, college, and my doctoral work at the University of California, Riverside. So much so that one of the first courses I designed and taught in the early 1980s as a new faculty member at Pepperdine University was a Freshman seminar titled “Myth, Fantasy, and Science Fiction.” After class one day, a student asked why I hadn’t included any Stephen King in the reading list. At that time, I knew of his works vaguely but hadn’t read any. The student encouraged me to start with The Dead Zone, a suggestion that led to my immersing myself in King, Koontz, Barker, and a host of others over the following summer.
Over the next four decades, horror in one form or another became a staple of my scholarly writing, my emerging engagement with fiction, and most significantly perhaps, my poetry. As I began at Pepperdine, I not only noticed the first warnings of hearing loss and tinnitus but also what I thought were merely internal bouts of darkness. My father passed away about that time, and we were discovering that the house we bought was quite literally falling apart. I assumed that my problems were those shared by everyone else, but that everyone else was stronger than I, more able to cope—all of which made the darkness worse.
I took refuge in dark fiction: in King’s stories of monsters that were more manifestations of the world around them (and around me) than inexplicable supernatural incursions; in analyzing and assessing varied approaches to horror, in part to make the genre more accessible to other readers but also to give me a sense of control over my own story; and most especially in poetry, where I systematically gave my varied personae worse problems than I was experiencing, then showed them ways out.
A little over fifteen years ago, after hearing loss, tinnitus, and depression had triggered my early retirement from Pepperdine (mercifully, thanks to an understanding division chair), I was finally diagnosed fully: serious, incremental deafness; multiple tinnitus in both ears, ranking in the top five percent in severity; and previously unidentified bipolar disorder, extending back at least as far as my teens. The next years saw an outpouring of literary criticism, fiction, and poetry, much of it directly or peripherally relating to dread, to fear, and to darkness. And in doing so, I found a much-needed sense of balance in my life outside of writing.
You write both prose and poetry. To what degree does your writing and poetry deal with deafness or being hard of hearing, and how does it present in your work?
Curiously, there seems to be a distinct line between my prose and my poetry when it comes to hearing. I’ve never consciously included a deaf character in any of my stories, except for “In the Haunting Darkness,” published in an anthology of tales explicitly relating to hearing, nor have I elsewhere dealt with consequences of hearing difficulties as plot. I suspect that this is due, as mentioned above, to my decades-long assumption that everyone underwent the same difficulties I was facing, and overcame them, so why should I write about them.
In poetry, however, the reverse occurred. Several readers have noted that my poems are intensely visual, rarely relying on sound images (other than the internal music of the lines, which is another matter). And when sound/hearing does appear, it is overt—in a series of tinnitus-based sonnets that fracture the form in every possible way, or in tinnitus haiku, culminating in the rather bleak
By the silence
i will know that i
am dead
I remain convinced that having poetry as an outlet, no matter how private, has helped me survive some perilous times indeed.
Have you had any special challenges at events with accessibility? Conversely, were there any particular successes you’d like to share?
I was inordinately blessed at the professional and fan cons that I’ve attended. One quirk of my hearing is that I frequently hear sounds but cannot distinguish words or hears words not spoken, which is particularly difficult when listening to presentations or fielding questions from the audience. Invariably, one of the other panel members (I have a couple of individuals in mind) would rearrange the nameplates so they could sit next to me and repeat or explain whenever necessary. Or someone would sit directly in front of me and repeat what I could not hear.
I no longer attend any events, but it is through my own choice.
Are there any things that panelists, and other people who are working with deaf and hard of hearing individuals can do to make things more accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing?
I think that the most difficult thing for others is to remember, Once I explain that I am seriously deaf and ask that they speak loudly and slowly, almost everyone immediately does their best…for a while. Then, as discussions grow more intense, they forget. It is simply human nature, but it is also painful.
As a writer in the horror genre, are there any portrayals of deaf and hard of hearing characters that you particularly like, or dislike, or would like to talk to our readers about?
None come to mind.
As a writer in the horror genre, what advice would you have to give to up-and-coming writers?
I’m enough of a traditionalist to agree with an ancient Roman poet that the functions of poetry (for which he meant all imaginative writing) are to delight and to instruct. For me this means that there must be a story, an entertainment that engages readers on multiple levels beyond just visceral revulsion. And it must have a purpose. My son Michaelbrent is an internationally known horror writer who has out-published and out-sold me many times over. And one of his prime criteria for an effective horror story is its redemptive value. By the conclusion, characters have changed, have learned, have become something not possible at the beginning…and the reader has changed with them.
Do you have any advice to give horror poets, or poets in general?
My main advice: explore. Try new things, new forms, new approaches. Take conventions and turn them on their heads to find out just what makes them work.
Early in my tenure at Pepperdine, I taught a directed studies course in advanced poetry. The student was a brilliant poet. Yet at the end of the class, I couldn’t give her top marks. When she asked about her grade, I had to explain that what she did was nearly perfect, but it was always the same. She had essentially written a single extended free verse poem over the course of the semester. She was upset, of course; but several years later, we met again, and she told me that many of her submissions had been rejected, because they all sounded the same.
Free verse is now conventional for poetry. So tackle older, formal approaches, learn from them, and apply everything you learn to you next piece.
As far as horror poetry goes, it provides a perfect opportunity for twists. Two of my most successful collections are explicitly horror…wedded to unexpected forms. A Verse to Horror: An Abecedary of Monsters and the Monstrous is a variation on two medieval genres, the abecedary, or alphabetical listing of things, and the beastiary. It concentrates exclusively on monsters, on horrors. And does so through limericks. The second, Corona Obscura: Sonets Dark and Elemental, comes from the opposite extreme. It is composed of forty-nine sonnets, the last line of each forming the first line of the next, and the final line of the sequence identical to the opening line. The form goes back to the Renaissance; the subject is contemporary and traditional horror. And both were finalists for the HWA Bram Stoker Award.
