Thirteen-year-old Marina returns home from Deaf school for Carnaval, torn between the Brazilian family she’s always known and the Deaf community where she finally feels understood. I have a soft spot for “Carnaval, Upstate” since it’s the first story I wrote that felt truly mine. I wrote the first draft in 2005 (!) in an hour-long creative rush while sitting at a table in my sorority house. Two years later, I submitted it for a creative writing workshop, and my professor encouraged me to explore it further, but I had other plans. I let it linger on my hard drive, but never forgot about it.
In 2019, I extracted the story from an ancient backup file and read it. The writing was clunky and overwrought, yet there was power in Marina’s struggle to reconcile her Brazilian and Deaf families and her complex relationship with music she experienced through vibrations.
The writing needed to do the story justice, and I set about leveling up my craft. 9 drafts later, I came to something that captured Marina’s emotional and sensory worlds. Little did I know that “Carnaval, Upstate” would lay the groundwork for how I would write my Deaf, blind, and DeafBlind characters.
Here’s Marina’s homecoming:
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I told them how much I missed them and how wonderful yet strange school was. They stared at me in that confused way they had when someone spoke English too fast. It’s funny how much you forget when you go away. Here, I used English or my voice. ASL was for school. I arranged signs in a more English way, which felt slow and clumsy. That didn’t work either, so I spoke, twisting my tongue and trying to breathe right. The words finally came, “I missed you.” I forgot how hard using my voice was.
They understood and hugged me again.
— “Carnaval, Upstate” Peatsmoke Journal (Spring 2021 Issue)
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You can read the original version at Peatsmoke Journal and revised reprints in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (Stillhouse Press, 2022) and I’ll Tell You Later: Deaf Survivors of the Dinner Table Syndrome (Handtype Press, 2024)
© Cristina Hartmann