Please join Jessica for the launch of Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays. Jessica will be in conversation with life writing scholar Kylie Cardell about essays, deafness and the natural world.

5.30pm for a 6.00pm start.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Books will be sold by Imprints Booksellers.

The event will be Auslan interpreted.

About Silence is my Habitat

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 can bring fatigue and isolation, is also a portal to a rich, contemplative, and creative life.

"Jessica White's reflections on deafness, on our entanglement with the ecosystems we live in, provide a new way for all of us to think about how we might take up space differently, how we might leave room for ourselves and others to live more gently. With heartbreaking tenderness and a thoughtful remove from the clutter of taken-for-granted life, White's insightful essays are an invitation to pause." - Jane Rawson, author of Human/Nature: On life in a wild world, A History of Dreams and From the Wreck

“With tender and unflinching prose, Jessica White elegantly illuminates the hidden rhythms of our world.” - Fiona Murphy, The Shape of Sound

"Jessica White interrogates the world of deafness through the prism of her own life: not just the perceived division between disabled and nondisabled people but what deafness has delivered to her — the skills of observance and quietness, the relationships she has with the bush, with the sea and swimming, and with the corridors of universities and archives. Through her travels through Germany, the United Kingdom, America and her own childhood landscapes in Australia, she reveals splendours that hearing people so often miss." - Kristina Olsson, author of Shell and Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir

This event is supported by the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre.