What Happens When You Lose Your Hearing?

When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms in this novel by Eliza Barry Callahan, an adjunct professor in the Writing Programat School of the Arts, the narrator keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned, all while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.

Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers—making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. 

Callahan discusses the novel with Columbia News, as well as what she’s teaching this semester, and which writers she would like to offer a spot at her dinner table.

What was the impetus behind this book?

The book I wrote began as a log, then became a short essay, then short semi-fictional fragments, and now somehow it has turned into a (slim) novel. It takes place over the course of one year, and is written from the perspective of an artist who, at 26, suddenly begins to rapidly lose her hearing (dovetailing with events that took place in my own life a few years ago when I was 25). It’s a book on luck, on looking, on estrangement, on avoidance, on love—I like to think of it as a score. Or as one long walk around oneself.  

The book began as a record of my shifting auditory relationship to the world. For one year, it was a fragmented survival document. I wasn't keeping a journal per se, or writing about how I felt, but more just tracking literal sensational shifts, as I was suddenly faced with the prospect of deafness and was quickly losing my hearing. In its next form, the book found a narrative—which became like a kind of grout, and also took on an entirely different life. 

What are you working on currently?

I’m in the very, very early stages of a new novel project. I’ve spent the last month working on a 20-minute film based on a section of the novel, which I wrote and directed. I’ve also been co-writing a feature length film for the last year, and I’m making some paintings again. 

What are you teaching this semester?

A class called Writing About Art—but I think of it as writing also with and from art. Writing alongside something and not necessarily about it. Ekphrasis. I’m teaching many texts I love by artists, writers, philosophers, and analysts, which engage with visual art or use it as a starting point for a writer’s own thinking.  

Any books you've read lately that you would recommend? If so, why?

Flush by Virginia Woolf, an imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Woolf from the perspective of a dog. What more could one want?

What's next on your reading list?

Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It’s been perpetually next on my list, and I still have a good friend’s edition that I borrowed years ago. 

Which three writers, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

Clarice Lispector to discuss love and dailiness. She has a way of turning the heart inside out, the day inside out.

James Baldwin for a rhythmic take on the state of it all. And Jean Genet for gossip, gossip, gossip.