Belinda Vicars MFA '07: A Sense for Story
By Rachael Burbank '09
If it weren't for an English professor stopping Belinda Vicars in the hall and asking her why she was majoring in criminology rather than English, Vicars would be in a lab examining bullet patterns right now.
Vicars wanted to be a cop, and she thanked Nancy Drew for that dream. As a 10-year-old student, she was scolded for borrowing The Secret Garden from the school library. Her teacher insisted Vicars was lying when she announced she read it nine times. This was unheard of for a deaf child.
Vicars is deaf, but fluent in American Sign Language and lip-reading. Vicars, who grew up in a household that spoke English, said it was difficult to prove she was literate. The deaf are not expected to do well, she said, much due to the lowered standard of education. "Illiteracy is endemic to the deaf community, many reaching only second or third grade reading levels," Vicars said.
To master the English language is a challenge, much like an immigrant experience, while ASL is conceptual and "poetically concise." Vicars said the visually orientated brain most of the deaf community relies on struggles with English structures and abstract wording that cannot be defined by pictorial language, for example the simple word "the."
While the deaf were generally encouraged towards manual labor, working as printers, mechanics and farmers, Vicars had been steered toward fields servicing the deaf community, such as a social worker or teacher. Vicars said she prefers cops, robbers, and studying the deviant mind and this led to her interest in criminology; a field that is closed to the deaf, except in a lab or research arena. She was up for the task, if only to break stereotypes.
Vicars said, "It is inescapable that the writer's experiences shape, even distinguishes, the way he writes and at some point of maturity, he caves in to embrace his individuality."
Vicars thus has become a writer. Focusing on prose writing, she draws on her childhood and circumstances to write in themes of poverty, isolation, immigration, disabilities, health care and education. She was drawn to Pacific's Masters in Fine Arts in Writing for her desire to learn about the west.
Vicars says that Pacific's MFA program was "serendipitous." Having control over the learning process, while guided by the writing faculty, she boosted her confidence in writing and enhanced her ability to trust her instincts while critiquing her work.
Vicars teachings as an adjunct instructor for California State University Sacramento and is also the business manager for her husband's on-line website that provides free ASL instruction for parents of deaf children (www.lifeprint.com).
Nowadays, she insists on calling herself a writer, first, and teacher second. Having published a few stories, she aims to become a novelist and make writing her full time profession. She said, "Unless you're pulling in gobs of money and bent on becoming the next J. K. Rowling or Stephen King and unless you achieve that level of notoriety, you're not a writer." While this is reality, she is unfazed. "What we do is essential to the world, and without our records of the human experience, we regress to the dark ages."
Posted by Martha Calus-Mclain (calu0689@pacificu.edu) on Jun 2, 2008