“Iris doesn’t want to change who she is, she just wants to better connect with other people,” said Kelly. Grandma not only gives Iris someone to communicate with, she also demonstrates times of satisfaction and joy in Iris’ life. This richness was largely made possible through Iris’ interactions with her deaf Grandma. Kelly fictionalized the whale to be 55-hertz instead of 52 because two 5s in sign-language worked better in the hand poems. She included descriptions of subtle hand-shape changes, cozy dialogue, jokes, karaoke, code-switching, and hand-shape poems. While she may not have set out to capture the Deaf experience, after being pushed by her editor Kelly filled the novel with details to both normalize sign-language and show how uniquely rich it can be. Only much later in the writing process did Kelly realize how that skill would play an important part in the novel’s resolution. This was inspired by a former client who, at a young age, had a knack for fixing radios even though he could not hear them.

When creating Iris, Kelly layered into her character an obsession with radios. The novel is the story of Iris, who is driven to create a song for the lonely whale and then engages her grieving grandmother on an epic adventure to play a song so the whale can hear it. This isolation could create a connection with the whale strong enough to drive the action in the novel. She also knew that is was surprisingly common for one or both parents of Deaf children to have limited fluency in sign-language, making it isolating even at home. As an interpreter, Kelly witnessed students struggling to connect when they are the only Deaf student in their school. When Kelly started to think of a human counterpart to the linguistically isolated whale she realized a Deaf character might be the perfect choice. She talked to experts, fact-checking her fictionalizations of the whale to make them as believable as possible while the story started to take shape.

With her usual research tenacity, Kelly started reading everything about that specific whale and whales in general. After seeing that Tweet, Kelly could not get the 52-hertz whale out of her head. He sings and sings and never gets a response. This very real whale is known as “The Loneliest Whale in the World” because he sings at 52 Hz, a frequency much too high for other whales to understand. Kelly found the 52-hertz whale when scrolling through Twitter one day. Much like her award-winning first novel, Chained, it began with an animal in this case a whale. Since Kelly is a sign-language interpreter you might assume her goal was to capture the experience of a Deaf character, but you would be wrong. The main character, Iris, is a 12-year-old Deaf girl who feels isolated from her school and family. Lynne Kelly’s middle-grade novel, Song for a Whale, grew organically.

Lynne kelly song for a whale