vernacular are woven into the texture of ASL poetry, and abandon phonological methods of analysis in favor of defining how Deaf artists organize their signing space. Folktales Ben Bahan defines folktales in American Sign Language literature as stories that have long existed in the community without a known origin. Folklore help create a common literary foundation that unite Deaf individuals. Susan Rutherford and Simon Carmel are the most prominent researchers of ASL folklore documenting stories in which members of the Deaf community connect with each other despite obstacles that would prevent them from doing so. Narratives of personal experience Personal experiences account for a large portion of the stories told by the Deaf Community. These personal experiences are often told in order to create a sense of a shared experience among individuals as well as highlighting the individual experience of the storyteller. Narratives of personal experience also allow for the combination of several stories, further tying members of the Deaf Community together. Percussion signing Percussion signing is a type of sign language performance that involves signing along to a specific beat, somewhat like a song in spoken language. Drums are a commonly known percussion instrument. The name percussion signing comes from the fact that this type of signing resembles beats like those of a drum in a song. Percussion signed songs are often performed like chants or cheers, and are common in group settings. For example, one commonly known example of percussion signing is the "Bison Song", otherwise known as the Gallaudet University fight song. Signing in this manner has a whimsical and musical feel to it that makes it so unique. Handshape stories ABC stories intermingle the alphabetical phonetic system of the English language with the phonological aspects of ASL. The structure of the story is set up by structuring it around the alphabet in order to determine which ASL handshapes to use in the story, and the story itself is performed in ASL. ABC stories are always signed in either alphabetical order, with each consecutive handshape following the letter sequence of the alphabet. For example, the "A" handshape may represent someone knocking on a door, "B" a door opening and "C" someone searching around the room. In some circumstances, the "N", "H", "U" and "V" handshapes are interchangeable because they are all formed with a two-fingered handshape. The same is true for the "M" and "W" handshapes, which