Author Reading Trident Bookstore and Cafe

I’m so excited to be invited to do a reading of my essay “Coming Home” in the new anthology Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship, edited by B.K. Jackson (2026 ELJ Editions, Ltd.).

I am one of twenty-eight authors.  We write about  experiences being a product of family secrets, perhaps because of an affair, silent or closed adoption, or donor conception, and all the ways those secrets created the fluid relationships that so heavily impact the meaning of family.

In these literary forms, we explore the secrets and lies we grew up with.  We delve into our struggle of trying to fit in, to find a place of belonging in our families, our communities, even within ourselves.  We’ve carry within our bodies genetic information that defines us one way, but our place in the culture we live in defines us another, perhaps because we are racially different than the parents who raised us, or perhaps because of an interracial relationship that signify difference.  We find we grieve, mourning the loss of the people we never knew, because we are mourning ourselves as the people who never really existed in another reality.

However, if we’re lucky, we are able to reconcile the person we are with the person we could have been,  the parents we should have had with the parents who actually raised us.  We also, hopefully, come to understand we, everyone in our culture, swim in a sea of shame.  In that understanding, we, again hopefully, comprehend and forgive the shame of our failures, our parents’ failures, our culture’s failures, of being human. 

The authors of Relative Strangers provide a roadmap for redemption, for acknowleging loss, for acknowledging shame, for showing the ways we can pull those dislocated parts of ourselves together in a way that we can live with.  If we accomplish that, we’ll have done something amazing.  And that’s what these 28 authors have done, given us a frame through which the reader can glimpse the secret lives too many of us are forced to live.

That we are here to tell our stories, is amazing.

The Reading Event will be held at the Trident Bookstore and Cafe in Boulder, Colorado, from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30.