Aspects of Life – Thoughts and Conversations
Recently, U.S. Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett suggested that child placement through adoption makes Roe V. Wade a moot point. And there are pleny of myths that point to this seemingly painless transaction. But as Katherine Joyce, a writer for Salon, states, “the suggestion that adoption entails nothing more than several months of inconvenience […]
Join me as I talk with three outstanding adoptee writers who have written memoirs about their experience: I will be speaking with Jan Beatty, author of American Bastard: A Memoir (Red Hen Press, 2021), Megan Culhaine Galbraith, author of The Guild of the Infant Savior (Mad Creek Books–An imprint of Ohio State University Press, Columbus, […]
I am so excited to announce I’ve been invited by Office of Multicultural Student Services at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse to keynote for the Loving Day Celebration. Loving Day ( June 12) commemorates the 1967 Supreme Court decision to remove state bans regarding interracial marriage. As an American Indian transracial adoptee, my research and […]
Katya Cengel, author of From Chernobyl with Love, looks younger than her forty-something years. Maybe it’s her smile, maybe it’s her thoughtful blue eyes, maybe it’s the look of a dreamer that she gets when I ask her questions about her reactions to living in Eastern Europe. Or maybe it’s not about youth, but about […]
We never know where our paths will take us. We just know we are going on a direction, many times, we are being led. For me, it is deeper into the forest. Now, that forest isn’t scary, but it is relatively unexplored. That forest is American Indian child placement. I was in my 40s when […]
Last month, I participated in a podcast with the Archibald Project, an organization that uses storytelling to address the orphan and child vulnerability crisis in creative and educated ways. I loved talking with them because they asked the hard questions, those questions that reveal the complexity and depth of tough issues, the ones that make […]
Addictions run in my family, so when I told my sister I have a social media addiction issue, she just laughed. My son and daughter-in-law said (and I thought initially that they were joking), “We knew that. We’ve known that for a long time.” How long? And why didn’t anyone tell me? Why am I […]
I stared at the posts of two of my white friends on Facebook, and my heart dropped. Each post contained what seemed to include supportive at best, innocuous at worst illustrative photos, each began with the right words of racial awareness, both, about midway through, switched so delicately to mirror the structure of white supremacy. […]
When I first saw the name on the email, the name looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Phillip Barcio. It turns out that he wrote a fabulous review of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption for the Western Humanities Review! That’s why it sounded so familiar! The email was at the same time […]
Yesterday, I spoke with Phillip Barcio, who is an arts journalist. He also wrote a fabulous review for Bitterroot for the Western Humanities Review.What was really interesting about his interview is that he asks guests to think about the idea of apocalypse, and submit 10 pieces of music that would be meaningful for the guest […]