One of the people who reached out to me after “Hidden in a Suitcase” was published at Guernica is Carly Hoffman, a Kindle Singles editor. After a good bit of back-and-forth, and some serious revision, I accepted her invitation to dive in as a Kindle Singles author. My short memoir, tentatively titled Walk Away, will be published this spring — not quite 100 pages about my journey from abused teenage runaway to up-and-coming trial attorney. Stay tuned, swimmers!

Some readers whose families had gone through struggles (prison, addiction, separation by adoption) similar to the ones in “Hidden in a Suitcase” took the time to let me know they had been touched by my story. I keep their notes near my desk as antidotes for when I
doubt myself.

Stephen Mulkey, the man I most admire, gives us Twelve lessons I wish I had learned in college

My review of this astonishingly original book went live today on the 32 Poems site. Caki Wilkinson has created a world within a world within a world with these poem-bios of an eccentric woman and her art. One of the most appealing elements of the collection is scandalous word-play. Here’s a snippet from “Hibernaculum,” one of my many favorite poems from the collection:

sometimes a simile is her best shot
to see things as they are. The rotten weather
is not Wynona’s problem: like a knot,

her heart’s pulled taut inside this self she’s spun,
and, like a knot, what’s holding her together
is the energy she’d need to come undone.

Got a quirky, poetry-loving friend? Buy this book for her!

“Adoptees all over the world live under the same curse: their bad qualities and behaviors get attributed to their birth-family genetics, and their good qualities and behaviors get attributed to the environment created by their adoptive parents.” A rant about class prejudice and misogyny in the adoption industry on Medium.

It’s such an honor to be able to share my family’s stories with more readers — and I’m so thankful for the many warm comments I’ve received from so many kind and generous people.

Thanks to my loving, courageous family and to the editors at Guernica, here’s another essay about my adoption search.

https://www.guernicamag.com/features/hidden-in-a-suitcase/