'The Secret Adoptee's Cookbook'

The Secret Adoptee's Cookbook


There have been a number of Australian memoirs written by adoptees over the last twenty years—Robert Dessaix’s A Mother’s Disgrace, Suzanne Chick's Searching for Charmian, Tom Frame’s Binding Ties:An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia, for example—as well as international adoptee narratives by Betty Jean Lifton, Florence Fisher, and A. M. Homes amongst others. These works form a component of the small but growing field of adoption life writing that includes works by “all members of the adoption triad” (Hipchen and Deans 163): adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoptees. As the broad genre of memoir becomes more theorised and mapped, many sub-genres are emerging (Brien). My own adoptee story (which I am currently composing) could be a further sub-categorisation of the adoptee memoir, that of “late discovery adoptees” (Perl and Markham), those who are either told, or find out, about their adoption in adulthood. When this is part of a life story, secrets and silences are prominent, and digging into these requires using whatever resources can be found. These include cookbooks, recipes written by hand, and the scraps of paper shoved between pages.

Article continued at M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture. This is in the latest issue of the journal, under the theme of 'cookbook', and edited by Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell.

The wave

The wave reared over me silently, and broke over my head in slow motion. I didn't notice it at first, until I realised I was grief-washed, the sideways feelings suddenly making their presence felt. I am trying to describe this feeling in my body, my skin, the other organs, because I know that it affects you, too, but you ignore it, out of fear or something else that I don't understand. I understand fear. I have sat with it, endured it, watched it eke away. C S Lewis said grief felt like fear, and perhaps it does.

Review of Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing

The core message of Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing is that teachers and students need to maintain communication in order for the teaching to be most effective, and the author gives numerous examples of how to do this throughout. The personal components of the teacher-student relationship cannot be neglected if students are to develop fully as writers.

Carl Vandermeulen is based at the University of Wisconsin and has taught writing, photography, and teacher education. His book is another in the series New Writing Viewpoints, edited by Graeme Harper, and aimed at teachers and researchers.

In the introduction Vandermeulen explains why he wrote Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing. He taught a poetry class that he thought would be successful, but failed miserably because there was a mismatch between his role as teacher and evaluator in that particular class, and his previous role as something quite different, an advisor and advocate. The clash of the personal with the impersonal produced a situation where not only the writing work suffered, but the relationships were strained. Vandermeulen advocates the advice of Tom C Hunley who teaches creative writing at Western Kentucky University, and whom he cites: that ‘introductory courses need to focus on fundamental – and personal – kinds of growth that enable the process of writing and of becoming a writer’ (x, which cites Hunley 2007).

 

Continued at TEXT.