'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.

Eggs I

I hated eggs when I was a child. But my parents thought they would help me grow into a big strong girl, and so they gave me one egg every morning.

They would poach or boil it, and put tomato sauce on the plate. I would take tiny spoonfuls, and try to ignore the taste as I chewed and swallowed. Then I would try big mouthfuls, to get through the meal more quickly, but that gave me an explosion of the foulness, the egginess, the white and yellow repellant smoothness. Sometimes I would be unable to keep it down, and flood the breakfast table with my undigested horror.

My parents would also try egg sandwiches, but the bread was never enough to mask the hateful flavour. It became a battle of sorts, with my parents eyeing me defiantly, daring me to come up with another complaint, another reason to not eat such a healthful foodstuff, or another vomit.

I took to hiding the egg sandwiches behind a large cupboard in the dining room. When my mother was in the kitchen, I would silently rise from the chair, and, keeping my eyes on the door, stuff the vile matter into the narrow gap between wood and wall. Sometimes it wouldn’t all fit, and bits of egg would scatter on the floor, or stick to the painted wall. I would frantically scrape it off and poke it back, pick up the squares of bread and force them behind the cupboard with the dust and cobwebs and dead spiders, as far as I could.

When we were sitting at that dining table one evening, a movement on the wall near the cupboard caught my eye. It was a big, black cockroach, the second most revolting thing in the world after eggs, and it was heading towards the space behind the cupboard. My mother saw it and put down her knife and fork.

What I am reading now

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

 

 

 

 

Slowly working through:

Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2nd ed.)

Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience by Carolyn Ellis and Michael G Flaherty (eds.)

Autoethnography as Method by Heewon Chang

and dipping in and out of books like:

How to Write A Better Thesis by David Evans et al (3rd ed.)

How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J Silvia

as well as zillions of articles...

Tempted by Orhan Pamuk's The Innocence of Objects which arrived today, delivered by the friendly courier

Origin

Where does this story begin? Does every story have a beginning, or do some just emerge out of a continuous running narrative? Or should that be narratives? Are we constantly making stories every minute of every day, or is there only the one grand narrative of the human condition, to which we all contribute? Did this particular story that I am about to tell begin when I was born, or did it begin much earlier, when my birthparents met, or when my birthmother left home to travel, or even when she was born? Or did it begin when my adoptive parents married, and no children came?

Or perhaps the story begins when I was told of my adoption, when the story that had been forming behind me, of a life written by others not myself, suddenly stopped, caught in the transition from secret to revelation?

Did the story begin when I started writing it myself?

This pain

This pain begins like a small movement in my belly. I barely notice. Then the feeling grows, and bits of it get stuck around a bone, pull insistently, make me notice. Grows some more, and then I have a hard time concentrating on what I'm doing, have to stop and take a breath. Then it grows again, and I know that I'm in for a bad couple of hours or so. It makes a run for it, enlarges into a wall, until I have to get up from my chair and take the pain and the body it inhabits for an endless walk. There is no sitting or lying down with this beast, this Thing, this mountain of lava. It will eat me unless I go inside myself and ride with it until it's seen the light of day. I must endure it, as the drug has failed. I have only myself to use against the biting, rasping saw of it.