When I hung up the phone after my 40-minute radio interview with Valerie Okunami, host of KCOR’s Bizi Yogi show I had a sinking feeling. I had talked about my shame on the air. I knew what I’d be discussing when I agreed to be a guest—the day’s…

Forty-five years ago today, I gave birth to the first person in the whole wide world who I knew to be a flesh-and-blood part of me. (I was adopted, so this was a huge deal.) Like today, it was a Sunday. The labor was long, and I was exhausted but elated…

Not long ago, I wrote a piece for Women Writers, Woman’s Books, an online literary magazine. This request coincided with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the emerging #metoo movement. It was perfect timing because I had recently finished writing…

This May I was a guest on “Alaska Public Radio”, an affiliate of National Public Radio (NPR). They connected me live from the NPR Studio in Sacramento where I told my story of being an adoptee who also gave up a baby up for adoption…

Change sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention. For example: What triggered the writing slump I’ve been in for the last few months? When, exactly, did my shins turn to lizard skin? And when was I appointed as the matriarch of my family to…

When I met a former English professor in Seattle last summer, she said to me, “Why are you writing your memoir? What has caused you to take this journey?” I didn’t have an immediate answer. Initially, I’d started writing to share my story of being…

Being an adoptee even when I was young, I was compelled to know my biological family, a quality that is absent in many of the adopted people I know. It makes me wonder if my aboriginal Cree ancestry has something to do with my deep need to understand…

A few months ago, I was going through a box of keepsakes from 1973—the year I gave my baby up for adoption. Inside were the treasures I carted first from Alaska to California and then through eleven additional moves over the last 44 years…

For most of my life I have been filled with insecurity around body image, ugh! There is a saying that “beauty is wasted on the young.” This is so true. Over the years, I’ve looked back at old photos of myself from a time when I thought I was too fat, short,…

One of my coworkers is a middle-aged screenwriter, a former sports editor, and a nice enough guy with a dry sense of humor and sarcastic wit. Let’s call him Ben. Great life, great wife. You know the type. During the fifteen years that we’ve worked out of…

We’ve all known people who go on and on about the drama in their lives (aka trauma survivor), getting so wound up talking about it that it makes you wish you could pole vault into another state. I don’t ever want to be that person. Unfortunately, I…

I started writing my memoir. Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I’m pretty much an open book. That’s what I thought, too—until I began writing about the pain of adoption, abuse, addiction, trauma, and healing…