179 Shannon Gibney
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/179
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 179, Shannon. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Before we get started, I want to let you know how much it means to me that you're showing up here to listen to adoptee voices. I remember when I was first in reunion with my dad, and we hit the inevitable rocky patch after the honeymoon period faded, I felt so alone. I believed that I was absolutely unlovable because my first mother had ghosted me after a few months into our reunion just a decade prior. For me, creating this podcast has been a tremendous labor of love so that other adoptees like me who were feeling alone, struggling in reunion, or coming out of the fog would have connection, so we wouldn't feel like we were crazy. The wildest part [00:01:00] of all of this is that it succeeded. Adoptees On has become our show to connect and share what the adoptee experience is really like and I'm asking you today to support the podcast and make it sustainable for me to continue doing this work. I'm Haley, the host and creator of the show–our community's show–and I'm also a wife and mom of two little boys, who are trying their very best to stay quiet as I record this.
Haley Radke’s little boys: Hi, Mommy.
Haley Radke: They're trying their almost best to stay quiet. When you sign up for Patreon or donate via PayPal, you are helping me, Haley, contribute to my family's needs. What I didn't expect when I started podcasting was that this would become my full-time job. I'm showing up for you and saying yes to adoptees, and I would love for you to show up for me and commit to a year of support for Adoptees On. I have big plans, and I want to do [00:02:00] huge things for adult adoptees, but I can't do it without the support of you, my listeners. For the month of April only, I have a sale on for a yearly membership to Adoptees On Patreon with one month free. After that, it'll be back to regular price. I'm honored by the support I have already gotten from the community and, truthfully, pretty scared to make this ask again, but if I'm going to continue making the show, I really need your help to make it sustainable and to have the ability to meaningfully contribute to my little family over here and to hire other adoptees to help build the show. Click the link in the show notes or go to adopteeson.com/partner to sign up right now. Okay, let's get to the show.
I'm thrilled. Shannon Gibney, writer and activist, is here. Shannon shares some of her personal story and how she's observed adoptee voices reaching critical mass over the last 15 years. Since her first novel, See No Color, was released six years [00:03:00] ago, she's heard from many younger adoptees who felt seen and validated by reading her words. Shannon recounts how her experience of grief and motherhood and the adoptee experience intertwined and how she's modeled truth-telling, even the difficult things, to her children. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com. I just want to give you a content warning. We will be discussing child loss in this episode. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Shannon Gibney. Welcome, Shannon.
Shannon Gibney: Thank you so much for having me, Haley.
Haley Radke: Thrilled. Thrilled to talk with you today. I would love it if you would share some of your story with us.
Shannon Gibney: I identify as a mixed Black, transracial adoptee. My birth father was Black and my birth mother was Irish American, and I was adopted by a white family in 1975. [00:04:00] I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have two brothers who are biological to my parents, so they're white. I have an older brother who is two years older than me, but it's three years because he skipped a grade, which those things matter when you're a kid and not so much when you’re–
Haley Radke: Every grade counts.
Shannon Gibney: It does. It does, and then all of a sudden you're 21, and it's like, who cares. And then I have a younger brother who is a year younger than me. And I did a birth search when I was 19. And as a domestic adoptee, of course, that was a much easier experience than a lot of my friends who are Korean adoptees, for instance, and internationally adopted. A lot of those folks, unfortunately, have a very hard time, of course, finding family members or birth parents. But I was "lucky." And I put that in quotes because I've also talked with some of my friends and colleagues who [00:05:00] are adoptees and critical adoption scholars who have also made contacts and had relationships with their birth parents and birth families. And the discourse on reunion is, well, 1) it's very lean, and 2) it's just not very complicated at all. And so I think what I've come to find in my own experience, and also connecting with other adoptees who are in reunion or have been in reunion is that it's just a very layered set of relationships. A very layered set of relationships. And we don't really have good frameworks or language in the dominant culture to really talk about that and acknowledge that. And even in our adoptee communities I would argue that we don't either because there's a lot of trauma and a lot of other things that get triggered with that. [00:06:00] That's just all to say that I discovered through my birth search that my birth father had unfortunately passed away when I was six. And then I did find my birth mother, and I had a complicated on-and-off relationship with her from then on until her death about seven years ago. And that's just not uncommon. Again, we don't talk about these things and the focus of reunion is all like, Oh, search and reunion. But it's like not 10 years out or 20 years out, what's going on then?
So, I'm active in a lot of adoptee communities, particularly transracial adoption, adoptee communities, POC. And I'm a writer. I write novels. That's probably my first genre. I also write children's books. Got three children's picture books that I'm working on right now. [00:07:00] I edited an anthology called What God Is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color. I co-edited that with my dear friend, writer Kao Kalia Yang. I'm working on a new anthology right now with Nicole Chung, a Korean adoptee, and that is a collection of young adult stories about adoptees by adoptee writers. So that'll be coming out in 2023. And then of course, my first novel, See No Color, is about a mixed Black girl adopted into a white family, and it's got themes of baseball. So it's a very loosely autobiographical first novel. My current novel that I'm working on now called Botched, I call it a speculative memoir, and that has all kinds of themes of transracial adoption going through that. So writing is and continues to be the primary or a primary way that I process [00:08:00] my experience and build community.
Haley Radke: So much there. I read somewhere where you talked about how writing will last for years and years, and I'll admit this, I haven't said this before, but it was only a couple years ago where I was like, Wow, books are, like, just ideas we write down, hey? Which really makes them small and yet so huge. And I wonder, for you, having your writing last for years and years in these stories. Who knows who will pick them up 200 years from now and read what you've written, and it will be preserved. What, for you as an adopted person having some of your history erased–and you say you had the privilege to search and have an answer where many don't–what about writing tied to being an adoptee? What does that mean for you, having your stories preserved? [00:09:00]
Shannon Gibney: My first piece in a book was Outsiders Within, which was an anthology that was published 15 years ago, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka and Sun Yung Shin, both of whom are Korean adoptees, and Julia Chinyere Oparah, who is a Black transracial adoptee. Everybody in that group is transracial adoptees. And that book was a watershed for so many of us because it was really the first book by transracial adoptees for transracial adoptees. The literature on transracial adoption has been dominated historically by white adoptive parents who don't identify as such. So people who are like, Well, I'm a psychologist, I'm a scholar, and I'm studying attachment with children and I'm looking specifically at transracial adoptees. But I'm not disclosing that [00:10:00] I have a daughter who was adopted from China. So I have a very particular viewpoint, right? But that's also not getting disclosed. And so that's still happening now in 2021, but adoptee writers, scholars, artists, activists, and cultural workers have really shifted the conversation. And in the past 20, I would say really 15 years. I'm 46, and I've seen a huge change, right? But coming up as a transracial adoptee, first of all, you don't see hardly any stories. You feel like a freak. You really don't see hardly any stories of people like you. And then the ones that you do see are very flat because they're produced by non-adoptees, either white folks or now I'm seeing more people of color writing stories actually with transracial adoptees in them. But I still find, not all of them, but many of them to be problematic. [00:11:00]
Haley Radke: I saw your series of tweets about own voices. And hello, adopted people, we're not this trope, right?
Shannon Gibney: Exactly, you can't just say, Oh, own voices. Oh, I'm a Black writer, and I'm going to have a Black transracial adoptee in my book. And therefore I get that experience because I'm Black. No, that's a very particular experience. Let me be clear, I'm not saying that in order to write about something you have to have experienced it, right? If you're going to write, for instance, a scene of sexual violence you have to have experienced sexual violence in order to get it right. But I think all of us, anybody reasonable, would understand that you have to do your research, you can't just say, Oh, whatever, I think it's like this. No.
Haley Radke: Oh my gosh, we reviewed a book last year on the Off Script podcast. Carrie and I read this. And I was [00:12:00] looking up interviews with the author and this was not an adoptee and it had an adoptee protagonist. And she said, "Oh my gosh, I've done so much research," and she listed off all the people she had talked to. You know what it is, right? Yes. Adoption-competent therapists, adoption, adoptive parents, birth parents. Nowhere did she talk to an adopted person. Nowhere.
Shannon Gibney: Right! Adoptees are always left out, and if we're let in, they talk to the children, right? We're infantilized always. But they're not going to talk to the people like you and me who are in our 40s. You're probably in your 30s. I'm in my 40s. But we're grown is my point, right? We have our own lives, our own families, perhaps our own children, all these things, and you can't just objectify us. So that's really what I'm getting at, I guess, is this movement of a critical mass of [00:13:00] transracial adoptees. I think we talked about in our prep before that it’s not that I actively try not to connect with white adoptees. It's just that's the way that whiteness functions. It separates out white folks from people of color. So I don't actually know that much about some of the cultural production or activism of white adoptees. I don't see that much of it. Most of the stuff that I interact with is, again, transracial-adoptee-produced, and that's going to be POC. But I've really seen, definitely in the past 15 years, a sea change of books, of plays, of organizations, of study groups and direct actions. And so that's not to say that the dominant narratives of adoption aren't alive and well and thriving in mainstream American culture because they are. And that makes me tired. Every time I [00:14:00] see a New York Times article about this white couple who went through so much to try and adopt a child from Somalia or something like that, I want to vomit. But there's just a lot of stuff out there. So I just want to say, in answer to your question and I know this is a roundabout way: That first piece that I wrote in Outsiders Within, I don't think it's a coincidence that the first piece that I had published was about my experience as a transracial adoptee because it's such a seminal experience in my life. It has overdetermined every other aspect of my identity, for sure. And that also, I think living in the Twin Cities, which we call the Land of 10,000 Adoptees because there are more Korean adoptees here than any other place than Scandinavia. Of course, for folks who are not from Minnesota, the state motto is the Land of 10,000 Lakes, not Land of [00:15:00] 10,000 Adoptees. And so connecting in my mid to late 20s with other transracial adoptees, other folks like me, mostly Korean adoptees, it really changed me. It changed my understanding of my personal experience, my personal history, and helped me understand how the experience was structural in many ways. So in other words, it politicized me is what I'm trying to get at. And I remain quite thankful for that. I say my first novel, of course, See No Color, published in 2015, again about a mixed Black girl adopted into a white family. I've said on many occasions that I wrote that for the girl that I was as a tween or teen who was longing for this very rich narrative of a sense of racial and cultural [00:16:00] isolation. A sense of questioning about racial identity and identities, right? Because Black is related to mixed, but it's not the same thing. And what do you do when you don't have access to this one culture that is mostly maligned in the dominant culture, Black culture in this case, right? But you, your body inhabits that racial reality, right? What do you do? So I wrote that book for the girl that I was so that girl and other girls like her, other adoptees like her, could reach for a different book. And since the book's been out now for five to six years, that has really been the sweetest thing about it being out, is other adoptees, especially younger adoptees, encountering it and [00:17:00] telling me, Wow, I never realized that I was a transracial adoptee. I didn't even know that there was language for this experience, and I never knew that, for instance, this feeling of shame, this deep feeling of shame that I have, and fear when I get around Black people, that's something that is part of the adoptee experience. Other adoptees feel that too. It's not my fault. This is what happens when you take Black children, Black people out of Black communities and put them, raise them with loving, hopefully, white families in a racist culture. This is what happens.
Haley Radke: How validating it is it for a young adoptee to feel so seen through your words. I think that's beautiful, and when I read it too, I thought of my little, 12-year-old self kind of feeling, I don't know, and that's not my experience, but there's so much adoptee [00:18:00] truth throughout that even myself, I was a domestic infant adoptee, same race adoption, I learned so much from your book as well. And what I found really fascinating was I listened to this podcast where a couple of young men read your book, and they don't have a connection with adoption, and they learned so much from it as well. So I think as big of a gift and validating it is for young adoptees to read your words, you're also having this impact on changing the societal narrative.
Shannon Gibney: Yeah, I hope that's what all good literature and art can do, you go into the specific, right? You have to inhabit this specific experience or set of experiences in order to get to the general. Everybody knows what it feels like to not belong, we've all had that experience at some point. Everybody [00:19:00] knows, particularly around adolescence, all these questions about who am I and where do I fit in my family, who do I wanna be? Your sexuality starts getting more prevalent and more important in your daily interactions and how does that intersect with your racial identity, how you see yourself, how other people see you? These are things that look different in situation to situation, but we all have to deal with them at some point. So yeah, I hope that's part of what my work can do.
Haley Radke: I wanted to ask you something that is really deeply personal. You co-edited another book that you mentioned, What God Is Honored Here? with Kao Kalia Yang, and you share about losing your first daughter, so your second child, a stillbirth. And I [00:20:00] heard you on multiple different podcasts sharing part of that story, and all I kept thinking throughout, because of course I'm here interviewing you as an adopted person, adoptee to adoptee, was what was that like for you as an adoptee? We talk so much on this show about grief and understanding this great loss we had, connection to our first mother, and then you have this great loss, personal loss of your daughter. Did you link that at all? Did you process it through the adoptee frame at all? I wonder if you wouldn't mind talking about that a little bit.
Shannon Gibney: I have an 11-year-old son, and I have a six-year-old daughter, and then I have another daughter, Sianneh, who would be seven if she were still here, and she was a stillbirth at [00:21:00] 41 and a half weeks. So she was 10 days late. So as you can imagine, that was utterly and completely devastating, and that was also part of the reason why Kalia and I wanted to put the collection together, because she had a loss at 21 weeks the year before me. And we both, after our losses, we always say we, we were doing what writers do, which is search out stories and meaning in literature, and we just could not find anything that really got to the raw reality of what it's like to lose a child, both physically, psychologically, emotionally, all of it. And I think it's hard for me to really... I think it's a really great question, and I don't know that I have been asked it in that exact way before. [00:22:00] I think having a language and a framework for loss, for deep loss, in a culture that–my mom was a therapist for many years, she always says we're a grief-averse culture. In a culture that's grief-averse it was very useful for me. And an understanding of, for example, ambiguous loss and how does that show up in one's body. And these things, I think that in our dominant culture we are not to talk about or we cannot talk about or we can't name or we can't linger in, such as my baby is dead, such as I don't know why I feel empty, but I think it has something to do with the fact of losing my first mother. There are certain [00:23:00] experiences that imprint on your consciousness and continue to have an outsized effect on everything that happens to you after that and how you process it, maybe even more importantly. And so I think that having this early experience of loss and not being able culturally to really articulate it or have a framework to understand it or a community to understand it helped me paradoxically because I had to go build those communities. I had to find those other adoptees. I had to find those people in a very similar way that Kalia and I had to go and find these other women of color and Native women who had [00:24:00] lost their babies, but nobody wanted to talk about, nobody wanted to hear those stories. Much in the same way that up until very recently the dominant culture doesn't want to hear anything but happy stories of adoption. They don't want to hear that there's loss inherent in taking a child from their first family and grafting them into another. Sorry, it's not just tiptoeing through the tulips and yes, Mom, I love you. Yeah, that's there, but there's a lot of other stuff there, too. So I think that the experience of being a transracial adoptee helped me develop these skills that I would need in order to process and work through the experience of losing my daughter in a healthy way as a writer.
Haley Radke: [00:25:00] I wonder, we've talked on the show before about the hard things and the crappy reunions that fall apart and the searches that find graves. We talk about the hard stuff all the time so I appreciate you so much sharing that with us. And what I found so fascinating and beautiful, to be frank, is how your son still talks about Sianneh and her memory is alive and included, and how you talk about that. And in adoption, as well, there's the intergenerational trauma of loss, and my children are fortunate that I'm in reunion with my father. So he's always been in their lives and they call him Poppy, and he's around. And so they haven't had that loss. It's very confusing to them when I explain how I grew up. And my kids are still pretty little; they're six and eight. But [00:26:00] I'm curious about how you speak to your children, then, about adoption and the impact because it sounds like you claim activism and all those things, right? So I know you're talking about it. They must see that as well in you, and how do you keep that in your language with them, I guess.
Shannon Gibney: It was interesting when my son was smaller. He would say, “I was adopted,” and of course I was like, "Don't tell–"
Haley Radke: Shannon, my kid came home from school and told me that he had told his friends he was adopted, and I was like, "I beg your pardon?"
Shannon Gibney: But it just shows you, right? Because your kids reflect yourself back to you, right? So it just shows you how central this part of your identity is and that they have absorbed that. And of course they want to be close to it because they want to be close to you. And so this is the way that they start processing it. And this is something that I've talked about with many people. I think the group Adoption Mosaic just had a session on this, too, [00:27:00] the intergenerational effects of adoption. Who is studying this? Who is talking about this? Who is writing about this? Because, for instance, it's very interesting. I have encountered a few families who, like mine, my grandmother was an orphan, and this is not uncommon that adoption runs in the family. And how does that happen, and what does that mean culturally? And how do our children process this information? My son's name is Boise, and in my new book all of this is explored and dealt with. But he's named after my birth father. My birth father, I found out that his name was Boise Colin. It's actually a family name. And so my grandfather's name is Boise. And I met my grandfather. I had the privilege of talking to him on the phone a few times when I was about 20 [00:28:00] before he passed a few years after that. So his name was Boise. And then, it's interesting, family history is just very complicated, as I was saying before. And so he, my grandfather Boise Colin Sr., his second wife had a child that he adopted when he married her. Okay? So my birth father, who was named after him, has already passed. So my grandfather marries this woman who has a child. His name was Christopher, and he was eight or nine, or 10 maybe, when my grandfather adopted him. He changed his name to my grandfather's name in the adoption process because he said that this is the man that he admired most in the world. So his name is Boise. So my son is now the fourth Boise [00:29:00] in this broken and yet amended line. It's very rich. It's very complicated. And we had the opportunity to meet my aunt, so my birth father's sister. He has two or three living siblings now, and we reached out to my uncle, so Boise Collins, who's my age. He's my uncle, but he's two years older than me, right? So the child of the child that my grandfather adopted. And so my children got to meet my aunt–my birth father's sister–and they've met her on several occasions, and we've been to her house in Detroit, and we met the other Boise. And it's just very interesting for my son, to watch him integrate a lot of stuff. And of course it's like, Okay, there's my side of the family and we've got Grandma and [00:30:00] Grandpa who are white, and aunts and uncles on that side of the family who are also white. And then their dad is Liberian, and so we've got that side of the family, also, that is partly here in Minnesota and partly in Liberia, and those grandparents over there. So it's a lot of stuff for them to parse through and figure out where it all goes. And they didn't have a chance to meet my birth mother because she passed before they were born. Yeah, it's very layered. It's very layered.
Haley Radke: Very layered. Yes. What else can you say, right? It's such a, I don't know. I think in asking the question, I'm always hoping I'll get some advice from a more experienced mother than I on how to navigate and explain this. But I think often we're just [00:31:00] muddling through, right?
Shannon Gibney: My whole thing as a mother, as an artist, as a person is, just tell the truth. That's hard enough. In the most skillful way that you can. Sometimes, obviously, it's not the time to tell the truth, right? But most of the time it's like the best thing you can do is not try to fix anything, not try to manage it and whatever. It's just, Look, this is the way it is. I'm doing the best I can, and this is what I came out of. This is the conditions under which you came into the story, but it was already going for all these years in this way before you came in. Now, what you do with it, that's a whole other thing that we can talk about and hopefully navigate together, and I can help you get the skills so that you feel like you can do it in a way that is going to feel okay for you. That's a different conversation, [00:32:00] but I've done the best I can with this mess. I'm doing the best I can with this mess. and I involve my kids. This whole thing of adoption before where it's, Oh, we're just gonna pretend that what's going on is not going on, right? Oh, we're all the same. We're all part of this family, and nobody's different. Adopted? Nobody was adopted. Whatever. That clearly did not work. That doesn't work. That never works. So that's what I've always done with my kids both in adoption and with the death of their sister. My son was three and a half when Sianneh died. He was so excited about being a big brother, so excited, and he was utterly devastated in his own three-and-a-half-year-old way, just like I was and his dad was. And I didn't try to put my utter and complete devastation on him because that would not be appropriate, but I wasn't going to try and hide it from him either. [00:33:00] And so yeah, she is part of our family story. She is alive in how we move through the world from the banal to the sort of very transformative and enlightened. They'll say, Oh, if Sianneh were here, we'd have to have a bigger car because there's no way we could fit three car seats in here. We'd probably have to get a van. And sometimes it hurts for me, but also it's very healing, and my son will tell people, No, I have two sisters. It's just that one is dead. And people will be like [demonstrative inhale], but to him that's just, This is my life. It's just a fact.
Haley Radke: Thank you for modeling that for us. Okay. Is there anything you want to tell us before we do our recommended resources? Anything I didn't ask you about, anything you want to make sure adopted people hear from you?
Shannon Gibney: Just that you're not alone. [00:34:00] There's many of us out here. Sometimes it can be really hard to find other people and to find other stories, but it's worth it to do that work. And in the end, when you find various communities, what you find is that 1) you're not as much of a freak as you always thought, but 2) you're also not as special as you thought. Because those two things are intertwined. And that's a relief. That's a relief. So I feel all these Western countries have this crisis of loneliness. I think in the UK, they have a minister of loneliness because it's such a problem. And with the pandemic, it's only been exacerbated, of course. But I feel like these really small micro-communities, like Korean adoptees or Black adoptees, whatever, it's like we can model what's possible to these [00:35:00] larger, more dominant groups that have really, for the most part, lost those kinds of communal connections which are of course forged through vulnerability and sharing. That's a really important skill that I think adoptee communities can model for others. And so yeah, if you're not yet part of an adoptee community, search them out. Get involved. Start listening to some podcasts. Join in a conversation through Adoption Mosaic or Network of Politicized Adoptees. There's so many really good groups out there. Read a book by an adoptee. You can find a lot of us on social media. I always try to respond to reader comments or people who reach out to me. I think that would be my main message.
Haley Radke: Perfect. I love building adoptee community. It's [00:36:00] not going to be a surprise to anyone but, of course, I'm going to recommend Shannon's books. So powerful. You're a phenomenal writer, and I'm not just saying that just because I'm looking at you right now. I said it behind your back too last year. Shannon mentioned this, but See No Color is the novel that's specifically adoption-related. Would you say it's middle grade or YA?
Shannon Gibney: It's YA.
Haley Radke: YA. So it's got some really interesting themes with the baseball and family. I found it really fascinating how you have the sister, the character Kit, pushing Alex, the adoptee, into finding out more information. I found that really interesting. I'm not going to spoil anything because I want you guys to go pick that up and read it. It's so beautiful. And I haven't gotten a chance to read it, but it's in my cart right now: What God Is Honored Here?, which we've mentioned, so you know what [00:37:00] theme that's on as well. I think that will be an incredible book, so I'll just recommend it too. But Dream Country. Oh my word, Shannon. Talk about this sweeping masterpiece, you've got all of these different protagonists and you're going back and forward in time, and I learned so much about Liberia. I had no idea. You talk about being in Minnesota. Listen, I'm in Canada, in Alberta. It is like this frigid white province. I learned so much. It was just stunning. I just loved it. It's just amazing. Dream Country, you guys, you have to read this book. You just have to. Love it. Okay.
Shannon Gibney: Thank you. And one thing I'll just say about Dream Country is even though there's not themes of adoption in it, there's themes of intergenerational family loss, and a central [00:38:00] question in it is what do you do when you don't know your story and you don't know your family story? How do you heal?
Haley Radke: What I found so fascinating was that you lived in Ghana for a while. This is researched. The- It
Shannon Gibney: It took over my life.
Haley Radke: That's an understatement.
Shannon Gibney: Yeah. It totally took over my life on and off for 20 years. I always say I spent 10 years trying not to write it and I spent 10 years writing it.
Haley Radke: Well, it shows that you spent that long. And so, anyway, we are so excited about what's coming out for you in the future. And whenever you talk about Botched, I'm so fascinated. Do you know Disappear Doppelganger, Disappear?
Shannon Gibney: Oh, yes. Matthew's book.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Matthew [Salesses]. Oh my gosh, so good. And so when you were talking about the alternative timelines and, yes, adoptees are so skilled at that, I think. Yeah, at thinking about our other [00:39:00] identities. So I'm very excited about that. Okay, I'm going to stop gushing. What do you want to recommend for us?
Shannon Gibney: So I recently did a talk with Adoption Mosaic, and they're a group run by a transracial adoptee, Astrid Castro, and it is just a great group. So just check them out. I would definitely check them out. There's a group here in Minnesota that I'm quite fond of called Network of Politicized Adoptees, NPA for short. And they just do all kinds of really interesting community and cultural work. They have book clubs about books written by adoptees. I've gone in and talked to them about my book and about other people's books. I think two years ago when Nicole Chung's book came out, All You Can Ever Know, they read it and I came in. [00:40:00] I think Dr. Kim Park Nelson had a class on the history and origins of Korean adoption, so it’s community education but on steroids, taken to the next level. I just appreciate their presence. I appreciate the depth and the sort of carefulness and commitment that they have to having these discussions and doing this work in as equitable a way as they can.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. I'm so excited we get to share them, and I will have links to all of those things that we mentioned in the show notes so you can find their website. I saw their Facebook page, so I'll link to all of those places so that you can find the Network of Politicized Adoptees and also Astrid's Adoption Mosaic. Astrid was a guest a little while ago, so we got to hear a bit of her story. Did you know she used to be a professional snowboarder?
Shannon Gibney: No, but that somehow doesn't surprise me. Yeah. She has those natural instincts [00:41:00] of being able to adapt to things coming at her very quickly, so that actually doesn't surprise me at all. No. Yeah.
Haley Radke: When you started sharing some of your story and about how we always see reunions as the happy whatever, I was like, Oh, man, this podcast is a resource of all the other sides of adoption that people don't talk about, but we do. So yes, Astrid has got her story in there too, and now you do, so thank you so much, Shannon. Where can we connect with you online?
Shannon Gibney: So my website is always the best place. It's just shannongibney(dot)com, and there is a Contact Me page and that just goes directly to my email. So yeah, if you want to find out more about me and my work, events, all that stuff, my website is always the best place. I'm also on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. If you go to any of those platforms and you type in my name, I'll come up.
Haley Radke: And I'll also link those places in the show [00:42:00] notes for you, too. All right. This was such a good conversation. Thank you so much.
Shannon Gibney: Thank you, Haley. Thanks for having me, and thanks for the work you do to build communities of adoptees. Appreciate it. Really do.
Haley Radke: I just want to double down and also encourage you to find adoptee community. If you already have some adoptee friends, ask them where they like to hang out online and, hopefully, you'll find a safe spot to connect in. There are very specific adoptee groups on Facebook, Clubhouse, all kinds of different spots on Twitter. I know there's other online forums that you can kind of get connected into that are really specific for transracial adoptees. There's some groups that will be country-specific. There's some that are religion-specific. There's all kinds of different groups that you can hopefully get [00:43:00] connected in with.
I have my Adoptees On Patreon group, but there's lots of free groups that you can hopefully get involved with. And if you're not sure where to start, another great thing to do is to go ahead and find some of those events that Shannon was talking about. There's online events happening all the time where you can connect with other adoptees and make adoptee friends, which is one of the biggest gifts.
So another gift to me is I'm so grateful for my monthly supporters. You heard at the beginning I have a sale on right now. If you join for a year of membership, you get one month free, and that is the only way I can keep producing the show and paying my editor and paying all the bills. So if you are able to, I would love to have you as a supporter. Go to adopteeson.com/partner to join and get the other Adoptees Off Script weekly podcast and there's another level for the [00:44:00] Facebook Group. I would love to have you join. And if that's not on the table, no problem. One free way you can help support the show is just tell one person about this episode that you think would love to hear from Shannon and her experiences as a writer and activist and that would be hugely beneficial. I would love that.
Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday
