331 Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/331
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. Marci shares about growing up in a deeply religious adoptive family. We talk about finding room in her writing for questions about her origins that may never have answers, how translation can echo the adoptee experience, and why creating spaces for adoptee writers matter.
There is a mention of abuse in this episode, so please take care when listening. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at [00:01:00] adopteeson.com/newsletter. 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.
Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello to Adoptees On. Welcome, Marci.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
Haley Radke: I'm so excited to chat with you. I have seen you in the adoptee circles for years and just waiting for the moment. Here it is. I'd love it if you would start. Would you share a little of your story with us?
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. Thank you so much. I've been such a, a longtime fan of your podcast too, so it's an honor to be here today.
Haley Radke: Oh, that's so nice.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah, a good synergistic moment. I was born in South Korea and adopted to a white family in Michigan at the time, and then we moved to upstate New York, where I spent most of my childhood into adulthood.[00:02:00]
And I have an older brother who's also adopted from South Korea, and we're not biologically related, but we're very close, and he's my ride or die. And so I was raised in upstate New York in a deeply religious Baptist family, and I was homeschooled also for all of K through 12. I graduated early. I did a gap year at 17, where I went to South Korea, and I tutored North Korean refugees through a missionary that my family knew and also taught...
Just did some English tutoring on the side and things like that. And I spent a year there, and then I came back for college. I went to a community college in upstate New York and transferred to a college in Pennsylvania, and then I did an MFA in creative writing with a poetry focus in Miami, Florida, which is where I now am.
And I have been in [00:03:00] Miami for 12 years as of this past August. And so that's a, a quick overview of , my life trajectory. And in terms of I think my creative identity is very much tied up in my adoptee identity, I think, where a lot of my... I'm a poet and a translator of Korean poetry into English and an essayist, and I would say that the questions that arose when I was thinking about my adoptive identity came out through creative writing.
And so it was a sort of Emily Dickinson has a "Tell all the world, but tell it slant" kind of phrase, and so I took that as an angle for answering questions that didn't have answers. And so I think in some ways, my writing is how I move through the world as an adoptee also. And so my writing moved [00:04:00] me down the Eastern Coast.
And I think as I get older and I look back on how my creative life has evolved, it's a very parallel journey for how I have thought about my own adoptee experience in settling into my own identity with confidence and finding community in very similar ways through writing and the adoptive experience and the constellation, if you will.
And then finding a lot of adoptee writers too, I think, which is where I really started to feel that I had gained a foothold in how to articulate what it meant to be an adoptee to me.
Haley Radke: I love that. There's so many places to go. Can we start with growing up with a brother who was also adopted? I heard you say in another interview that he was the one who's older, and he was the one that maybe questioned your parents or opened up conversations that you might not have been quite ready yet.
Can [00:05:00] you speak a little bit about that?
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. So my brother is older, and it was just the two of us, and we were both homeschooled, so we were in the house 24/7, and we fought endlessly when we were children, which I think is probably why we're so close now. But because he was the older sibling, and he was the first for a lot of experiences, as older siblings often are, and because he was already asking questions about "Who am I? Where did I come from? What does it mean to be adopted transracially?" And because there were not a lot of... There were, there was no answers, so he was always asking the questions, and then I was always just following along. And so he would bring home anything Korean, like Korean music, Korean TV shows. He's the reason that we connected with the local Korean church that had Korean language lessons as a kind of outreach program.
And then we ended [00:06:00] up connecting with other Koreans and making friends, and that is where I started learning about Korean culture. And that, in that way, he was the reason that I really thought deeply about and questioned a lot of things that had come up. And in a more personal sense, just our family home dynamic was a very difficult one.
There was a lot of tension, a lot of abuse going on. And so in a lot of ways I feel like I'm starting to say this more often out loud, but he saved me in a lot of ways because if he hadn't been my older brother, I'm not sure I would've made it out of that house. I'm not sure I would've made it out of that kind of life alive in a very rural, very deeply religious family, and a lot of depression, and all of those things.
And so in those ways, too, this is where I think a lot of experiences so personally gets wrapped up into too many things to be [00:07:00] able to cleanly untangle. He was also the first to leave and the first to tell me that I could leave and be okay, or that I could survive and do different things, and that I could do, and I could live, and I could blank, right?
So in a lot of ways, I don't know. There's no way to know if we would have had the same kind of bond if we were both not adopted, if we were both, biologically related or biological blood family, right? But I do think that a lot of how we interacted and how he functions as a person was part of what saved us both from that, that life and perpetuating that kind of family environment
Haley Radke: I'm really sorry that was your experience, and I'm so glad you had him.
Wow.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Me too.
Haley Radke: Wow.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. Yeah. That's why he's my ride or die- ... 'cause no, no one else... I think that's the thing is like no one... Everyone's [00:08:00] stories are different in life, but no one else understood me and understands me the way that he does in all the, the nuances of experience and identity.
Haley Radke: So you have a couple different layers. Transracially adopted, transnationally adopted, and now we're- I'm hearing a really difficult home life, the homeschooling, the religious upbringing. So I'm gonna ask, like I'm curious about how you start perhaps as a young adult, like, thinking about how did adoption impact me?
With the asterisk here obviously you knew it did because it wasn't like- ... oh, the better life you were promised.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. I do understand that we had a difficult childhood, but I also understand that the dichotomy that was happening is that our adoptive parents were also doing what they thought was the best thing [00:09:00] for the family, for themselves, for us in those moments, which is not to say that they were right. But one of the things that they did really well was that obviously I'm, I move through the world as a Korean woman, and they are white, and so there was no way to hide the fact that we were not blood related. So that question had to be addressed in some capacity, and I think, they addressed it in very similar ways to a lot of transracially adoptive parents where it's, it's "You were adopted."
There was the, "We don't know anything about your birth family. We chose you." There was the religious element of, "We are encouraged by the Bible to and so adoption was a conversation piece in the house very early on. I don't remember a time that we were not able to openly talk about that as a fact.
What made everything [00:10:00] uncomfortable in those family dynamics is when my brother started asking very specific questions of where he came from. And we knew that we had adoption files. He wanted to see the adoption files, which of course prompted more questions, and then out of fairness, which is, great even though I was younger than him, they were like, "Oh you should probably see your file too."
And I didn't know how to look at it and- I had questions, but I didn't know how to ask them and it's one of the things that we didn't really talk about when we were young, my brother and I directly and privately with each other was what was in our files. We didn't really share that, but it opened a different kind of way of thinking for me in seeing actual documentation, not knowing what it was, not really being able to walk through it with an adult.
They were like, "We're just gonna give you this file, and we'll come back in an hour if you have [00:11:00] any questions." I was like, "I don't know," and then that was about it. Oh,
that's
Haley Radke: I'm sorry. That sounds like what some of the agencies do in Korea. Here's your file. You can look it up for a few minutes, and then we're gonna take it away.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yes, which is interestingly also how I was educated as a homeschool student. So it was very normal for our family. It was like, "Here's the textbooks. Go do the workbooks. If you have any questions, come ask us," right? And that's partly why I'm a bit of a self-starter and I'm always asking questions now because I think I didn't know how to ask questions before.
Haley Radke: Yes. Okay this also it's keeping on the personal, so you just say when you're ready to pivot. But being raised in a religious family, and I read in one of your essays perhaps more than you have some religious language. You talk about Moses. You just mentioned there's this biblical mandate to adopt kind of thing, which, that's what I grew up believing, too, but now my [00:12:00] understanding has changed so much.
That's really not what biblical adoption was. And have you unpacked any of that for yourself? I don't know if you're still religious at all, but whatever you're comfortable sharing about that topic.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. It's actually a fun topic for me. So as a oh, I should probably have clarified this earlier. When I mean that I was in a deeply religious family, I mean that my adoptive father was a Baptist pastor, so I was a pastor's kid. So as a pastor's kid, I have read the King James Bible and some of the other versions multiple times which maybe actually is where my love for language started. But I also am an avid reader, and there's a lot of archetypes that happen.
There's a lot of, across literature, there's references and classics and things like that. So there's a, a kind of reverence for literature in a way in the religious sense, right? That one book is being taught for centuries across cultures and generations. And so that's one thing I find really [00:13:00] interesting about biblical stories.
The other thing is that I so I was an English major and part of what I love about reading is just knowing weird, obscure facts. And so I know a little about a lot of- random things. I'm not an expert in any of them. But one of the things that I fell down a rabbit hole once when I was trying to research for, actually for an essay, is the origin of adoption as a concept and how it's changed over the years and how maybe power has impacted...
It's lot about, everything comes back to power, who has power, who doesn't. And it's interesting because adoption I know in some of my research, adoption comes from the idea that in like the Greco-Roman world if a person did not have children, they could adopt another adult to inherit and pass along names and [00:14:00] wealth and everything like that.
And it wasn't the way that we think of adoption now. It was a way to preserve lineage and house, the house of such and such.
Haley Radke: And that adult got to also keep their original identity-
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yes ...
Haley Radke: and a connection to their original family.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Exactly. And they got to be part of the conversation and the choice. And this is where power also keeps coming back into play, right? And so what the biblical mandates are referencing that time period, what kind of language and customs people might recognize, and it's a very different read than what we think of now and also what cultures think of and what maybe a country is thinking of politically, where you see a lot of patterns if you look at the history where maybe government policies or economy or any kind of external forces cause a birth rate to go [00:15:00] down and then maybe, different reproductive rights or medical advancements or different things are going up or down, and then conversations about adoption come up, ages about adoption come up.
And so it's a very different history than I had learned or that had been any kind of information that even my adoptive family might have had access to at the time. And so thinking about the way that religion can be interpreted, because I had been taught all my life how one interprets the Bible, there is a lot of...
There is one answer is the kind of Baptist mode of thinking, is there's one interpretation that is the correct interpretation. And for an adoptee who has no certainty and has to live in uncertainty, I learned to start questioning what does truth mean when there is no proof of the truth and you have to go fully on faith.
And so [00:16:00] it's an intertwined development of how I think about fact-checking and history and influence of all the different variables that get swept under the rug or were not even accessible to the people researching them at the time.
I don't know if that answers the religion question.
Haley Radke: That's great. I was just checking. I did an episode, it's a- all the way back, 191 from October of 2021, where I have Dr. Erin Heim on, and we literally unpack what you just concisely explained about that's what adoption really looked like. And so for modern day churches to be talking about adoption like it's this mandate to scoop all these babies up from impoverished countries and take them to the real homeland over here, it's not accurate.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. Yeah. It was a mutually beneficial business transaction.
Haley Radke: Yes. It's that. It's certainly [00:17:00] that.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: It still is a one-sided mutually beneficial often.
Haley Radke: Oh, my goodness. I have a quote here from you that I really identified with. You were a guest on the podcast Unraveling Me, and you said, "Asking questions implied a threat." And can you speak to that a little bit? Because I, I remember asking and getting the no answer, the stern face, and then thinking, "Okay, I'm not gonna ask anymore."
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. Asking questions implied a threat
Haley Radke: Of your adoptive parents. I'm sorry, I should have given more info there.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Do- I do remember saying that. Contextually, I think for me, there are a lot of human elements tied up into asking questions.
There's an inherent need to know or desire to know, [00:18:00] and there's also a cultural expectation, or maybe it's a human expectation, to know the thing, and that is not just the person who wants to know, but it's also the person being asked. I should know an answer that's satisfying, or I should know, how to answer this question or how to be a parent, how to be a human, how to... and the other thing that happens is that if you have an unanswerable question, but you have a really persistent child who's like, "But I still wanna know, but why? But why? But why?" It can threaten the ego quite a bit. And also, as a student of literature, and if you even look at television, which is a really strict form of writing the scripts, every story starts with a secret, multiple secrets, right?
And there's a lot of what happens if I answer the question? Who has the power in answering the question, and who has power in asking the question? And in a [00:19:00] household where silence was golden. I grew up with the adage, "Children should be seen and not heard." Even asking a question is a threat in that kind of society.
And also, as a woman in a really patriarchal religious home, asking a question can look like defying the one true truth of, do not... Why are you questioning me, or why are you questioning how things are? And so on that level, it definitely can threaten the ecosystem, and it also... Any questions threaten the nuclear family assumptions that, you have two parents, you have maybe two or three kids, you're repopulating the earth.
And asking questions of why don't we look like that kind of family, why don't we have that kind of story, when you don't have an answer because you made specific decisions for your family, is also threatening because none of the answers are going to stay aligned with how you've built the rest of your life.
[00:20:00] And in a household where there is an idea of absolute truth and uncertainty is like there's always an answer. There's one true answer if you sit with it long enough. There's no room for silence. There's no room for the leader to be wrong and I think maybe that's why I do believe in a lot of nature versus nurture because I have actually become even more insistent on asking questions.
And even in my career and as a writer and as a student, I was always like, "I'm gonna be the stupidest person in the room. I'm gonna ask the stupidest questions." I don't believe in stupid questions. I don't. I'll ask what no one else in the room wants to look like they're asking, and I encourage that too, because for me, a question can, is only threatening if you think you have to have an answer. But if you're questioning because you assume there may not be an answer, it's actually quite freeing. And what I tell people that I'm [00:21:00] training or teaching is that a question tells me a lot of information, and I'm always just looking for information.
I always say I can do a lot with information as long as I know something. And so asking a question also tells me what the person is focusing on, what they're thinking about, what they're wondering about. And if I'm the one asking the question, I know what I, that I don't know something, which is actually quite exciting 'cause it means I'm always learning something.
And if I am being asked a question, it forces me to evaluate whether I can answer the question, whether I have the answer, and it's an opportunity to reevaluate whether I still think that is the answer, because I might have changed my mind, and that is also not something I grew up believing a human should be able to do once they have found the answer.
So for me, questions are actually the opposite of a threat, but it took me years to get to that as a concept.
Haley Radke: I live my life as a very curious learner [00:22:00] also so I definitely relate to that. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how your writing and connecting with other adoptee writers has shaped your view of being an adopted person.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yes. I started out as a fiction writer. Actually wrote a lot of fan fiction, probably a lot of young people. I love fan fiction. There is, somewhere on the dark web, Nintendo fan fiction under my pseudonym.
Haley Radke: We'll put the link in the show notes. No, just kidding. Just kidding.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: But in school, I ended up, through a variety of ways and failures, gravitated toward poetry, and one of the things that poetry does is it's a slice of life. Often it's capturing a [00:23:00] moment of chaos in the tranquility of the aftermath of it.
And it's also a way of processing. It's a way of thinking about the world and really sorting through articulation. I have a professor who once said, "Poets are always trying to tell you what they're not going to tell you, and then they tell you." And it's a thing that I felt very comfortable with, and it turns out that I was a terrible fiction writer, but I loved the world-building elements.
Also, as a video gamer I think that's part of it, is the world-building, the character development that fiction has that I didn't think poetry could have. And in undergrad, I had a professor who in one semester taught the poet Ai A-I, and she is known as the Queen of Persona, and she wrote about essentially the dregs of humanity, if you will.
She would write persona poems in the persona of a serial killer or a child beater or, just terrible human beings, like war [00:24:00] interrogators, right? And in looking at her bio, her artist bio, I found out she was a Buddhist, and a lot of apparent dissonances that I was starting to question.
And I also didn't realize that persona poetry was a thing. I thought we're in the post-confessional phase of Sylvia Plath. The I is the artist I, and I was like, "That's too vulnerable for me." But the persona allowed me to go back to fiction roots and under a kind of pseudonym, think about things and write about things and step into the mind of people in order to get questions that I could not get by asking them as myself.
And so I started working with a lot of persona in undergrad and then also in grad school, and my grad school poetry thesis turned out to be my first poetry collection, Hour of the Ox, which is entirely persona poetry that revolves around the question: What happens when an [00:25:00] integral member of the nuclear family is suddenly removed?
And the secondary question that I was asking on a personal level was: What does it mean for me to be a Korean American woman? What kind of people have I come from? What kind of history have I come from that I don't have direct and comfortable access to? Even the small things, like I don't know... I say this often, I think, but I don't know what lullabies my birth mother might have said, or sung to me in the womb, right?
I don't know what a typical prayer would be for a Korean person. And so those are all things that I think I was spiraling around in my writing that persona poetry really allowed me to tap into. And so that's the kind of process that I have brought to every other project, because it turns out that's [00:26:00] how I think and how I like to think is those poetic leaps, the persona of fiction, and the world-building of a storytelling aspect, a kind of narrative.
Haley Radke: I heard you talk a little bit about that when you did a, a local TEDx talk about your pivot. I promise I don't have links to your fanfic. It sounds like I did the full deep dive, but I missed that. You're having a reaction to me say- mentioning this Ted Talk.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: It's gonna surface one day. AI's gonna scrape it from the deep reaches of the internet, and one day it's gonna surface.
Haley Radke: It surfaced today. I watched it today. If you come on the show, I Google you top to bottom.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: I love that.
Haley Radke: No. Okay. Sorry. Let me pivot. I wanted to ask you [00:27:00] about your Korean language lessons. You mentioned your brother, finding out spots where you could learn, and you also said you've translated Korean poetry to much acclaim, I'll have listeners know.
And yet you tell this story of, receiving this award, and there's some kind of press conference or some such organized thing where of all the translators, you're a very apt with the written Korean, but not as much with spoken. Can you talk about learning the language and coming to this mastery where you can translate and yet still you're othered, and you're still, you know- Say more.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. [00:28:00] Yes. So when my brother and I were young, we took language classes. They were every Sunday after church at the local Korean church, and the beautiful thing about Korean language is that it's a really phonetic language, unlike most of the East Asian languages where you have to memorize characters.
It's a very simple alphabet that you can... it's very similar to the English alphabet, where you can learn the alphabet and phonetically sound out words, but then it becomes a question of vocabulary, syntax, and then the native speaker instinct. And so it was very easy to learn as a child, too and I also had my brother and then our new friends to practice with.
And being in Korea for the gap year when I was 17 was really helpful in learning how to navigate and just immerse myself entirely in the [00:29:00] language, which South Korea I lived in Seoul, and at the time it wasn't the kind of K-pop tourist destination that it is now. So there was a lot less English.
There were fewer English additions to, let's say, street signs or things like that. And so it was easy to use what I had to practice. And so since that year, I really haven't had a space to practice speaking, but because I'm an avid reader and I'm a really visual person, it's a lot easier for me to take the time that I need to read and write it.
I should say read it more than being able to write it above kindergarten level, but the reading of it is much, is slower. I don't have the quick kind of translation that an interpreter might be able to have. And poetry even more so because it's such a dense and complex form, even in Korean. And how I had studied poetry in my MFA program, there's a kind of, there's a history there also of [00:30:00] language, and I didn't feel comfortable. There was a lot of the imposter syndrome of I'm not Korean enough to do this, or I'm not native enough. I'm going to miss idioms and references that a native speaker might be able to translate differently. And so as much as I love... I could tell that it was a home language for me just sonically because even if I don't always understand what is happening, I, there's something about, listening to a TV show or K-pop beats the sounds of the language.
And so there's a comfort in it sonically for me, and the time I get to spend as a translator is a slow time for me. I do not use AI in any of my translation. I will write out all of the words by hand. I'll go through a literal they call it a trot sheet, a literal translation of word for word, and then because it's poetry, my translation mentor calls it the [00:31:00] making the poetic leap and thinking about authenticity and accuracy.
And I was interested in translating poetry, but I didn't really know how to get into it, and Don Mee Choi had been interested in pairing Korean women poets with Korean-American women translators because she thought that the choices that one makes in that process would be very different than what had been done historically.
And she knew that I didn't feel confident in my Korean, and so she paired me with E.J. Koh, who is a good friend of mine, but she didn't know we were friends at the time. And so having that kind of comfort of being able to work with a friend who had a different skill level of Korean was very different experience.
But what I loved about the process is that she was studying literature and film, and she would come to me and she would say, "I think it should be this," and we would say, "Okay." And our project took five years together, and then she would come back maybe a month later, and she'd be like, "Actually I've been studying the history of rice, and I think this is the reference that they have."
And [00:32:00] it changed the whole poem because it's a poetry line. It's not, just a straight up factual, sentence. And so the process felt very comfortable even if the language did not. And I am in the minority probably as a translator to say that I hope a lot of people translate the poems that I'm translating just to experience the choices, and our publisher, it's very rare, but our publisher translates the original language alongside the translation, and I do often encourage people to think about the choices because it's the same question, right?
What happens if I translate it different, if I made different choices? And so translation feels like a, a language, like a trans language experience that is very much the adoptee experience in a lot of ways.
Haley Radke: I was gonna ask you. So first I'll just say that you expound on that story in your essay, The Truth Untold, which can be found in Relative Strangers, [00:33:00] which we'll speak about in recommended resources.
But yes, this metaphor of translation in an adopted person, I'm sure you've thought about this, and have you thought about writing about it?
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: A little bit, yeah. I think actually that essay that you're referring to started me thinking about it and that essay was the first time I was starting to write nonfiction about it, rather than just sitting with the translation process itself. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Okay, I look forward to your future work on that. I won't poach it for this conversation. I really enjoyed your poetry book, Hour of the Ox, and I was telling you before we got on, I've had it for a number of years on my shelf. And you said earlier that you like to collect all these little facts and things, and you're a researcher, and the stories you [00:34:00] tell about the pearl divers, of course, captivated me.
It's so fascinating, and I wonder if you could share a little bit of that just for people to kinda get a taste of a little bit of what you write about in Hour of the Ox.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yes. Oh, thank you for asking that. So when I was writing poems about being Korean American, and it wasn't quite sticking as a thesis, and my professor was like, "You're not writing poems fast enough to graduate."
And I, at the same time, I read this article about the pearl divers, they're called haenyeo, on, on Jeju Island, and I did a whole deep dive into... I was like, "Oh, they're... This is a dying art. Why is it a dying art? What is this?" I had never really heard of them or really cared about doing any more research.
And it turns out the history of Jeju is really a fascinating history it, within the larger South Korean history. And haenyeo are these pearl divers. The women on Jeju Island so the, the story goes that they were protesting what was happening on the [00:35:00] mainland, and I'm saying this with very little clarity on that element 'cause I do hope that people do their own research into that.
But they were protesting the mainland, and the mainland taxed the island, and the main source of income is the fishermen, and so they were taxing the fishermen. And because it's a patriarchal society, the women were like, "Oh they can't tax us, so we're just gonna go swimming."
And so culturally, they were pearl divers. They free dive with no diving equipment and they can hold their breath for three minutes at a time is the average length of time, and they harvest, sea life, so abalone, octopus, other mussels and different things.
And it's a very similar practice there's Hawaiian pearl divers and things like that. But it's a dying art because as these women were getting older and this way of life was starting to shift because advancements were happening on the mainland and all of the younger people were going to the mainland and then staying there for work and to raise families, no one was really taking on... the younger gener- generations were not taking on the [00:36:00] lifestyle and the career that the pearl divers were. So this New York Times article was talking about the dwindling numbers of these women, and it just struck me how powerful they were. There were some incredible photographs.
There was this one photograph that I tacked to my wall for the entirety that I was writing the book, and it's this woman who is you know, she has a wrinkled face. She's got the little glass goggles, and she's holding up an octopus, and it's wrapping its tentacles around her arm. But it's such a victory pose, and she's just in the water with her diving rubber suit, and it's such a powerful photograph, and it made such an impression on me that I was like, "What if I was descended from women like this? Is this what it means to be Korean American?" It's not the pop culture references or anything I had been raised with. Is this what it means? And that just blew open the entire book process for me.
Haley Radke: I love that story. I connect to it so much because I've [00:37:00] always been obsessed with locks- ... the way you move into another waterway when the heights are different, and my maternal side is from Scotland. There were locks there, whatever. So I always think "Oh, I wonder." And it gives me back this piece for folks who may search... they may choose to search, may- they may not. For folks who search and never find an answer, and how do you build your history and lineage? And as a poet, a writer, a storyteller, you're able to assemble some things together for yourself. I think that could be inspiring for folks that might feel really sad at having a dead end- ... and no answers, and to think that you can become curious about other things in hopes of having something that you can think about or ponder. I don't know. Do you have thoughts on, more thoughts on [00:38:00] that?
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah. I thought of the process of writing that poetry book as a I love mythology and I love the ancientness of prophecy and as, just as a concept, I think, again, my fantasy days and classics and things like that. And I thought of the process of asking those questions and writing poems to answer them and answer them over and over again.
At one point I felt like I was writing the same poem over and over again, and yet it was very different. And it felt like I was making my own myth of myself. What is the mythology of me? And as someone who still doesn't have any real answers for my own origin story which I think is what a lot of people expect that an adoptee will focus on or expect the the reunion story or the knowledge story.
I'm actually more interested, I think, in the [00:39:00] emotional truths that get uncovered in that process than in really finding my own story. I've done the DNA tests and the birth searches and things like that, and my brother has asked me, he asked me before I did any of that stuff, he's like, "Why don't you wanna know?
Don't you wanna know? I wanna know. Who, who wouldn't wanna know?" And I was like, "I'm not ready." And then I was like, "Is that true? I don't know if that's true." I think what's true is that I have decided I don't need that to be a whole person. And in fact, I think maybe that's what poetry does for me, and well, writing in general does for me, is that I have decided how to form my own myth- my own origins and my own person in order to move through the world in a way that feels satisfactory and fulfilling for me, and that's not for everyone.
And it's actually a thing that I asked BK Jackson, the editor of the [00:40:00] Relative Strangers anthology. She was like, " would you be willing to write an essay? Someone, another contributor recommended you, said I should get in touch with you." And I heard the concept of the anthology. It was like meeting relatives who are strangers and thinking about just any kind of genetic displacement, if you will.
And I said, "I don't have that story. I've never met a relative stranger. Would you be interested in an essay from me about not finding any of those answers?" Because I do think that is something that's extremely painful and not talked about enough, that I have become strangely comfortable sitting with.
And she was like, "That's actually great. No one else is really writing about that right now." And so it gave me a real opportunity to think about absence. The, the white space, which is also very common for poets to sit with, is the white space around the text on a page, is something that [00:41:00] maybe that's why it feels very familiar to me to be writing about not finding people and being okay with it.
And yes, I would like to know, but I'm also okay not knowing. And maybe the poet Mary Ruefle talks about yet. She'll be like, "Oh, I don't like that thing, yet. I might change my mind." She'll be like, "I don't like that movie, yet." Which gives a future forward and an acknowledgement of who you are in the moment, but an, an opportunity to change your mind with it, which I think is a really beautiful human thing that we don't talk enough about.
Haley Radke: I'm so grateful for you sharing that. Thank you. We do focus more here often on the reunion, and I know it's not possible for everyone, so I always wanna make sure we have space for that. I'm running out of time with you, Marci, and before we do recommended resources, I just wanted to thank you for your [00:42:00] involvement in starting the Adoptee Literary Festival which has been so meaningful personally to me to see so many of my friends get a platform and-
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah
Haley Radke: an opportunity to share their reading. I've heard you share about it on other podcasts where you and Alice Stephens were discussing how you wanted to make it as accessible as possible. And so if you've never heard of the Adoptee Literary Festival, you can go back and watch all the many of the sessions, I should say, and participate in it at your leisure on YouTube.
So is there anything you wanna say about that before we do recommended resources?
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Ooh, yes. Thank you for bringing that up. It truly became a space that, it's the sort of thing where you build the thing that you wish you had which is very much how I've built the communities and connected with those people who want to do those things in [00:43:00] specific ways.
And we don't have to be everything to everyone because we recognize that everyone is building something, and that's also why I love your recommended resources part of the podcast because it's a little bit of everything. Cumulatively, we get to grow together as a community and learn. And the Adoptee Literary Festival is a real... it's a space that when Alice and I were building it the first year, we were like, "I don't know if anyone's gonna show up. Maybe 10 people. Maybe 100 if we're lucky." And it was literally Zoom was like, the Zoom webinar was like, "How many people do you think are going to show up?" And they're gonna charge you based on the number of people they think, the attendees that they're gonna let into the room.
And it turned out that we had over 600 people showing up in the first year, and it was a new connection, too, that- we both thought we were pretty plugged in to a lot of things, and yet, and it also, ... I s- I firmly believe [00:44:00] in any space that you are, you leave it better than you found it, and if you are able to open a door, you leave it open if you can for the next people.
But also, one of the things that Alice and I ended up learning together was, people are very concerned about bringing people to the table, and between my day job and just the creative world, a lot of the questioning I'm now in my new era of is, do we need a table, or why can't we just make the table bigger?
Why do we have to even think about a table, right? How do we re-envision and innovate a lot of things? And the Adoptee Literary Festival is just that. The second one was two years later, and it morphed entirely. And we were like, "It doesn't have to be the same as the first thing." And so it's really cool to think of it as a tangible growing thing with whoever is at the helm.
Haley Radke: Love that. Okay, so I ... It won't be a surprise. I want listeners to pick up your poetry book, Hour of the Ox. We already talked about The Pearl Divers. And I say [00:45:00] this about almost every poet who comes on the show, but it's absolutely true of you, too. Your vocabulary is so meticulous- ... precise. And I pictured you reading aloud some of the poems.
The way you play with words, I can read it in my mind. I hear things audibly and, ... when I read. And I think, "Oh, man, she has ... She knows the sound of these words," certainly. So I look forward to hearing you read sometime. And then we both talked about Relative Strangers, this collection edited by BK Jackson of Severance Mag, which many people will know her from.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship. And your essay, The Truth Untold, it's so wonderful. I wanted to read more. You have more essays online that I found we'll link for folks, but you're just such an amazing writer, Marci. Thank you for-
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Oh ...
Haley Radke: the truth you bring [00:46:00] into the world. It's just a real delight to get to read your work, so thank you.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Thank you so much.
Haley Radke: My pleasure. What did you wanna recommend to us?
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Ooh, I would love to recommend The Starlings Collective.
Haley Radke: Yes.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: So The Starlings Collective is a group of BIPOC adoptee writers that I connected with through Kundiman and then the greater community.
And there are a lot of poets, and then there's some essayists. There's some fiction writers. Alice Stephens is part of it, Tiana Nobile, Sarah Audsley, and Ansley Moon, who has a new book coming out in 2026 called Register the Missing, which chronicles an exploration of the 50 million girls in India that go missing have gone missing over history, and it's also an accounting of her own experience as a, a transracial [00:47:00] adoptee.
So The Starlings Collective, we have a list of resources on our website of people- things that people have recommended to us that have helped us in our journey. That includes creative work as well as critical work, even movies, documentaries, even graphic novels books for children. I think a couple therapists also that work with adoptee folks.
And we also do a quarterly book club where we we look at a different book in a different genre every single quarter. And it's just a great community of people. It was a way for all of us to keep in touch and do something that was for us that we wanted to share with anyone else who wanted to join the conversation. And it's just been a little lighthouse in my life since we've started it.
Haley Radke: I love that. I've seen many of the events on Instagram, the word I'm looking for is advertise. And I thought, "Oh my gosh, they're doing it." So amazing. Love it. We will link to that and your work. [00:48:00] And would you let us know how we can connect with you online?
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Yes. So I have an author website, Marcicalabretta.com. I do have some social media. Instagram is probably my most active, and it, the handle is Marcicalabretta across all platforms. And I would love to connect with folks.
Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you so much, Marci. What a delight to get to speak with you today.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Thank you so much. This has been such a fun conversation. And thank you so much also for the work that you do through Adoptees On and everything else.
Haley Radke: Thank you.
I am so thankful for adoptees like Marci who are brave enough to start something and invite the rest of us in. Whether it's the Adoptee Literary Festival, The Starlings Collective, another book club or support group, these spaces exist because someone took that first step. Someone thought we need this and was willing to [00:49:00] do it.
It takes courage to put an idea out into the world and so much work to keep showing up and making it happen. To those of you creating places where we can connect, share our work, and feel understood, thank you. If you're listening in real time, make sure to go to our Adoptees On Instagram account because we have a book giveaway for the anthology we were just talking about, Relative Strangers, and you'll find all the details on how to enter right on the Adoptees On Instagram.
Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.
