255 Sarah Audsley
/**Haley:** 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. We are thrilled to introduce you to Sarah Audsley today, Sarah's debut poetry collection, Landlock X, is our June adoptees only book club pick.
Today Sarah shares about how a reunion with genetic family in Korea only opened up more questions for her. We talk about cultural differences, context that can be lost in translation and how she may be an anomaly with accurate records from the adoption agency. We talk through several of Sarah's poems and our excitement surrounding the growing body of adoptee literature.
Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. If you join us in June, you'll have access to our brand new Ask and adoptee therapist event, as well as the adoptee's only book club with Sarah Audsley.
Stay tuned to the end of the show and I'll tell you more details. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, AdopteesOn.com. Let's listen in.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees on Sarah Audsley. Welcome, Sarah.
**Sarah Audsley:** Thank you so much, Haley. Thanks for having me.
**Haley:** I love a poet. I gotta tell you. I can't wait. We're gonna talk about your book a little bit later, but first, do you mind sharing a little bit of your story with us?
**Sarah Audsley:** Yes, and I love that you love poets. So my name is Sarah Audsley. I grew up in Central Vermont in a log cabin that my father built, and with white parents. And spent, you know, on my entire childhood in the same house and then always wanted to be a writer, was writing poetry when I was in elementary school and in high school, and then had clearly no idea that the writing world existed.
Didn't know that there were MFA programs, and it wasn't until I was in 29 until I realized that I really wanted to, that's what I really wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer. So I naturally gravitated towards processing my life and my emotions and my experiences through writing. I have a journal from when I was 10 and 12 years old, of letters that I wrote to my imagined biological father and a mother, which might be my next project to dive into looking at the, that handwritten journal.
Flash forward to today. I published my debut poetry collection in February of 2023 with Texas Review Press, and it's called Landlock X and I'm really proud of it. It took a long time to finally get to this point. And I'm also a Korean American adoptee. A transracial adoptee which I think is very important to anyone who's engaging with my work.
And then I've also gone back to South Korea in 2013 and did meet my father. That's a little bit about me.
**Haley:** Thank you. I'm curious. From you saying even at, you know, 10 and 12, these journal entries that you were writing to your biological parents, what led you to discover, can I search, can I look? What is that going to look like? What age do you come to that?
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, I think the journal entries, when I was a young person, allowed me an imaginative space to have dialogue between these people that essentially are also characters in someone's imagination. So I grew up knowing that my biological mother died from complications of my birth and that my genetic or birth father was not able to care for me, which is why I was adopted.
So the path to the search, which is pretty common in any adoptee's journey or experience- and I think of adoption as a spectrum of consciousness or awareness of how important it is to consider as part of your identity. In 2003 was when I first attempted a search, and that was, I had some friends whose parents were in Seoul in South Korea, and I sent them my adoption paperwork, which my parents had a file folder in the file cabinet in the basement. And I asked for those papers. And I sent them onto my friend's parents who were in Seoul. And at that time I got feedback back from the post-adoption services that my biological father was indeed alive. But he at that time was not a interested in connecting with me.
And I was also told that he had remarried and had a son and a daughter, so I had half siblings and that shows up a little bit in the collection. In the third section of the book, there's a poem called The Half Sister Unmet, and then there's a poem of Planet Nine, A Primordial Black Hole, New Research Suggests, which references the half brother.
That journey began in 2003 when I was 21, and I was interested in making some type of connection. And then it took another 10 years for my genetic father, biological father to be interested in contacting me because, as adoptees know, sometimes you don't have accurate records. Sometimes there is no paperwork at all, and depending on if the adoption is closed or open, they won't put you in contact with each other unless both parties want to be connected.
So on the cusp of 30 was when I received a handwritten letter and a translation in English and a photo from the post services with information from my father. And, the collection, the poetry collection opens with the handwritten letter from my father, and then the book is divided into three sections, kind of like a triptic, like a painting that has three panels, and the book opens with disorientation.
With the untranslated handwritten letter from our biological father. And then there are three erasers of the English translation that appear. Each one appears in the, each individual three sections of the book. So I wanted the book to open with disorientation for someone not to be able to read it. I can't, I don't read or write Korean, so I can't read the letter.
I need a translator to translate it for me. I also needed a translator to be physically there at the meeting when I met, when we had a meeting yeah.
**Haley:** I wondered if it was his actual writing.
**Sarah Audsley:** It is, yeah.
**Haley:** Because it's so neat. It doesn't touch one line on here, and then the content of it is, you know, I read it as deeply emotional as someone who is still closed off to you a bit could be.
And so I don't know, what did you have this feeling when you saw it? I get this feeling of oh my gosh, I don't know what this means. I don't know. And when I look at it, I'm like, oh my goodness. It's very like neat and precise and I don't know. Did you have a thought?
**Sarah Audsley:** So I think that when I look at it as an object to use in a poetic form, what the erasure form allows me, allowed me to do was to pull out or push back certain parts of the text and to repurpose and interact with the text in a new way.
On receiving the handwritten letter and the English translation and the photo, I wanted to respond, but it really did take me six months to, to compose like a six page letter to write back. And knowing that was also going to be translated, you know, that there was gonna be a process of sending something that would then have to be filtered through in translation.
The sentence that is the most interesting to me was, "she left you like that", which was describing the death of the birth mother, which was the catalyst for the choice for adoption. And that, just that very short sentence. It's only, how many words is that? 1, 2, 3, 4. Four words. Seems so like impactful and direct.
Also like a simple, declarative sentence of that. That's how it was. This is how it was. So the process of interacting with that translation was pushing forward all the I's. The capital I and the lowercase I in the first translation, and then the third one has pushed forward all, they you's, the word Y O U and then the letter U.
So you have you. And then you have I, I. And then the middle translation has pushed and pulled forward certain words, certain sentences, like "she left you like that" is highlighted. And I was really thinking about agency and the pronouns of the I and the you. And then the center middle translation really wants to highlight just certain words, certain fragments.
So it's interesting to, for adoptees interacting with our documents. And I see that as a way to process experience and also as a creative exercise and craft ability to craft your work your experience through the, a poetic form and a poetic tradition.
**Haley:** I have combed through some of your social as I do when I prepare for an interview.
**Sarah Audsley:** They're all about my dog. There's a period where there was no dog photos, and then they're all dog photos after that.
**Haley:** We love dogs here, so that's all good. That's literal, that's nothing to do with what I'm gonna do. Say I am gonna say something superficial later, but that's not, it's enough.
**Sarah Audsley:** Okay, that's fine. Go ahead.
**Haley:** No, in some interviews you've done and things, and you know what, I find you, you're very outspoken on reproductive justice and women's rights and those kinds of things. And it comes through in your work, I think. And so when I read this line, when he says, if you are married since you were 30 years old now, he wondered if you were married.
And I was like, oh. Interesting. How does that, you know, come across to you as well? That's this other curiosity like of his, this other connection to someone else? Possibly. And I don't know, I just thought, oh this would be hard for me to take. I think. I don't know. I'm, maybe I'm reading into too much, but do you have thoughts on that?
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, it's really funny. I think that the letter, the content of the letter really reveals cultural differences and opinions about what success looks like from a Korean father point of view. And yeah, I very much feel American and very much coming from a feminist point of view and the way I navigate my life and in the choices and decisions I make.
So the assumptions that are, that come with those types of statements and questions are wondering like, if I'm married or if I have a good job, is revealing of what success looks like in his, in a Korean father's point of view. And really yeah, one, one could think, well, you know, my success has nothing to do with you. In that I'm only genetically related to this human, this person.
And also shows a value system too, and certain things. I was like, oh well, I wouldn't value certain things that he values. So I find it both like revealing and also a little bit cringe worthy on some levels for the assumptions that, you know, that he is making. I, you know, I don't wanna have children personally. I have tons of friends who have kids, but that might be a metric of success for this person that now made me by semen and blood, which is a line from one of the poems in the book.
**Haley:** Thank you for sharing that. I think. It's so insightful the ways that you pull out these different pieces for us as a reader to take us along that journey with you and in doing so, I can imagine, you know, that might feel very scary cuz it's ex, these poems, they're extremely personal.
So much of your work is, it's, you know, it reads as autobiographical. And so I'm assuming that's true for most of it. And so, how has it been for you now to have revealed yourself in these ways through your poems? Now I know some of them were previously published, but to have them all together as a collection and I got to read this and be like, wow, I feel like I really know you before I even got to talk to you.
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, thanks for that question. I've been thinking a lot about that question as bringing the book-- the book's only a few months old now cuz it was published in February and. I'm like deeply committed to poems and to the potential of poetry and for how it's deeply important to me in my life. And in Poetry Speak, we talk about the first person speaker, the first person as a speaker.
And I've been beginning to think of it as a persona that we get to inhabit and to process our lives and our experiences through this first person speaker. With that being said, it is a very close, you could read it as very close to me, to Sarah Audsley, as a person in the world. The, that the first person autobiographical information that you're reading is a version of the truth.
And the other thing that I like to have a little bit of a boundary or a barrier around it when I'm bringing that deeply personal work from the private into the public realm through publication, is that I firmly believe that it's art. And that the book is a work of art. And that through writing and then through revising over and over again and through the choices that I've made, that the first person speaker and my story has been transformed through the process of creating art.
And so yeah many, I have some several friends who have bought the book and one of them messaged me and said, oh, it's like spending time with you, Sarah. Which is a very friendly way of putting oh, I think I learned more about you and therefore know more about you and your life.
And I think that's true. Like I think you could read the book and make many assumptions and learn a lot, but I also hope that the book also achieves and contributes to adoptee poetics, and is in conversation with other adoptee poets and, also, you know, conveys feeling and meaning and does more than just quote unquote tell my story.
I hope that it also is a work of art in and of itself. And that's maybe that's my best effort or my best hope for the book. But I do think that any person now in the world with especially adoptees, I think we need to be careful about how we bring our stories forward. And because it is risky because there could be misunderstandings or, and there's also stereotypical story narratives around adoption.
And so I've been nervous about confirming or affirming certain biases around the adoption industry. But this, it, the book is grounded in my lived experience and there are moments of racialized moments in my progressions that I have experienced that make it, make its way into the book. So as I've been doing, moving that work from the private into the public route through readings and these types of wonderful opportunities. I'm open to having these conversations because I want to be having these types of conversations and contribute to the conversation.
And then the last thing I'll say is that, I think that anyone who is working in any medium, whether it's like visual art or performance or documentary or writing, and if you're adoptee, I feel like you have to be ready for that shift from the private to the public. And that at the end of the day, you get to choose how much you tell or how much you don't tell, and you can always say no.
**Haley:** Absolutely. You can always say no. We just what I tell people at the beginning of our interviews, if I ask you something you don't wanna talk about, please tell me and we'll just move on.
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah.
**Haley:** You know, our stories are one of the only things we have agency over saying or not. Right. Especially as adopted people. Well, I love how some of the things you highlight in the book, like you, you literally have a piece about the Adoptee Citizenship Act and you know, so I was like, yes. I'm so thankful for that. Anytime fellow adoptees are highlighting adoptee issues to the general public, like it just feels frankly it feels subversive, which is silly that it has to be that way still, but very empowering for the rest of us to be like, okay, great. Somebody said it, you know? So thank you for adding to the chorus of voices around that.
Let's talk about art for a minute, because your cover-- I have not wanted to put the book away. It has been sitting on my desk since I got it because the cover is so gorgeous and you talk through the book, the color is so present in, in almost every poem.
It's mentioned multiple times in multiple ways and I saw you mentioned somewhere in some other conversation like, oh yeah I kind of would love to be a painter, maybe, or you know, so can you talk about the process of coming to this gorgeous cover by a fellow artist and then the importance of color to you.
It maybe, before you answer that, I'm going to say my superficial thing to you, which is in deep diving, your social Sarah, I became enamored with your earring collection. Because they're all huge and beautiful. And I was like, I would, I like those. I like those. I like those. So anyway, complimenting your taste in jewelry.
All right, let's go back to art and color.
**Sarah Audsley:** Thank you. Well, my favorite jeweler is Erica Walker and she lives in New Hampshire. And shout to Erica Walker. I'm a little embarrassed on my love for jewelry, for the amount of money that goes towards it. But there's something really wonderful about choosing what to adorn yourself with and it also kind of is, it's both decoration and also powerful in what you choose.
And also I think that it can also be like an armor and a shield. Like you could, you know, get dressed in the morning and put on your, the necklace that's gonna be, you know, the thing your talisman for the day. So that's my superficial answer.
**Haley:** Which is not superficial whatsoever.
**Sarah Audsley:** I also gravitate more towards stones and rocks from the earth and from the land, which is a nice segue into the book cover. So the book is called Landlock X and the cover art is by a visual artist friend who I met at Vermont Studio Center, where I work, where I run the writing program manager at Vermont Studio Center.
Nancy Kim is a Korean American artist who lives in Italy. And she was a artist in residence in I think 2019 where we met each other and we stayed in touch and I sent her the full manuscript before, pre-publication. So she read the whole book and we had a Zoom and I asked her if she'd be willing to do, provide the cover art for my book. And she was going to make individual pieces in response to the poems, but we just didn't have time because my publisher needed an image within a week and it just wasn't gonna be enough time for her to make, to do her, create a process to make individual pieces based on the poems.
So I was scrolling through her social media and I was like, I like this one or this one. And one of the choices was already in someone's private collection, so it wasn't available. But the one that we ended up with is called How A Yellow Hollow, and she made it in 2021. And it's paper pulp and silicon and acrylic paint.
And if you ever are able to physically get your hands on the book itself, we were able to wrap the image around the spine and there's minimal text in the, typically poetry collections have several book blurbs on the back, but we wanted to maintain the integrity of the image. So we included only one book blurb on the back and then four as the inside first page that you open.
And then I also decided not to put my photo on the back of the cover. My photo and bio longer bio, are on, is in the back of the book. So really wanting to maintain the image, I love the color. It is this hyper vibrant yellow, green chartreuse that actually also changes depending on what lighting it's in.
And the form of the cover itself evokes both land, it's both land and not land. It has both locking the water and also po like negative space and positive space. And you can also physically see like the impressions that her fingers were making in the paper pulp. So I'm, I love the cover too, and I really feel like it's both engaging and also gives you, you were like, oh, what is this?
What am I about to enter into? And the color yellow recurs throughout the collection and the color yellow for East Asian and myself becomes like a interesting color to meditate on. So it can be a racialized color. Some people are referred to Asians as yellow, and I was interested in that color, both in my, some of the experiences I bring forth in the collection, and also I'm surrounded by visual artists in my job and interested in painting and the creative process through the color yellow.
But also you end up just seeing it everywhere. Once you start fixating on something ends up becoming an obsession and you end up just seeing it everywhere. So yeah the color yellow recurs throughout the collection and both in its form that, in that the form that appears and takes in nature, like through birds or flowers or, and then also through the ways in which it can be used in art.
But then also how it's also color that becomes racially charged.
**Haley:** It's really this powerful theme through the whole book that I was, you know, paying attention to the whole way through, which is a testament to your strength in writing and trying to highlight that for us. I am, I don't know, I was just really struck by the way you describe things visually. And then when I found out you, one of your hobbies, is you know, climbing and being in nature and all of those things, I was like, oh, okay. I kind of get it. Like you're very interested in what nature looks like and being, you know, connected to place. And so I think those themes come through as well.
Can you talk a little bit about your love for being outdoors and exploring and what that means to you personally? We talk so much about, you know, therapy and you know, processing or adoptee stuff on the show and I'm wondering if that's any piece of it for you.
**Sarah Audsley:** I am not currently in therapy. I'm slightly resistant to it because I've found ways to process my experience in other ways that I would call therapy. And that is, you know, spending time with my dog and also spending a lot of time outside in nature. I do feel a deep sense of place and belonging in the landscape where I live.
I also lived in New Hampshire for 10 years before I moved back to my home state of Vermont. And that 10 year period was, you know, biking and climbing, ice climbing, back country skiing, cross country skiing. So moving in the landscapes and in accessing different trails and peaks and summits has been really important to me for decades now.
And what I've realized is that in a world where I might not feel belonging in either a racial group or, you know, because I'm adopted and feeling like you know Korean, but both Korean, but both not Korean, not having grown up in Korean culture or, so not feeling like I fit in certain ways, I always feel like I fit into the land and place where I live. And that has become very important to me to maintain that level of access.
So I typically don't really go to the city very much, but I do like to visit, I like to kind of dip in and out. So I'll go for very brief periods of time and visit friends who have more urban lifestyles and I do really love engaging with museums and like the food, like I, I am very much lacking in different types of cuisine and food access where I live.
But yeah the sense of place and belonging for me really comes from my ability to see an experience, a landscape in all different seasons as well. Which I think comes through in the work, in the poems, just paying it attention to the detail. One of the things that I really enjoy is visiting, revisiting the same hiking trail or mountain summit or river or stream or whatever in different seasons, and watching it evolve and change over the course of the regular natural changes that take place in, in nature.
So I am an introvert and I spend a lot of time alone walking my dog in the woods. And that has provided a level of belonging. And also, if I call it, you know, my, my church, my therapy is going into the woods.
**Haley:** So you've got writing and nature. Those are the like processing tools that you have cultivated over your 40 years so far on the planet. I love that. Now, I don't know if you're gonna be able to think of this immediately or not, and so no pressure, but I live in Alberta. And I'm wondering if you can think back to when you were in Banff, and if you were working on any of the pieces that ended up here, anything related to where I live, Sarah?
**Sarah Audsley:** So Haley's referencing, thank you for doing the really deep dive. You're a very good researcher.
**Haley:** It's not creepy when it, when you're an interviewer. Right.
**Sarah Audsley:** Exactly.
**Haley:** That's the job. Yeah.
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, I spent, I had a five week residency at the Banff Center and The Banff Center is located in Banff, and they have a literary arts program. They also have performing arts and a really great indigenous writers program as well. And I was working, I was definitely working on poems for the book during that time.
Continuum came from that time period. The poems about my half-brother and half sister came from that time period. They started as epistolary poems, so you know, "Dear... Blah, blah, blah", "Dear... Blah, blah, blah". So poems with the direct address. Like writing letters.
**Haley:** Can we pause at the Half Sister Unmet?
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, sure.
**Haley:** That makes me so happy that you wrote part of that here, because when we got to the last line, I giggled so hard because. It's a spoiler. Can I read it? Is that okay?
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, please do. Yeah.
**Haley:** The last li like, it's like all this like sweet stuff about, you know, what sisters could be, right? What the relationship could be like, and the last line is probably we would've hated each other. I don't know why that just killed me.
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, I, it's funny, it's, yeah. It's a little unexpected cause the po the rest of the poem is oh, it would've been like this, it would've been like that. It's like in an imaginative sort of space.
But the reality is like probably we would've hated each other.
**Haley:** I'm in reunion with two half sisters and a half-brother, and to, to my delight, we have all sort of cultivated these really amazing relationships.
**Sarah Audsley:** Oh, that's so wonderful.
**Haley:** And I'm a mother to two boys who would like to kill each other every single day so I just hit my sweet spot right there. I don't know, it was just, that's one of my favorites, just for that reason.
**Sarah Audsley:** It's true. It's, or you know, in this imaginative space, it could be anything, but, you know, it's also a nod to the complexities of what you're saying of being a sibling.
**Haley:** Well, let's do, let's kind of wrap on that topic before we do recommended resources.
Let's talk a little bit about siblings. So you grew up with a brother who was also adopted from South Korea, but you had no biological connection too. So you knew an adoptee growing up. Did you guys ever talk about adoption?
**Sarah Audsley:** Yes, my, my brother is a year and a half younger and we're not genetically related. So we, my parents had us involved in a Big Brother, Big Sister program which is based in Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Which is about 20 minutes from where we grew up. And in that area called the Upper Valley of Upper Connecticut Valley, which is in between Vermont and New Hampshire, there were actually a fair, enough Korean adoptees to have a little big brother, big sister group. Haley's just nodding her head and laughing a little bit.
**Haley:** Okay. I'm la Okay. I have two things. So one of my regular co-hosts that's on Patreon, Carrie Cahill Mulligan, she, I was just there to visit her. She works at Dartmouth and she lives there, so I've
**Sarah Audsley:** Oh, wow.
**Haley:** I've been there.
**Sarah Audsley:** Oh, so you know where I'm talking about.
**Haley:** Yeah, I do. And then part two to that, one of my other regular cohosts for Patreon is Sullivan Summer and she was raised in New Hampshire as well to white adoptive parents. And she's black and she is told me many times, so I should be able to summon the statistic up and I cannot in my, it's like less than 0.1% or something of people of color that live in that state.
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, very white. Very white.
**Haley:** That's why I'm making the face like, wow, okay. There was enough Korean adoptees to have a group. Okay, carry on.
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, I think it was like maybe like less than 10, you know. Maybe it was like six of us or seven. I don't know. I don't actually remember. But you know, during that mid to late eighties period, there was a large number of Korean adoptees that were exported from South Korea. And I think that the number I've heard is like around 200,000 Korean adoptees, but actually no one really knows, I think because of the inaccurate record keeping that was taking place.
So this is all to say that my brother and I were part of this Big Brother, big Sister program. And so we learned some things about Korean culture, and both of us grew up knowing our adoption stories. I won't share his, because that's his own story to, that he owns, and I wouldn't wanna share his story without his permission. But we have two different stories behind our adoptions or the ones that were told to us that from our adoptive parents that are, that is more or less backed up by the paperwork that we have available to us.
So my brother was not interested in returning to Korea with me when I went in 2013. And he has not reached out or tried to, done a search, or expressed interest in a reunion. And, you know, I'm totally respectful of his relationship with adoption and also with his knowledge and relationship and interest in his own story.
Even though we grew up together in the same household we've had different paths and journeys around thinking about how important or how not adoption is to our own individual identities. And my parents always provided the information that they had to us. So we grew up knowing each other's stories.
**Haley:** I think you have this like unusual case where your paperwork is like accurate and it played out just and they had so it's unusual, I feel like.
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah, it is.
**Haley:** Compared to so many of the Korean adoptees that I've gotten the honor of speaking with. So thank you for sharing that. Has your brother read any of your poetry?
**Sarah Audsley:** I will answer that question, but I just wanted to go back to that comment on having accurate records. And being able to do the search and for the search to come to fruition or to have, to end up with a reunion. At that time, I didn't realize how rare it was for that circle to be quote unquote completed. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to have that experience.
But also I will say that it just brings up more questions. Because the more information an adoptee receives can end up just bringing up other questions. So in many ways, there, there is a rec-- it doesn't matter what-- I mean. It matters. It so matters to go through that process and it can be so heartbreaking to not be able to find, to have a successful search or to not get any information.
But that too can be the information that you have. So I just wanted to acknowledge and not devalue anyone else who hasn't been able to go through that process. And I also think it's really risky and it takes a lot of courage and vulnerability and kind of blind faith to pursue that.
And the other thing is that I never did a blood test to actually confirm that the person that I was looking across at the room was actually my genetic father. I just trusted, but I blindly trusted the paperwork to be accurate. Which is sounds, it's kind of weird to think about. But anyway I just wanted to make sure that I, we make space for everyone's ability to both search or not search, and that those things are out of your control. That having accurate documents are not --something that you just can't control. And what you have is what you have. It's kind of a weird inheritance.
**Haley:** Yes. Thank you for that acknowledgement.
**Sarah Audsley:** And then, so you asked about my brother, and my brother has a copy of my book as do my adoptive parents, and.
I don't actually know if he's read it. I think he has read the poem-- there's a poem in the book called Swarm, which is a childhood memory of,
**Haley:** Never forget.
**Sarah Audsley:** Yeah. Where you know, we're kids and we're biking on the property and we hit a log and all these wasps come flying out. And I got in trouble because I didn't help my bro.
I just got out of there. And I got in trouble for not helping my brother not staying to you know, get him out of there too. And this poem is it's, and it also has a very connected to the farming culture that I grew up with. And hanging, and references my brother.
So I think he is, I think he is read that and we just joke about it around the dinner table at my parents.
**Haley:** Okay. That's a scary poem. It's coming from someone who, last year, let the wasps carry on a little too much in my yard to the point where some of 'em came inside. Oh, do not recommend.
Anyway, let's do our recommended resources. I have nothing to do with wasps. I love that you said chartreuse in our conversation because that's the color I was going to use to describe your cover, which is gorgeous and I hope everyone grabs a copy of Landlock X. It is really phenomenal. And I'm not just saying that cuz you're right there.
I loved it. And I can't tell you the amount of time I have just stared at The Waiting Children art at the back where you have covered the photos of waiting children, waiting to be adopted with these beautiful flowers. And also made found poetry, when you like cross out some of the words in their descriptions, like it's just remarkable.
It's so powerful and unfairly, no one else can see it, but it's behind you as we record. It's just so gorgeous and heartbreaking at the same time. And I hope that through our conversation folks can hear how much I enjoyed your poems and reread. And in fact, we loved it so much. We invited you to do our book club this month.
At the end of June, Sarah graciously agreed to come and be our featured author for June. So we're reading Landlock X together. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can come and join us live for that Zoom, and if not, you just still need to get Sarah's book. It's just amazing. Amazing. And just for the people that maybe poetry can be intimidating sometimes, I found your work very approachable. And of course I've, you know, found new things upon second, third readings, but it overall, like it was not easy to read. I don't wanna simplify it like that, but it was very approachable and just loved it. Fellow adoptee. Well done.
**Sarah Audsley:** Thanks Haley. Yeah. Shout out to poetry. You can read poetry.
**Haley:** Yes.
**Sarah Audsley:** Don't be afraid.
**Haley:** You too. You too can read poetry and understand some of the meanings behind it. And we probably won't truly know all the things that you've hid for us in there, but some of those is what we interpret for ourselves as well. Right. So it kind of can go both ways.
What do you wanna recommend to us, Sarah?
**Sarah Audsley:** Thank you so much, Haley, for having me and for giving me this opportunity to talk to a fellow adoptee and to be in touch with people in your community. I'm so impressed by the community that you built, and also I think that's really lovely that you're asking anyone you're interviewing to have a recommendation for another resource.
And so my recommendation is Cleave, by Tiana Nobile. And .She is a fellow Korean adoptee and actually a dear friend from graduate school who invited me to join her in the Starlings Collective. We are an adoptee collective that has list of resources on our website and also we do also do an adoptee book club cause there can be many, several ones.
And it's so exciting to be together in multiple different ways and to have multiple access points for adoptees to engage with each other. I didn't have, definitely did not have this when I was growing up, so I'm super grateful. But Tiana's book, Cleave, is also a poetry collection and she was also been interviewed by Haley on Adoptees On podcasts.
So you can listen to the interview with Haley and Tiana and also pick up a book Tiana's book. She's a master of folding in research into her poetics, which Haley highlights in the Adoptees On interview with Tiana. Tiana is a dear friend and I think I see her as a sister and also as a fierce adoptee activist and advocate for our voices to be able to tell our own stories.
So I have deep kinship to her. Thank you for asking. Yeah.
I
**Haley:** love that you recommended her. I didn't know that you guys had that connection when I invited you on and I, I know I gushed about Cleave on her episode, which is 180.. It is so good. Oh man. Of course you're friends. Of course. That makes all, everything makes sense now. Okay. We will link to that. We'll link to the Starlings Collective.
I know Tiana has done several courses for fellow adoptees who are, you know, getting into poetry writing and I know you guys have done online events together and poetry readings and things, so make sure you are following Sarah and Tiana for sure.
Where can we connect with you online, Sarah?
**Sarah Audsley:** Sure. I have a website. It's SarahAudsley.com and SAudsley, so Saudsley on Instagram.
**Haley:** Perfect.
**Sarah Audsley:** Thank you so much for our conversation today. Thanks, Haley. Thanks for having me for all you do for the adoptee community.
**Haley:** I'm so excited that Sarah's book is our June adoptees only book club pick. We are recording that book Club event live on June 24th, and if you are a patron, you can join us. I hope you'll join us. Our co-host Sullivan Summer will be interviewing Sarah and many of our adoptee friends will be joining us as we discuss this tremendous poetry collection.
We have just announced some changes for the adoptees on Patreon community, and I'm really excited that we are gonna be having a new monthly event with direct access to some of your favorite adoptee therapists who have appeared on this podcast. If you have questions you'd like to submit to our therapists, you can join us at adopteeson.com/community, and there's a link to the Ask and Adoptee therapist form in Patreon.
Our first live event, if you're listening to this episode, when it goes live, is next Tuesday, June 6th, but we will be having these monthly a portion of them will be recorded and dropped into the adoptees off-script podcast feed. So even if you can't join us live, you will hear these therapists share their advice with us.
So I'm really thrilled that we can bring you this brand new resource. Okay. Join us for book club. Join us for Ask and Adoptee therapist. Thank you for listening to Adoptee Voices. Let's talk again next Friday.
