It was a year ago that I received a Facebook message from a Sara Easterly, inviting me to participate in some cockamamie scheme she was calling the Adoptee Voices writing group. I am a recalcitrant naysayer by nature, but something about Sara’s enthusiasm, vision, and verve was infectious, and so I found myself agreeing to join Sara, some dude with the mononym Ridghaus, and a woman with a golden voice and the wisdom to go with it, Jennifer Dyan Ghoston, for the first cohort of the Adoptee Voices writing group.

While Sara drew up a schedule for 2021, I initially agreed to just one session at a time. I didn’t want to get sucked into something I would regret, like that time I signed up to be PTA Secretary, and couldn’t get out of it for the next four years because no one else wanted to step up and do the job.

I quickly discovered that Adoptee Voices writing group gave me back just as much—if not more—as I put into it. While I hope that the writers have benefited from my writing expertise and advice, I know that I have greatly benefited from hearing their stories. Gaining new perspectives, I am constantly amazed at the adoptee’s capacity for resilience and our writers’ tender regard for each other.

And now, here we are, one year on, at the end of our fifth cohort, about to start the sixth. Sara no longer has to ask me if I’m on board for each upcoming session—she knows I’m committed.

Since that first cohort in 2021, Sara’s vision has only expanded. She and Jennifer, along with sage therapist Kate Murphy, lead the “Honor Your Voice” writing group on Mondays; on Wednesdays, she, Ridg, and I facilitate the “Hone Your Craft” writing group; and she and Susan Devan Harness are collaborating on a once-monthly group for published authors, “On the Page.”

Appropriately, paper is the traditional gift for a first-year anniversary. From the very beginning, adoptees’ lives are defined by paper: amended birth certificates, doctored documents, official records that are kept hidden, other official records that are fictions of bureaucracy. A Korean adoptee, I am a “paper orphan,” declared by the government to have no mother and father, even though there is another document with my mother’s fingerprint on it, signing over her rights to me, forever severing our bond.

But, we adoptees can also reclaim our lives on paper. It often starts in childhood, when we keep secret journals that are the repository for all the confusion, anger, and hurt of our identity issues, alienation, and the yearning to just fit in. We seek refuge in the books that let us know we’re not alone, that speak to our marginalized souls and make us feel seen and included. And after we have emerged from the fog, we pick up pens to write for our very lives, becoming the subjects of our own stories, reframing the adoption narrative, word by word, page by page, writer by writer.

It is our great pleasure, then, to present the fifth edition of the Adoptee Voices e-Zine, “On Paper.”

Happy paper anniversary, Adoptee Voices! May there be many reams to come.