Shae Lee is a quiet speaker whose words, and phrases flow like a gentle breeze. But don’t be fooled. There are gale-force winds in the wisdom and insight she gave me when we sat down in September 2022, for this conversation about poetry, adoption, and the power of words.

Susan: Thank you so much for sending your poetry to me. Each of these pieces had words that captured my attention, formed something really coherent for me. In your poem “Tenderness” I loved this phrasing: I’m saying hey to tenderness lately when it arrives all sticky and drooping with heavy uncertainly riding shotgun hollowing out a cavern in my chest again.

I love this phrase: All sticky and drooping.

Shae: Isn’t that how it feels? It’s just whawww, so heavy. For those of us who are so sensitive it often feels like something you can never be free of. It’s always with you somehow.

Susan: That just laid me open. And then I really connected with the phrase from your poem “Curated from Sand:” This masculine love, a baby girl shouldn’t have to birth her survival on her own, out of nothing, in grief and pain. I do it every day.

Shae: Yeah, that’s an area where when I speak it, when I read it out loud for the first time, that just came out and it was almost like this salvo, like boom boom boom boom. Because I do feel like there’s this intrinsic moxie that if you decide I’m alive and I’m valid you have to tap into it, and so it’s like once you start chipping out of the despair, you just have to keep going. So, when I wrote that it literally just fell out just exactly like that. And my heart breaks for everyone who’s had to do that in whatever form, whatever gender, whatever culture they’ve been in. It’s hard to do this on your own.

Susan: Thank you so much for sharing. Before we start, can you give me just a brief introduction to who you are?

Shae: Of course. I was born in South Korea in 1970. My birthmother kept me for nine months, against tremendous odds. At nine months I was malnourished, and she made the decision, I think for us both to survive, to relinquish me for adoption. I feel very fortunate because what happened after, she had no control over.

It was a hard life when I arrived here in the United States. There was a nine-month lag. So there were chunks of nine months: nine months to form, nine months with her, nine months before I arrived here.

I remember getting off the plane, I remember the handover. It was terrifying because there was the energetic moment where, as a toddler—I was very aware—I turned around in this semi-circle for the handoff, which looking at now, is so cold and inhumane. It’s just like handing over a package. And the woman who came to claim me, I sensed from the get-go that there was untold sorrow in her, and I was supposed to fix everything.

I grew up in Wichita, Kansas. I married my college sweetheart. We have two beautiful, incredible, grown men now. Will and I divorced many, many years ago. I think that there were so many beautiful aspects of our marriage, we remain partners, we remain family. I feel thankful we were able to raise our children together.

Now that my sons are grown, I largely feel like I’m raising myself. This is the first time I’ve been able to do that with access to wonderful resources and beautiful people, and to have the awareness to really care for myself in a way I didn’t get when I was younger.

Susan: Isn’t that amazing? I think it’s an age thing. It’s like we give ourselves permission to explore those hidden places that we kept locked for so long. Because there’s no one around to catch us in the act.

Shae: Yes, that’s a beautiful way to put that. And when I think about that intrinsic moxie, that survival instinct, that strength and that fortitude, I don’t know that I’ve never not had it. I think I was gestated in utero in stress chemicals. I think I was born into a pretty harsh… I had the love of my mother at that time, but she was stressed out. I’m sure that I felt that. And then everything else. And so, I do think that the ability to be able to genuinely care for myself and to attend to all of the ripples and the emotions in a very loving way, in a contactful way, it’s a blessing to me.

I do feel like my first and greatest victory in this world is raising my sons. I’m just so thankful that they did not have to endure what I had endure and what I experienced. They had their own challenges, but they’re fully equipped, and they know that they are secure and that they are loved. That’s pretty darn good; I’m pretty proud of that.

Susan: Congratulations! Everyone needs to have a congratulations for getting their children to that point, because raising kids is a labor of love, with labor being a capital “L.” I don’t know that you are able to say, “Okay, done. See ya.”

Shae: It evolves. In raising my sons, I tapped into what I always needed in terms of security and consistency and presence. I’ve tried to offer that. But I felt very connected to my birthmother. Even though I only knew her in the flesh, outside of her womb for nine months, she’s part of my life every day.

Susan: You write poetry, you write beautiful poetry. Are there any other styles of writing that you do?

Shae: Not that I present to anyone else. Journaling pretty much has saved my life, and that was from the moment I could write words. I wrote poetry, I just wrote my feelings out because there was just so much I couldn’t express in the physical world. I definitely couldn’t be witness to it. So writing, in terms of public consumption, poetry is my vehicle.

Susan: Let’s talk about journaling for just a moment. I’m not going to ask you any questions about specifics, but I like to hear how people write in their journal. Some people write narrative, some write in bullet-points, others add artwork, like drawings or small watercolors. And still others write for a specific purpose, and as a result their journals read beautifully. For instance, perhaps they’re written for their children, to help them understand their parent’s experiences. How do you write in your journal?

Shae: That’s such a cool question. Thinking back on the scores of journals I’ve filled and later felt unease with, hoping they’d never see the light of day, I feel like my style is almost a letter to self, to my past self, to my future self, to self right now, in terms of comforting. It almost sounds parental at times. It’s almost like our bigger consciousness, our bigger awareness, is on the paper.

I have this phrase that I use, I call it boots-on-the-ground self. In our great self, we see, we understand everything. But the boots-on-the-ground self, this is what’s in our body, this is how we experience the world. Boots-on-the-ground self has no idea what’s coming next and is always fearful that this is permanent. The big self knows otherwise. It’s kind of with this dual consciousness that I write. My boots-on-the-ground self will say, ok, this is what happened today, and this is how I felt about it. And then my wise self will instantly pick that up and say and this is what I’m going to do with that experience, because I know this, we know this. It’s almost like a self-comforting measure.

My journal writing is incredibly personal and awkward and sometimes brilliant. Like our writing, the styles of journals we write in is important. I like the ones that open up flat. And then I’ll shelve them away and every once in a while, I’ll get out a stack of old journals and I’ll read through it and I will actually rip out everything that isn’t true now, that I don’t want to take with me, and sometimes that journal has like three or four pages. Other times I rip out what I do want to keep and give thanks to what I don’t and then I go ahead and get rid of the journal. I feel like I try to curate and edit what really stuck through the years.

Susan: That is so powerful: I rip out the stuff that is no longer pertinent to my life right now.

Shae: You know what the big key part of it is? When we go back with our editor brain, when we’re reading it, there’s just so much criticism. I go back with compassion, with intense compassion for that version of me, because boy, was she lost and sad and lonely and hurt. And angry. About things she ought to have been angry about. She had every right to be. So, it’s with a lot of compassion and gratitude. I have to be in that kind of a place to read through it, like a younger self, or a little sister, and not shame them. Not shame them for what they experienced, and what they chose.

Susan: That is beautiful. You’d said earlier that you’d always written in poetry. If you had to take that decision apart and just critically look at that decision, what led you to use that genre of writing?

Shae: Let me think on that for a moment, because my gut immediately says poetry is the distillation of the journals. With poetry, you can very precise. It’s like bouillon cube, you concentrate it and then it’s like this chunk, a word, a phrase, maybe its two or three words; that concentration might be the truest thing that you say.

I had a visual when you asked me that question, because growing up there was such a block to communication. It was almost like I was cleaving a crevice and just shoving the words out there: I do matter. My feelings are here. I am valid. And so, poetry has always felt like rebellion. It felt like the quickest, most irrefutable way, irrefutable is the word I want to use there, to express my perceptions of the world that weren’t always welcome. When I was young, in the abuse that I experienced, so much of it was the silencing. Of everything, of the feelings. That’s what was given to my adoptive mom. And that was largely how she parented. She devalued and demeaned anybody that wasn’t hers, or of her voice. I guess, in a nutshell, poetry was the most concise way that I could say “I matter.”

Susan: Writing poetry escapes me. Therefore, I have so much respect for people who know what to do with all those words. And how to bring them into being in a way that sparks connections, or imagination, or joy; sparks something where you just have that connection with someone else.

Shae: Okay, you’re making me tear up. I’m honored. Thank you for saying that. And a part of me is like, I don’t know if I deserve that. I don’t know if I’m there. But I really appreciate the way you just said that. I’m just letting it be near me.

Susan: Good. Wrap yourself in it because it’s true.

Shae: It definitely feels like a different way to experience the world. I think in poetry.

Susan: I think the genres we fall into are the genres most familiar to us in our head.

Shae: Yeah. I can only speak for myself, but that’s what feels true. I can write essays; I can write chapters. I’ve written small, short, not-great plays. I can do those. I have experience arranging words. But poetry is what makes sense to me. And when I read someone’s essay, like in the Adoptee Voices writing group, when I hear the brilliant work, I’m so floored every week by just the quality of talent and skill for these people just to bleed their heart on the page. And when they read it, I hear it in poetry. So, if someone says to me, “I don’t know what to do with poetry,” I’m like, you are writing it. You are writing a long version of it.”  But to me poetry is truth. It could be awkward and ugly or transcendent; it’s all the things we feel. Poetry is like striking all the extra words but keeping that kernel of truth.

Susan: I’d like to ask you something, and this is a big ask: if you were to paraphrase all of your poetry, what do you want your readers to walk away with?  What do you want them to know about you, know about your experience?

Shae: A couple of things. The first one is there’s dignity in being here. And that’s such a fear that we all have. That we in our humanness and in our brokenness, our fear and our despair is that we’re undignified and we’re shameful and not worthy. And the truth is that there’s so much dignity in just being in this skin, being here, being able to express our feelings, express ourselves.

And the second, probably most important thing is, you’re not alone. You’re not alone. And I don’t know if my poems are just kind of like, from an ego standpoint, it’s an “I’m here, I matter, this experience is valid.” It’s kind of like the final say. Also, it’s telegraphing to you, “I see your pain, I see where you have felt like you’ve had to birth your survival. I’ve seen how tenderness lands in you and how that informs your life.”

So, to me it’s also a linking. It’s a lot of reassurance, or maybe an affirmation that this life is hard, but there’s dignity in being here, and you’re not alone.

Shae Lee, poet, has so much wisdom to share and to listen to her quiet words, filled with such strength and fortitude is to feel connected. Thank you, Shae, for talking with me.