[petermbooth]

Hi all!
My name is Peter and my wife Amy and I have three children all of whom were adopted through foster care. (In fact the finalization for our youngest happened just 9 days ago! Yay!). We have been foster/adoptive parents for 13 years and in that time have met a lot of people with a lot of stories. Earlier this year we decided – with encouragement from our local Department of Children and Families – to try to collect stories of families that were formed (or added to) through foster-adoption. All year, off and on as time has allowed, we’ve been working on getting the news out about our anthology out to the adoptive community around the country. We sent a mailing to every social service agency in the country and put advertisements in Adoption Today and Foster Families magazine. Today I’m coming here to post a little information in an effort to ferret out some more writers. Given that this forum is called “Foster Child Adoption Stories” this seemed like a pretty obvious place to get out the word. So, here’s the info…

[This information is the text of an email that we’ve been sending out to people who contact us about the anthology. It contains most of the pertinent information and should give you a good sense of our project.]

At this point the anthology is in it's infancy -- well, maybe we've moved beyond infancy to the toddler stage -- but we're still just getting started.

We are looking for essays of about 2,00-7,000 words that describe some part of the adoption experience. Because this is an anthology, we really want each essay to cover a different angle so that a family who is considering adoption can read it and see a diverse range of experiences, give them things to think about that they hadn't before. For instance, we have a woman in W. Virginia writing about the fact that she can't go to Walmart on Saturdays anymore because so many of her children's birth-relatives hang out there (she has 10 children!) and how so many of her children are bio-siblings. She would adopt one and then a few years later a little brother or sister would come along and she would adopt that one as well to try to keep the family together. She has five sets of sibs. Another woman is writing about being a lesbian parent of 2 adopted girls. Somebody else is writing about blending her bio and adopted children into one harmonious family. One woman who has just adopted a 15 year old is thinking about writing a piece WITH her daughter, kind of telling the story from each of their perspectives. There is another woman who became a foster parent JUST so that she could adopt a young man that she knew. So she knew the child first and then backtracked to figure out how she could help him.

Probably the most important thing is to get clear at the beginning about what you are writing about and not try to tell your family's ENTIRE story. There are some very general guidelines on our website: http://www.adoptionanthology.com You should check it out.

Because most of our writers are busy parents and not professional writers, it is a slow process (as you can imagine!). But, as final products come in, we have been sharing them by posting some of them on the website. So far we have one story that has already been published in a different anthology of adoption (state, private, and open) stories. We have received permission from the author to re-publish this piece. It is available for reading at our website (www.adoptionanthology.com) Hopefully it can serve as a good model. The book it is taken from is "The Adoption Reader" edited by Susan Wadia-Ells. There are a LOT of excellent stories in this book -- again, they are not state adoptions -- and if you're interested in other examples, this would be a great source.

I look forward to hearing from you again as you begin to put your pen to paper.

Peter Booth
352 Vermont Route 15
Jericho, VT 05465
(802) 899-1391
petermbooth@yahoo.com
www.adoptionanthology.com

[RiverGal]

Just emailed this link to a friend. Hope you get some good responses...sounds like a helpful project.

Good luck!

~Deb

[petermbooth]

Thanks for passing on the info. We're doing our best to get the word out to as many people as possible. We're really want a diverse set of voices in the anthology so that hopefully everybody who picks it up will find a story that seems to relate to their experiences.
Peter

[RiverGal]

Bumping this back up in hopes more folks will see it...