You may know Eli Harwood from her popular Instagram account Attachment Nerd, but what you may not know is that Eli is also a brilliant adoption-competent therapist who spent two years living in Seoul working with Korean adoptees at the beginning of her career. (And you can trust us, adoption-competent therapists are our jam!)

We talk about how Eli ended up working with the international adoption community, the barriers for some adoptive parents in supporting adoptees, what kinds of stuff can come up when adoptees spend time in our birth countries, childhood trauma and attachment wounds, and finally, the importance of hope in the healing process.

A licensed therapist, author, and educator, Eli has more than 17 years of experience helping people process relational traumas and develop secure attachment relationships with their children and partners. Her new book, Securely Attached, a guided workbook to help heal insecure attachment patterns, is now available. Eli also has three children, one husband, two cats, and an extraordinary number of plants!

It’s been a minute but we’re back! And we’ve missed you! Catch up with us from Hana’s car as we reflect on the past year, and have an (awkward but very real) convo about career changes, perceived failure, and navigating big life transitions.

Friendship might seem like a random topic for an adoptee podcast, and this series - of which the current episode is the first - is an experiment, tbh, like a lot of things we do here. But lately we’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Maybe it’s because of the pandemic and the isolation that many of us felt, maybe it’s because Hana moved to Korea and had to make new friends - multiple times, or maybe it’s because of a larger cultural conversation around the role of friendship in our lives, alongside and in addition to fulfilling romantic and familial relationships. Friendship is also at the heart of our podcast - for 3 years now, we have been interviewing people, writing and recording stuff as a way of continuing our own conversations about adoption (and other random shit) over thousands of miles.

In this conversation, the three of us talk about how we define a friend, what friendship means to us, what it takes to maintain friendships, whether it’s harder to make new friends as you get older, and more.

Korean adoptee Leah 양진 Nichols is an award-winning filmmaker and designer currently based in Seoul. She works to expand models of kinship, increase access to collective histories, and champion the compatibility of trauma and joy. She is best known for her short film 73 Questions (2017) which won the 2018 Social Impact Media Awards (SIMA) Creative Activism Award.

What are you afraid to feel? Fear? Sadness? Anger? Whatever it is, adoptee coach Susan Stam (강선영) wants you to stay with it. And then stay with it a little longer.

Adopted from Korea at the age of 4 years and 7 months to the Netherlands, Susan works as a coach specialising in relinquishment and adoption-related issues with AFC (Adoptee and Foster Care) Netherlands, founded by Hilbrand Westra (our Episode 17 guest!). But the path to becoming a coach wasn’t easy; Susan struggled with her own issues, including a hypersensitivity to rejection so strong that she could "smell it", relationship addiction, and insomnia - issues that only started to heal after she became conscious of her relinquishment and adoption trauma.

In this conversation, Susan talks about her own journey and then shares some strategies for when we feel triggered, for getting out of our heads and into our bodies, for learning to connect to our feelings rather than numbing or pushing them away, and for setting boundaries when you’re a self-confessed people pleaser. And then, Susan catches us off guard by turning the questions back on us, and we both get real about some shit!

Get ready for vulnerability, feels, and some super practical tips that we hope you will find useful!

To learn more or to get in touch with Susan, visit

www.afcnederland.nl

Bonus gifts from Susan!

 

Susan’s personal k-pop playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3fdlzhOhucBpEgyGPWE4xG?si=73a55990c17e4c9d

 

Susan’s go-to kimchi jjigae recipe:

Susan uses Maangchi’s recipe (http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/kimchi-jjigae) with a few tweaks:

• Always make your own stock!

• Substitute red radish if you don’t have Korean radish or daikon radish

• Use preserved anchovies in oil instead of salt (to taste)

• Omit sugar

We had SO MUCH FUN with this guest and we think you will too. Korean-Australian adoptee Ra Chapman is a writer, actor and dramaturg. She has strong ties with the adoption community and works closely with Asian-Australian and diverse artists.

Ra is one of those people who has been on our list of guests to invite for a long time, but we were just waiting for the right moment—and here it is! Ra’s debut play, K-BOX, which won the 2021 Patrick White Playwright Award, will premiere at the Malthouse Theatre next month (and we are so freakin’ proud of her!).

K-BOX is a surreal comedy with an Australian Korean adoptee main character named Lucy. Lucy has just quit her job, dumped her boyfriend, and turned up on her adoptive parents' doorstep needing somewhere to crash. She's depressed, she's a mess, and she's stumbled across an old cardboard box that was once full of childhood memories but is now completely empty.

Lucy and her parents haven’t always seen eye to eye on everything, but when a K-Pop star mysteriously wanders into their lives and starts asking destabilising questions about her Korean roots, new fault lines are exposed in the family unit that become impossible to hide.

In this episode Ra talks about the inspiration for K-BOX, as well as her transition from acting to writing. Then Ra shares her experience as an Asian Australian actor and writer, and her thoughts on diversity and representation in the Australian arts scene. Plus, we make our acting debut reading a short excerpt from K-BOX, we learn some industry lingo, such as “meat puppet”, and much more.

K-BOX opens at the Malthouse Theatre, in Melbourne, Australia on 2nd September 2022. Book tickets here! https://www.malthousetheatre.com.au/tickets/malthouse-theatre/k-box/

Today we're in for a treat! An outcome of some gentle encouragement from me (Ryan), in this episode Hana shares a beautifully written account of her Korean language learning journey thus far. In the loose form of a listicle - because we can't resist a good list on this podcast - here's 10 'lessons' Hana has learned about, well, learning one's original language as an adoptee, how it differs from learning a foreign language as a hobby, the frustrations and joys, the pressures and the rewards. And of course, on brand, this episode gets deep into some feels.

In this episode we have the pleasure of speaking to Korean adoptee and award-winning writer James Han Mattson. We start with James' path to becoming a writer and the moment when his Iowa acceptance letter arrived in the mail. He treats us to two readings of his work: an extended excerpt from his recent novel Reprieve, and his essay “Letter to a Stranger” published in the literary magazine Off Assignment, which is about a pivotal moment during his time living in Korea. We discuss some of the themes explored in Reprieve - including the complex intersections between love, desire, and racial preferences - as well as the challenges of learning one birth language in one’s birth country, while you’re also so deeply engaged in your craft as a writer who publishes in English. Finally, James tells us about how his time in Korea changed his writing and gives us the scoop on his new novel in progress, which features a Korean adoptee protagonist.

James Han Mattson was born in Seoul and raised in North Dakota. He reunited with his birth family in 2009. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is the award-winning author of two novels: The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves and Reprieve, which was a Fall 2021 Book Pick by The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, and the TODAY show, among others. He is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen Magazine.

You can follow him on Twitter: @jhmattson or check out his website at www.jameshanmattson.com

In this episode we talk to the inimitable Jenny Heijun Wills and touch on some of the themes that - we feel - go to the very core of our stories and our storytellings as adoptees. Consent and access. Fact and fantasy. The challenges of charting our way through the stories people expect - often even demand of us since we were children - to aim for something that serves us: the nuanced narratives we deserve to have, and which we are allowed to create and invent.

Jenny Heijun Wills is a multi-award winning creative writer and scholar, whose most notable contribution is the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize-winning book titled Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related, published by Penguin Random House Canada in 2019. She is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg and is currently writing two novels.

​For more on Jenny, head to: ​https://www.jennyheijunwills.com/

Twitter: @JennyHeijun

IG: @jennyheijunwills

Born in Daejeon, Korea, and adopted to the United States at the age of ten months, Lee Herrick is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, a finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award, Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire. He is also the co-editor of the anthology The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. As well as being a celebrated poet, Lee is among one of the kindest, most generous, and sincere guests we have ever had the pleasure of talking to on the podcast.

In this broad-ranging conversation, Lee treats us to a reading of two poems from Scar and Flower, including “How Music Stays in the Body.” We then speak to Lee about his journey to poetry, about the fundamental fire that drives his art, and his process of coming to peace and forgiveness following his second trip to Korea and an unsuccessful birth family search. Most of all, Lee wants all of us to be ok, and after talking to him we feel that - just maybe - we will be.

CW: This episode mentions suicide.

Read "How Music Stays in the Body" here: https://poets.org/poem/how-music-stays-body

For more about Lee, head to: https://www.leeherrick.com/

Adoptee Literary Festival, 9 April 2022: https://www.adopteelitfest.com/

This is a special compilation episode featuring six powerful short pieces about first encounters with food from our birth cultures, read by their transracial adoptee authors, from our recent autobiographical writing workshop led by Korean adoptee Mee Joo Kim. Hana also has a little chat with Mee Joo about the value of adoptee-only spaces. We hope you love the short pieces as much as we did! We’d also like to thank the Overseas Koreans Foundation for making our writing workshops possible.

If you would like to contact Mee Joo about future writing workshops or life coaching services, you can email her at [email protected]

Stay tuned for more interviews with our writing workshop facilitators!