Something is Afoot: An Interview with Andrea Ross, Author of UNNATURAL SELECTION: A MEMOIR OF ADOPTION AND WILDERNESS

Andrea Ross’s debut book, Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness (CavanKerry Press, 2021) explores the rewards and dangers of exploring the natural world, living an unconventional life, and questing for ancestral identity. This suspenseful read is a surprising and poetic yet accessible narrative. As an adoptee, I was attracted to the subject matter, and discovered an elegantly structured and nuanced book that relies on pacing and imagery. It is a memoir devoid of confession and cliché, a feat as deft and daring as the two interconnected experiences Ross describes: living as an itinerant back woods nature guide, while searching for clues as to her family of origin. The Grand Canyon and the canyon of sealed records mirror each other, and she describes facing them with the same curiosity and fortitude.

In the last year, adoptees have made great strides in recentering the adoption narrative to focus on the people most affected and most ignored: adoptees themselves. Writers, filmmakers and podcasters have gone public with meaningful works addressing an experience that the culture both glamorizes and illegitimizes, one that makes detectives out of ordinary citizens as we seek information and connection that the rest of the world takes for granted: ancestry, heredity, and family. I took special interest in discussing these powerful shifts in perspective with Ross, as much as discussing her craft.

We spoke in person on March 26, 2022, during the last hours of AWP 2022, after she moderated a panel called, “Each Book Another Me: Mapping the Progression of Self Over a Career.” A mix of fatigue and buzz, adrenaline and soul, filled the halls of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, as friendly maintenance workers moved the loiterers like us toward the doors.

During the panel Ross introduced her work this way: “My first book is called  Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness… it maps the human need for belonging both from an adopted person’s perspective for belonging to community, belonging to other people but also belonging to landscape: the idea of landscape as a surrogate for lost family, landscape as the body of the beloved and landscape as a living breathing entity which we are in relationship with.”

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KFK: So in the panel you reveal that this memoir started as a book of poems.

AR: I can send you some of them if you want to take a look at how the poems and the prose interface with each other.

(The corresponding poem and prose excerpts are at the end of this interview.)

KFK: I would love that. It was interesting hearing you talk about how, because of audience and message, that it had to turn into prose.

AR: I'm glad you caught that. My memoir has a certain reader in mind. I wanted to explain to people who aren't adopted or haven't been touched by adoption, the particular brand of loneliness that adoptees experience, especially when they're from closed adoptions in which they're not allowed any information about their origins. The book I'm working on now has a completely different audience and I think that as a writing teacher we talk all the time about who is your target audience? What kind of background information can you assume they have? What do you need to tell them? What kind of language or jargon or vocabulary do you use?

I thought, “I really need people to get the message and it's not coming across in poems even though I just spent two years working on them.” But it took a lot longer than that to write the book as it turned out.

KFK: How long did it take?

AR: I would say beginning to end probably 10 years. I was also raising a small child and trying to launch my career as a teacher and so I didn't have a lot of time to devote to it, but also a lot of it was just really hard stuff to go into and I had to pace myself because I would just get sad and I didn't want to go too dark and not be able to pull myself back out. I would set aside time for writing the really hard stuff and try to compartmentalize, so yeah it took a long time.

KFK: So you saying, “This is going to be really hard to write…” I have to say I had this book sitting on my nightstand for a week thinking, “This is going to be really hard to read…” because as you know I'm adopted, too.

 AR: How did you find it when you did dive into it?

KFK: I felt… lightened. It was a great feeling… So tell me about your three semesters with poet Lucille Clifton.

AR: I mentioned in the book I was not an English major or a creative writing major as an undergrad, but I did like to write and so I took an intro to poetry class. Once you've taken the intro poetry class at UC Santa Cruz, you were allowed to try to get into the advanced poetry class, but you had to submit a portfolio to be considered. I imagine there was some pressure on Lucille and the other professors teaching that advanced class to only accept people in the major, but she said she would just kind of meditate on people’s manuscripts and pick the ones that she felt that were people who had something that needed to be spoken, and somehow that happened three times.

She's sort of a patron saint because I don't know what I would have ended up doing if I hadn't had the boost from mentors like her. It really was kind of like sitting in the room with a prophet because she would just say these things that were so profound. She was such a national treasure and she touched so many people. I just felt super lucky to have had that time with her.

KFK: Did you read Guild of the Infant Savior: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book by Megan Culhane Galbraith?

AR: I did.

KFK: What do you think of it?

AR: I liked it! Megan and I have been in contact ever since we realized that our books were being published at the same time. I like that hers is so different than mine. It makes me feel more secure that mine has its own niche but interestingly so much of it is just saying something similar, the closed adoption stories of people just really needing to know who they are and not having access to that. Then the next part of the story is if you do search we all seem to have the same fears and hopes, that they (our biological parents) might be dead, they might reject us, they might be the most amazing person… Or we might have the Kunta Kinte “I have found you!” moment.

We all have that range of fears and hopes around reunion, but then she had a completely different experience with finding her natural mom than I did. They were really into each other at first, and now they're estranged. Mine has been much more even keeled than that. I never felt like, “Oh now I understand why I am who I am.” I didn't and I don't really see myself reflected in my natural parents so much, but nonetheless even though we're super different and have really different politics and values, they're all really committed to being in relationship, even though it's not super close.

I get envious when I hear stories of people who were like “I look just like them.” But in terms of the best possible outcomes, I think I lucked out. I've been in reunion with my natural mom for 20 years. That's pretty unusual. Often reunions run their course in less than 10 years, partly because there's no map charted for that relationship and so it's just really hard to figure it out. I think a lot of times somebody just kind of drops off. It's probably not unlike what happens with some open adoptions these days where people go into it with good intentions and wanting to do the right thing for the child by keeping everybody in contact, but then it gets hard because you're parenting somebody else’s biological child, or you are the biological mom and you are coming to grips with, over and over again, the fact that you have relinquished your child. I think it's similar in an inverse way.

KFK: There’s trauma in both staying in touch or being apart. “Adoption is trauma.”

AR: So much trauma.

KFK: That’s still considered “a theory.”

AR: How's that for those of us who have lived it? We know that it's not just a theory.

KFK: Did you see the documentary Reckoning with the Primal Wound? Are you part of The Adoptee Army?

AR: Yes and yes. Did you get your name on The Adoptee Army list at the end of the film?

KFK: I was late to the game, but when the film gets fully released, I'll be on The Adoptee Army list.

AR: It was so gratifying to see my name and to see so many names on that list.

KFK: It's growing and growing.

AR: Such a good idea that she (director Autumn Rebecca Sansom) had to just make that list in the credits. I was telling a friend of mine about it recently. She said, “It kind of gives me chills… it sounds like the Vietnam memorial, except that was everybody who died and these are the people who lived, but are lost…” So it’s a different kind of reconnection…

I found out about that film because I was asked to be on the podcast called Adoption: The Making of Me, which has been going for about a year. The premise is it's two adopted women who are about my age, mid 50s, who have been friends for a long time and they decided to do a podcast in which they would each read a chapter of Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound, discuss it on their podcast and then bring in a guest whom they would interview.

They brought me on and said, “We saw that Nancy Verrier blurbed your book. How in the heck did you do that because we want to contact her!” I totally cold called her and she was just so generous. They're like, “We want to bring her on because we're reading her book!”

They contacted her and she got back to them eventually and she told them that this Reckoning with the Primal Wound film was happening, and they told me.

Just like you mentioned in your email, something is afoot. I don’t know what it is yet, I am really looking forward to finding out, but something is afoot with the adoptee community and just with adoption in general and the way that people are talking about it and exposing things.

KFK: My thesis or theory is the idea that The Primal Wound was published in 1993. It was such a groundbreaking book, to acknowledge that infant adoptees had suffered a loss, that we are not blank slates. I started going to Joe Soll’s Adoption Healing Network support group in New York City around that time. I think it's taken us this long to get well enough to tell our stories, to make art, to be open enough. I’m also not sure what it is, but it seems like since the last generation did this work that helped us get well, that's its now our time.

AR:  Megan and I are exactly the same age, and the podcast women…

KFK: Me, too.

AR: There's something about this coming of age, into the age of “no fucks left to give.” Like fuck all y'all, I'm gonna speak my truth! There's something about being over 50. Just suddenly, not suddenly, but gradually, we've matured and learned that we just have to live our lives the way that we want to live them and if that means telling hard truths, then so be it. That is really interesting, that we are all the same age.

KFK: The Summer of Love, right?

AR: I thought maybe that was my genesis but my natural mom was so conservative she couldn’t have even known what that was, but she was having sex anyway as people do.

KFK: Surprising who has sex!

AR: Almost everybody, turns out!

KFK: You handled that so well in your book. You left a lot off camera, but we knew you were being pretty wild in many ways. I like that.

AR: People always ask me, “What's it like to have people know this really intimate stuff about your life?” And I’m like, “You don’t know the half of it.” I didn't really want it to be about my sexuality, but part of that was about the search for self, trying to be fulfilled through in relationship with other people, especially dudes, yeah, a lot of bad boyfriends…

KFK: A powerful scene in the book was when you found the wounded hiker. I thought that if this story couldn’t get any more wild and dangerous…

AR: The more time you spend out in the wild the more likely you are to come across the extraordinary, whether it's something really scary like that or something really beautiful… I was squatting to pee in Alaska when I was out backpacking and I looked up and there was a wolf standing there, the only time I've ever seen a wolf. The wolf checked me out and walked away. I never would have seen that if I hadn't been out backpacking in the Alaskan tundra. That happened one day out of the hundred days that I was out there.

KFK: You are so courageous to do these things! I love the outdoors but…

AR: Some of it is recklessness, the recklessness of youth, and also the adoption loss of self. I felt like I needed to pitch myself against the elements (snaps her fingers) to feel alive, to prove that I was worthy of walking the earth, so that was a big part of it, like testing myself against the elements, what can I do, how far can I go with this till I feel like I am deserving, like I'm worthy somehow.

KFK: A great line in the book is, “Participate in your own rescue!” That’s a sticky note on the refrigerator line.

AR: (laughing) That one just got handed to me. The river rafter really did say that and I remember being just puzzled at the time, like how can I possibly participate in my own rescue? I'm sitting here in the Grand Canyon in this freezing cold water, I just got flipped out of a boat. I can't participate in my own rescue and then of course it's just such a direct metaphor for what we do as adopted people as wounded people, people who have gone through traumas. How much do we have to freaking participate our own rescue? Well turns out a lot. Like you were saying about going to the adoption groups and healing yourself, like it doesn't really happen unless we do it ourselves.

KFK: I think if Reckoning with the Primal Wound gets picked up on Netflix or Hulu or HBO then people scrolling will actually learn something about themselves or their adopted family members. It's hard to get someone to pick up a book.

AR: I found it so powerful the way that she was able to field the perspectives of so many different parties involved in the adoption constellation. Just to see a sibling, her bio sibling, grappling with what that meant. To be like, “suddenly I have this sister.” I had the same thing with my half-sister and it's hard for her. I think getting that validated is really important, just as much as it is for our experience to be validated.

KFK: Somebody in the chat room after the Zoom film screening said, “I had a failed reunion! Why do you have to keep telling me Cinderella stories?” That felt like “ouch.” We have to acknowledge our privilege that this reunion worked out.

AR: There has to be ways for people to deal with that. Like what Megan is dealing with. That’s got to hurt. A lot.

KFK: The empty picture frame is in the book more than once. It's very interesting it wasn't just to end the book.  She wrote, “I was not allowed to use this photo” under it.

AR: It's so emblematic of the rest of our lives before reunion. We aren't allowed to use that because we're not allowed to have access to our own stinking birth certificate. I just got mine four months ago. I was doing an article about how it's done on a state-by-state basis. It’s a giant mess and up until only like five or six years ago Colorado where I was born did not allow it at all and then the law changed. I was like, I haven't been keeping up on my homework and so I just went ahead and sent away for it and got it. It was weird.

KFK: Did the article find a home?

AR:  It was published in The Conversation. What's cool about it is that it gets picked up by lots of other outlets so when I Googled my article after it was published on The Conversation and all these other outlets had picked it up, so it goes out into the world in a way that it's hard for writer of my platform to otherwise do.

KFK: Congratulations on the book and now your article! What’s next for you?

AR: My next book is more joyful and it's about women and friendship and the outdoors, so my target audience is people who want to experience that joy.

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Andrea Ross did send me two unpublished poems that later became chapters of Unnatural Selection. Here is an excerpt from one, and an excerpt of the chapter of the memoir after it.

The Skull

(This event is referenced in Unnatural Selection’s chapter called “Ruins and Ladders”)

A gratefulness.

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         Nothing exists except the present.

A foothold—

         We’re always experiencing a present moment.

sandstone, the Navajo sandstone.

         The past and the future are simply ideas.

Footholds in the sandstone’s face: each a fist-

shaped niche, deep as a toe, a couple of knuckles;

         We are not subtle enough to have a science of becoming.

a foothold is a handhold.

         Nothing is ever one thing or the other.

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Excerpt from Unnatural Selection: “Ruins & Ladders: Navajo National Monument”:

“In my little tent that night, missing Don, I distracted myself from my preoccupation with the cattle by envisioning the footholds and handholds I’d seen chopped into the gritty Kayenta sandstone during my descnt into the canyon that day. Known throughout the desert southwest as Moqui steps, they are prehistoric pathways, climbing routes carved by the Ancient Puebloans. I knew it was important to leave any archeological artifact alone so that it might be preserved and appreciated by future generations. But were the steps artifacts? All I knew was that they called to me. I desperately wanted to put my hands and feet into their small recesses to see how they fit, to find out where those hanging cliff trails would take me.”