I’m Maureen McCauley, a writer, editor, and artist living in Seattle. I hope this site and blog will be a place for conversation and candor about adoption, family, and possibilities for creative change.
Please check out my “Upcoming and Ongoing” page to see some of the projects I am involved with.
I’m the mom of four wonderful young people. My sons were babies and my daughters were 6 years old when they were adopted. They are all now in their 30’s. My children are Black; their adoptive dad and I are white. I am also the proud grandmother of an amazing 15 year old and a delightful 2 year-old.
I spent many years involved with adoption professionally, as the first executive director of the Joint Council on International Services, interim executive director of The Barker Foundation, and executive director of Children’s Home Society and Family Services East. That work helped me understand adoption practice and policy. The real life experience of raising four children (via infant adoption, older child adoption, transracial adoption, US adoption, international adoption) plus one “niece” who joined us at 16 years old, helped me understand love, joy, compassion, loss, grief, and hope.
I have also learned an incredible amount from adult adoptees in real life and via social media. My eyes and heart have opened so much since the time I first considered adoption.
I was a contributor to the first on-line adoptee-led, adoptee-centric magazine Gazillion Voices.
I am a co-editor of an anthology of essays by Ethiopian adoptees, titled Lions Roaring, Far From Home, which will be available soon. The writers are from 8 countries, and range in age from 9 to 50+.
Two of my adoption-related articles are “When Adoption Stories Don’t Have Happy Endings, in Slate, and A New Light: How My Daughter’s Pregnancy Made Me Rethink Adoption, on Catapult. I’m currently working on articles about liberatory grant seeking/writing as it relates to adoption, about the nature of hiraeth and my former home, and about marijuana use by people over 60.
