 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show, where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. I'm here with Amy Hoffman, who is a longtime activist, writer, member of the literati of the All Things LGBTQ community and the LGBTQ community in general. Welcome Amy. Thank you. It's great to be here. It's great to have you. We're here to celebrate this terrific novel that I finished last night, Dot and Ralphie, and we'll talk a little more about that soon. But first, let's start with an introduction that I will read, and it's from your website. And I'm going to use various persons, maybe second, third. Not first. Okay. A writer, editor, and community activist, Amy Hoffman is the author of the novels Dot and Ralphie, which we're going to talk about, in the off season, which takes place in Provincetown, looks great. And three memoirs, Lies About My Family, An Army of Ex-Lovers, My Life at the Gay Community News, and I think that's such a fabulous title for that book. I've always admired it, and Hospital Time. An Army of Ex-Lovers was shortlisted for a Lambda Book Award, and both an Army of Ex-Lovers and Hospital Time were shortlisted for the New York Publishing Triangle Judy Croan Award. Amy is currently a freelance editor, writer, and consultant. She was editor-in-chief of the Women's Review of Books for 14 years, from 2003 to 2017. And that's an amazing accomplishment. Thank you. I'm very proud of it. Oh, you should be. That's a wonderful publication. You are a faculty member in the Solstice MFA program at LaSalle College. Is that how you pronounce it? You've been an editor at Gay Community News, Southam Press, and the Unitarian Universalist World Magazine. You taught writing and literature at the University of Massachusetts and Emerson College and served as development director for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and the Women's Lunch Place, a daytime shelter for homeless women. Your creative writing, feature articles, and reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Gay and Lesbian Review, a publication that I also write for, women's review of books, and other publications. And I've seen your work over the years many times. And I was just commending you before we taped on your entry in that wonderful anthology put together by Richard Schneider about stonewall in search of stonewall. It was a great article. To continue, Amy has a BA in English from Brandeis University and a master of fine arts in creative writing from UMass Amherst, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Your activism has included, so this is a really full resume, working for peace with the Jamaica Plain Action Network and Jewish Women for Justice in Israel, Palestine, volunteering with the Reproductive Rights Network and Outright Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference. You've served on the boards of Gay Community News, Sojourner, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and the Boston Lesbian and Gay History Project, and as a judge of the Lambda Literary Awards. I can't believe you did that. What a lot of work. It's crazy, but I don't think I'm going to do it again. Well, to top it off, let's finish it off. As you write in Lies About My Family, you grew up in New Jersey, the oldest of six children. You've lived in Boston since 1973. When you're not writing, you enjoy meeting, playing the violin, basically yoga and hanging out with your wife Roberta Stone. Very impressive. Thank you again. Let's start with your writing career. Have you always been a writer? Um, I wrote. Well, I guess the answer is yes. I mean, I wrote a lot as a child and as an adolescent. I wrote lots of poetry like a lot of people do. Unfortunately, when I started college, I stopped writing creatively and I also had a terrible time writing anything for a long time. But I started writing again in my late 20s, early 30s, and that was when I decided to go to graduate school and writing, mostly because I thought it would give me time to write. I don't think I realized that it wouldn't totally fund my writing, that I'd be doing a lot of teaching and other jobs as well as being a graduate student. But it was a wonderful experience, I have to say. I went to graduate school at UMass Amherst. I met a lot of really wonderful students and a couple of my teachers who I remained friends with for a long time after that. It was very inspiring and I didn't expect that when I went because I was writing openly lesbian work and I did not expect to get much support for that. But I was pleasantly surprised and, you know, people, there were a lot of people who didn't get it or who felt uncomfortable with it, but for the most part, it was okay. I mean, Northampton and the Pioneer Valley in general, where UMass is located, has a very active lesbian community and did at the time, and I think that that helped a lot. What year was this? I was there between 1985 and 1989 when I was kind of going to school and working and teaching and writing. You came out in the 70s, though, you said, you believe I read somewhere. Yes, I came out probably around 1976, 77. I worked at Gay Community News, so I was sort of very publicly out starting in 1978. And writing the entire time. Yeah, I mean, at GCN, I wrote a lot of news articles and opinion pieces, and I think it was mostly after that that I really started focusing more on my creative writing. Well, we're here to celebrate the publication, as we said, of Dot and Ralphie. How did you happen to write this novel? People have been asking me about that, of course, because I've been doing some of these interviews and readings since the book came out to try to get to promote it. And I realizing that the characters of Dot and Ralphie, that couple, have been in my mind for a really long time. I remember, I think I wrote a piece about going to the Michigan Women's Music Festival, which I did in 1977, I think, in the summer. But I wrote a short story about it, and in that story, there was a lesbian couple, just a glimpse of them, and one of them, they're sitting outside their tent, relaxing in lawn chairs, and one of them, I guess, who's the Ralphie predecessor, is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and a pair of plaid shorts. So I just had this image of them for a long time, like I said. And so when I started the book, I guess it came out of that image of these characters. And it ended up, I think of novels as kind of rolling snowballs that accumulate all kinds of stuff as they go downhill. So the characters, you know, as we were saying before we started our formal interview, have a lot of, they're getting older. I guess they're older than they were when I first conceived of them. They're dealing with various kinds of health issues and relationship issues. And they have a friend who is a little older than them, who is also passively experiencing the beginnings of some cognitive issues. So there's a lot of different things going on in their lives once I started exploring them and the snowball started rolling down the hill. Well, when I first saw the description of it, I thought I've got to read this book as my life. And then, you know, my experience of reading it as someone who came out in 1975, who is of a certain age, I loved all the cultural reference points, ours and the humor, you know, like God goes on a gay cruise and she says everyone's so nicely coupled and, you know, satisfied with themselves. I mean, they're in Michigan and all that sort of stuff that appears. That was delightful. But also, and I think you might have said this somewhere in the interview, not in an interview, there aren't that many books about aging lesbians that are affirmative and, you know, or at all, really. Jane Rool did write a book about an older lesbian couple, one of whom has Alzheimer's or some sort of dementia and that came out long, long time ago. So she, I mean, and the book is kind of idealized, I think, in that the character with dementia doesn't have a lot of the issues that go along with that. But in any case, she was really a ground breaker in so many ways, Jane. And one of the ways in which she was very original was in writing that book. How long did it take to write it? Oh, you know, I'm very slow and the book is very short, but it still took me, oh, I'd say probably two years at least, maybe three. I'm not exactly sure when it started and finished, you know, because there's a whole process of, you know, writing it and thinking I'm done and then we're having to revise it and revising it again and then getting feedback from editors. And anyways, I think I would say it took me, why don't I say three years. Also, you know, as you mentioned, when you were talking about my biography, I've always had a day job. And so my habit was to get up early in the morning and write before work. So I didn't always have a lot of writing time. But now you're retired? Now I'm retired. I don't know if I have more writing time than I did. I know exactly what you mean. So with this book, did you were able to maybe sit down and just write for eight hours, which I can't imagine doing personally, but... No, I can't write like that. I think, you know, unfortunately, I maybe because of this long-standing habit, but most of the time, you know, two or three hours that is stretches about what I can do, especially when I'm writing new work, I can revise for longer than that. And actually, I have had the experience of going to a writer's retreat. I've gone to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts many times. I highly recommended to any of the writers out there to apply. And the first time I went, I was terrified because I thought, what am I going to do with two weeks where I have nothing on my schedule, but to be at my desk. And actually, it was great. And I have been much more productive during my times there than I ever expected. And my concentration has been great. You know, I've been able to really focus for, you know, a big chunk of time on my work. So... What's the difference between writing nonfiction and fiction? Um, well... When words are rushed. The process has felt very different. I mean, for one thing, writing memoir, I think, takes a lot of personal work and excavation. And at least my writing, I'm fairly strict with myself in trying to be as honest as possible. And so it can be difficult, you know, just sort of psychically difficult, which is not to say that fiction isn't. But when I started writing The Off Season, which was the first fiction I'd written since graduate school, really, it felt so liberating. And it felt so light. It felt like a bubble. Because I could just make, you know, I let my imagination go and I made up all these characters. And I, you know, saw sort of how the relationships were evolving, which became a plot. And it just, it was fun. It was fun in a whole different way. So the experience, you know, for me was very different. And the pieces, the way that the structures of the books evolved was also very different for fiction and nonfiction. Nonfiction books I wrote in pieces. And then I had to figure out how to make the pieces all fit together to become a book. The fiction, I had at least the illusion in my head that I was writing from beginning to end. Of course, I had to, that changed. But it felt like I was writing from beginning to end. Let's give the audience a taste of the novel at hand. You've agreed to do a little reading from Dot and Ralphie. And would you mind doing that now? I am happy. Is that good enough for us? Yes, I'm happy to do that. I'll read just a short excerpt from, basically from the beginning of the novel. As we've been talking about the title characters, Dot and Ralphie are a lesbian couple. They're in their late 60s. Dot is a children's librarian. And Ralphie works for the Department of Public Works. So neither of them are retired at this point. Even though a lot of folks in their late 60s are, my parents actually worked right up until their 80s. So maybe that's my role model. But when the novel opens, Ralphie is recovering from knee surgery. And she and Dot are worried about whether Ralphie will be able to keep her job, her physical job, with a bad knee. Because she works, as I said, for the Department of Public Works. She does a lot of work outside. A lot of really physical stuff. Their apartment is also becoming a problem because they live on the third floor of a triple decker in Boston with no elevator. The typical, if you're a Vermont audience, will also be familiar with triple deckers. I think they're all over New England. They're just very typical working class architecture, three floor flats. And in Boston, at least, you don't have to put in an elevator unless you're more than three floors. Another character in this chapter is Dot's sister, Susan, also a lesbian who has just gotten involved with a much younger girlfriend, Jermaine, who is French-Canadian. On their way back from a six-month anniversary weekend in Ogunquit, Maine, Susan and Jermaine notice a sign on the highway. For an independent living community, for people 65 or better. That's what the sign says. And I didn't make that up. They want Dot and Ralphie to consider moving up there and the four of them drive up to look at the place. So that's the setup for this chapter. It becomes an expedition. For the first time, Ralphie manages to bump herself down the front steps on her butt with hardly any help from Dot, which is an accomplishment she's proud of. It takes a surprising amount of arm strength. They drive around to pick up first Susan and then Jermaine, who rushes out her door carrying a picnic basket. For after the tour, she announces, darling, says Susan, how sweet. In the community room, I saw on the website, very pretty and for all to use. Nursing homes have websites, says Ralphie. It's not a nursing home. It's a condo Dot size. And we're just looking. Remember Jermaine looks puzzled. Everybody has websites, she says. They pull up to a low beige building, a shoebox, basically, that matches those in the office park next door. Except for the main entrance and imposing pillard portico. No, over there, Ralphie corrects Dot who's aiming for visitor parking. Ralphie points her to the handicapped space in front of the door instead. Hey, says Jermaine, not fair. The disabled, they need it. And says Ralphie, extricating a permit from the glove box and hanging it on the rear view mirror. I'm a cripple. That's why we're here. Remember? A woman comes out of the building waving at them exaggeratedly. She's probably in her late 60s like Dot and Ralphie, but she looks like she belongs to a whole other generation. Her body is sort of rectangular, and she's wearing a wool skirt and actual hose, pearls and a twin set. As they pile out of the car, the woman smiles broadly, her mouth outlined in vermilion. Welcome, welcome, she calls. Welcome to Maple Grove. And we do have maples, you know, quite venerable ones. They made sure to keep them when they built the townhouses. We're not like those places, Mountain View Lakes or whatever, that are miles from any lake or mountain. She laughs at her little joke. Our grounds here are just lovely in the fall. I always say you can go leaf peeping right from your own kitchen window. Well, some people have to travel miles and miles. Susan introduces them. Susan Greenbaum, she says, laying her hand on her chest and then palm out displaying the others. Germaine Bellrose, Dorothy Greenbaum, Dot, says Dot. She doesn't let just anybody call her Dorothy. Ignoring her, Susan finishes. Oh, and our Ralphie, as though everybody has one. Ah, the woman nods as though these introductions explain something. Mrs. Daly, she extends a hand and Ralphie reaches over her crutches to shake it. Mrs. Daly takes it hesitantly. She's trying to figure out the relationships among this tour group. Mr. Bellrose, she concludes, aren't you the lucky one surrounded by all these pretty ladies? Ralphie's been mistaken for a man before. And generally, it's not a situation she wants to get herself into. With younger guys, especially, it can turn dangerous once they realize their mistake. She prided herself on giving as good as she got until the night when she ended up in the hospital with a concussion, a couple of black eyes, and three broken ribs. Never again, she vowed. She became expert at deflecting aggression with humor. And these days, challenges are rare. Mrs. Daly, though, has handed Ralphie an irresistible opportunity, and she plays along. You bet, she growls, trying for bustle. Dot catches her eye and Ralphie winks. Against Dot's better judgment, she grins back. Susan glares at them, but keeps her mouth shut. Mrs. Daly leads them through the pillars into the foyer. Dot and Susan in front, Ralphie, who's positioned herself next to Jermaine following. Jermaine finds the whole thing uncomfortable having this strange man sizing up to her while her actual girlfriend has rushed off the head. But then she reminds herself, it's not a strange man, it's Ralphie. Our front desk is staffed 24 hours a day, says Mrs. Daly. Isn't that right, Cindy? Cynthia, says the woman sitting at the desk, who is dwarfed by an enormous flower arrangement. Concierge's service is included, Mrs. Daly points out, by trained staffers like Cindy here. Cynthia, the concierge, enunciates, since this happens almost every day. Ignoring her, Mrs. Daly nudges the group along to their next stop. Impressive, booms Ralphie. Mrs. Daly looks at her suspiciously. We receive a beautiful fresh bouquet every week, Mr. Velrose. Just one of our lovely touches. Now let me show you one of our units. Don't you love it, Susan asks Dot excitedly? All that parking and the grand foyer and the concierge, like in France. She looks around for Jermaine, but with Ralphie on crutches, they fall in behind. I could live here, Dotty, I really could. In a unit, says Dot, what town are we in again? Oh please, it doesn't matter. You just shoot down 95 to Boston whenever you want. I see, says Dot, nodding at this ridiculous statement. No one shoots down 95, encircling a city famous for its maniacal drivers and irrational signage, including an Einsteinian stretch on this very highway where you find yourself traveling north and south at the same time. The road is clogged day and night. Mrs. Daly leads them out of the main building and across a short path to a townhouse. In the first floor apartment, Susan admires everything. Then reiterates to Dot all the features their guide has just shown them. The granite countertops and the silent dishwasher. The waterfall showerhead in the gas fireplace. The view is just as promised. A rolling lawn and the stand of large old trees. All of it cleverly landscaped to imply that over the next tail is a Therovian woods rather than an office park. Back in the living room, Mrs. Daly stops her guests and arranges them on the armchairs and couches the place has been staged with. All of it unobtrusively tasteful and neutral shades that can barely be identified as colors. Grease. She switches on the fireplace. So that's it, she says. What do you think, Mr. Bellrose? Throughout the tour, she's glommed on to Ralphie, having apparently decided she's in charge and addressed most of her comments to her. Ralphie grunts. Oh, enough already, Ralphie says, Susan. And it dawns on Mrs. Daly that she's made some sort of error. Susan turns to her. It's gorgeous, she says. We're going to have to give this some serious thought. Very good, says Mrs. Daly, less warmly than before, handing around her business cards. Do call any of you ladies if you have any questions whatsoever. The community room asked your name. Do you know where is that? We brought a picnic. I think they have them in some of the other developments, dear, but here we are in assisted living, you know. Turning off the fireplace, she ushers them out of the building and points to a fork in the path. That's the shortcut to the parking lot, she says, dismissing them. We are in handicapped, says Germain, for Ralphie's bad knee. Mrs. Daly has been trying not to look at Ralphie, but now she does, and Ralphie gives her a big smile and a wave hello with her crotch. Same way, says Mrs. Daly. She's had enough of this group. She doesn't even know anymore whom she's supposed to be selling to. Just follow it around to the front of the building and you'll be back where you started. Exactly, thinks Doss. What a great excerpt. I love reading that excerpt. My partner grew up in Chelsea. And so I read that section about I-95 to her. And she confirmed it's ferocity that you do go north and south at the same time. That is absolutely true. I did not make that up. Has responded variously. And if I was wondering if you could tell us about that, and also if there's a particular audience you had in mind when you wrote it? Well, when I've done readings to people in person, especially if the audience is skews older, like the characters, people have shared a lot of their own experiences with disability, with the healthcare system, with trying to find appropriate care as queer people. So I've learned a lot actually from the audiences, not much of it pretty scary and not positive. It doesn't make you look forward to dealing with healthcare as you get older. In terms of the audience I thought of, I guess I felt like mostly I think about a queer audience, an LGBTQ audience. You know, that's the world I'm writing about. And so I feel like that's also sort of the world I'm writing to. And that's an important part of how I identify my own community. I didn't think of myself as writing mostly for people in my age group or in the age group of these characters. And in fact, I was worried about the cultural references that I think you and I were talking about before because there's references to lesbian life in the 70s, 80s, 90s. The characters talk about going to bars, they talk about going on lesbian cruises. They talk about things that people aren't doing as much anymore. And I was concerned about whether younger women would, younger readers just generally would get that. And it's turned out not to be a problem somehow that stuff is still bouncing around enough in the culture where people understood it and enjoyed it. And I have a 24-year-old lesbian friend who lives in New York who's always taken for a man. And we were just talking about today that whole butch man misidentification that constantly it's timeless almost. Oh, yeah. Well, lesbians get mistaken for all kinds of things. At one point, is this in Dot and an Alfie? I mean, I know that, you know, lesbian couples, and this has happened to me, get mistaken for sisters, get mistaken for mother and daughter. Me too. I have been mistaken for the daughter of my wife. That's not good. I think, you know, as I think I say in the book, you know, straight people sort of get that there's some sort of vibe that they can't quite figure out what it is. I love that. I underline that in the book because it happens to us too all the time. Tell me about your literary influences. I love this question. I always find it a hard question to answer. I read constantly. I have, you know, a master's degree in fine arts and literature. I think I can say a few things. Lately I've been, well, I just read Kate Atkinson's new book, which she's a British writer. She has written, she writes in many, many forms. She has a series of mysteries that are wonderful and very intricately plotted. That's one of her sort of her characteristics. She, all of her books, no matter what they are, are very intricate. She writes, she often writes in short chapters and she, her chapters often start with a bit of dialogue. And I tend to do that as well. As I said, her books are very intricately plotted. I'm sure she has many outlines. I never outline. I don't outline. I don't know where I'm going when I start. I'm very character driven. Other writers who've been important to me are Virginia Woolf and Maxine Han Kingston and Toni Morrison. I guess I mean for all kinds of different reasons. I think Maxine Han Kingston helped me at a certain point because she's also somebody who's writing sort of totally, I would say transcends genre. It's not even concerned with genre. Her memoirs are full of stories and bits of history and folktales. She's mixed fiction and nonfiction. She doesn't put a value judgment on one genre over another and she, it's just all together there. And that was important to me. In your, let's switch gears for a minute. In your profile or interview or rave review, the piece that appeared in Boston, in the recent issue of Boston spirit in which you are featured. You said, and let me quote you to yourself, community is the thread that runs through everything. I love that line. There are really thoughts to live by. Personally, do you have a writing group? Do you have a writing community? If you've lived in Boston almost 50 years, you must have a million from a lot of communities. I do have a writing group. In fact, I just met with them two days ago, which is unusual. We're very informal. We're not one of these groups that has assignments and meets every two weeks for a certain number of hours. It's quite informal, but we've all been, and there's only three of us. So I don't know if it's a group or I don't know, a dinner party, but we have been all very important to one another in our writing. I think we've all been able to encourage each other or provide criticism and critique at certain really important moments in the writing. So it's been wonderful. How long have you been meeting? I'm not even sure. None of us can remember, but at least 20 years. Wow. That's fabulous. It's great. There are communities in the novel are sort of interesting too. It's striking, I think, because you seem to suggest that there are communities everywhere you just have to find them. I suppose that's true, or at least it's been true in my life. I've written about this, but I worked at a paper called Gay Community News in the late 70s and early 80s, and that experience was really central to me. It was a crucial moment in my life. As I said, one of our focuses on that newspaper was community, which was important at that time because the idea of having a queer movement was something new, and the idea that we had a community was new. We were very much out of the mainstream. I think our community was important to us in maybe a different way than it is now. I think it's still important, but what I was going to say is that just about everyone who's important to me in my life now is someone I know from that time. Really? Including my life. Well, I met my partner at the Second Wave Collective in the basement of the Unitarian Church. I worked at Second Wave briefly. Did you really? Yeah. I lived in Boston between 79 and 84, and it had a lasting impact on me, including the literary community. All that wonderful lesbian publishing that was occurring really energized me. The Boston movement was very literally focused. There was a lot of books, newspapers, magazines, small publishers, everything. Tremendous amount of literary production going on in Boston at that time. Not so much now, but then. What are your current projects? You're going around with a book tour. That's time consuming. That's a project, but I have a couple of projects. I am working on a new novel. I don't want to say anything. I can't really say anything much about it. It's been very early stages, and I've been working on it kind of on and off. I've just recently sort of tried to immerse myself in it a little more. I'm also, though, doing something that's new to me, which is working on anthology. My very close and dear friend, Irvashi Vad, died in May of metastatic breast cancer. She was a really important queer activist for many, many years and a prolific writer. One of her sisters and I are putting together a collection of her writings that I think will be really valuable. That's a really important project. Thank you for doing that. Some of her published work, but also Jolton of her sister has been delving into her archives and her computer, so she's been discovering a lot of unpublished work that is also really interesting. So we're going to be working on that. That is fabulous. Oh my goodness. I think, well, I guess I want to reiterate what you were quoting me as saying about community. I feel like to me it's in every one of my books. It's something that's been sustaining in my own life, finding a community and working on creating communities. So I guess I just think if anyone's looking for a theme in my work, that's what it is. And it's a really important theme. Well, thank you. Amy Hoffman, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for inviting me and for asking me all these interesting questions. It's been just a delight to talk to you. It has been fun. You'll have to come again. Hi, all our viewers. We'd like to welcome Rebecca, Majoia, and Sally Ann Majoia, who wrote Uncertain Fruit, which is a story about their journey trying to have a child. And so, hi, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. Yeah. So where are you? Are you back in Vermont now or are you living? I know that you went from here to Florida, right? And then Connecticut. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. And are you in Massachusetts now? We are back in Vermont. Yeah. Because when I was reading that, I really got ... When I was reading about your leaving, I remember thinking, I would want to leave too. I wouldn't want to be in that same community with all those memories and heartbreak that occurred in that particular area. But welcome back to Vermont. Thank you. It was great to be back. Yes. And you all spent eight years trying to have a child intro, right, in Vermont? Yeah, we did. We tried to go the fertility route for about eight years, and then we started to look more into the foster care and adoption route. So it was actually about 10 years total. 10 years. Yeah. 10 years. And Delilah was an interesting character in your novel. She was the woman who was going to give you in a private adoption. What was his name? Sage. Or the baby. Yes. And that you had suspicions that this might not go well because of her mother. So did you use people's real names here, or did you change the names? No, we were very protective of everybody that was involved. So I don't think besides our own, there is nobody's real name in the book. Yeah. So were you totally thrown when you must not have been when the grandmother, Delilah's mother, had been behaving throughout this whole adoption. So you must have felt a little bit like, did you feel totally blindsided? Did you block that out? Or? Great question. Great question. I think after so many years, our hope was so big. I remember our lawyer at one point saying to us, protect your hearts. And looking at her like, what? Yeah, how do you even begin to do that? How do you begin to do this when you've waited so long? And you're finally holding that baby in your arms from the moment yeah. He was ours. He was ours. The second he came out. We watched him be born. So like, Sally and his skin to skin contact immediately. It was harsh. Yeah. I mean, as I talk about, or we talk about the book too, I mean, I was working on breastfeeding. There was just so much bonding that happened. And I think we were just so excited and welcomed him into the family and the family was so welcoming. And that it was, I can't say that we were totally blindsided. But, you know, it's one of those. Emotionally, we were blindsided. I think logically, intellectually, there was a piece of us that knew that it was getting on winter. What's a teenager to do if they might not feel welcome coming home without a baby? I mean, what? So there's that logical part of you that's saying, Oh, this, this kid's in a really tough spot. What is going to happen here? But hoping that social services would swoop in. Or, you know, something, that something would work out that so emotionally, I would say I was, I was blindsided. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's not one of those hindsight is 2020 situations and we can write about it and, and put those pieces together after the fact even. Yeah. Yeah. See red flags now, but at the time, yeah, I knew from the way the book was advertised that this was probably going to happen. But, you know, even still, I sort of felt like, wow, the trauma that, you know, the dealing with all of these emotions. And how could you really, you know, be prepared for something like that? You really can't. No, no, no, no. So even if this little leaf over the back, right, was going, well, yes, a little gremlin that was hanging out there. And we almost had a couple babies from foster care system, but it was never something always. It was, yeah, we didn't see them born. It was, it was, it was touch and go the whole time. And it was only a few days kind of thing. It was never, they were never in our home. It was so, it was not like this. Yeah. Yeah. So when you were writing this book, who was your audience? Do you think, I mean, who were you trying to reach with this? Well, I go ahead, you go. No, initially it was healing. It was just both of us use writing as just a tool journaling for therapy or whatever. We've always been writers just about what's going on in our life and to heal from whatever. And so initially it was just that. It was just healing. I think in part we were originally thinking, well, we'll put together some kind of a book about surviving the grief of losing a baby in this kind of situation. And when, and we're also readers and we usually turn to books when we're trying to figure something out for ourselves. And we were, we couldn't find any book that had gone where the, you know, parents, birth parents, anybody had gone through a similar situation. It's just got those happy endings. Yeah, we got a lot of like, you know, that's not what we wanted to read. You know, we wanted to allow them to say the words that I was feeling. So we were really looking for some comfort and we thought, well, if we can't find this, there are other people that have gone through similar situations. There are other people going through the fertility processes and the pain of all of this. And so why don't we put this together and, and give this to others so they know that they're not alone in their process. So I think, you know, we wanted this book to be out there for these people, but people are to us. But I feel like the audience has gotten wider and wider as we thought about it too. Yeah, I feel more and more as we were getting closer to publication and Roe v. Wade happened as a political statement as well as everyone should be able to have a baby or not every family. And we hit roadblocks with insurance because we're a same sex couple. And so I feel like it's, it's a little bit of a maybe political platform too now that we can say everyone needs needs access, you know, to say that same sex couples have to try for six months before anything's going to be covered. Yeah. Like, how, how is that equal and accessible for everybody? There, yeah, just a lot of, you know, reproductive rights on the LGBT, you know, platform I feel like that you're talking about here, right? Yeah. Yeah. And we found out things like that there's only three countries where you can go as a same sex couple and adopt internationally. We couldn't afford that anyway. So it was out of reach to us. But there's so many hurdles that we didn't realize were still in place. And just going to get married, it doesn't clear all the hurdles, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And, and did you get any pushback from people like either adoptees or parents who are in the situation that you were in? Did did you get any feedback about how they felt about this? I don't know. I don't, I can't think of anything specifically. Can you? Not specific pushback. Yeah. Or certainly not yet. Support. I think I've just felt a lot of support from different people who have been adopted saying how, how they really appreciated our perspective. And it gave them sort of more of an appreciation for their parents and what they must have, how much they must have wanted a baby when they adopted them. And sort of gratitude for the way they've ended up in life. I think we've also, it's also reached out to people I've heard from various people who have lost through either miscarriage or, you know, in a, a NICU situation or whatever. And the, they've really resonated with just the, the grief experience. And, and, you know, the, all the love and emotion that goes into Yeah. During the process, there was pushback, which we write about a little bit, you know, friends who are because of the age difference and the kids from my previous marriage being older saying, you know, like, what do you want to start over? Like, what are you thinking? And when we did a fundraiser, I remember one person saying, well, if you can't afford a baby, why are you doing this? And it's like, well, no, we can afford a baby. We can't afford the adoption because it's so expensive. And so there was, I guess, different pushback during the actual process. And there certainly was plenty of pushback from the birth grandmother during the process. Yeah. And some agencies we felt more welcome than other adoption agencies. I love when they, you know, the social work comes to your house and you're answering questions. And you're sort of like, well, I had to admit that my brother was a sociopath and, you know, whatever. I'm like, oh my God, to experience, you know, like that kind of, you know, my, my father or mother was, did corporal punishment, you know, and to have to reveal all that, which, you know, is painful in itself if you haven't chosen the person that you want to tell it to. So, you know, that was really a very interesting part about what you have to go through just to even qualify to even, you know, and, and it seemed like it was a bit of a class issue too. Like, you know, like people to Jake doesn't seem to have any trouble surrogate, you know, getting surrogate parents and, you know, you know, adopting or, you know, whatever he, you know, so it seemed a bit of a, you know, if you have enough money, you can get this done. But if you don't, yep, it becomes an emotional struggle. So I saw a little bit of class in there, you know, not that, you know, you guys weren't working and really, you know, making good living and doing all that, but, but how much money and how, you know, a lot of barriers there for sure. And they say, you know, the first agency you went to, it's like, you have to have at least $40,000. $45,000. I think it was $45,000. $45,000, like, you better, you better, like, come in with in the bank and it might be more than that. Yes. So like what even hardworking people, like, that was also, I really found an interesting aspect here. Yeah. And also, you know, how revealing you all were. And I think, you know, that is to be highly commended. And you talk about here, there's a passage on page eight, which I just thought was very, very insightful and about your idea about the mother and how she would, how could you willingly give over what you didn't even know she was giving or, you know, that was really an insightful question that you asked yourself and the audience to contemplate. And, you know, and your care of her during throughout this whole book, I know you had moments when, you know, you, you wanted to like, not kill her, but, you know, like, you know, you were really angry at her and really upset. But even through that, I think you found a way to make her really human and really young and inexperienced and emotionally didn't probably have the best support that that a child of 17 might have on this kind of situation. So I thought that was, that was really good. So, you know, what would you mind reading the passage or reading our audience a passage from your books and like an idea? Sure. Yeah. Give me the baby. We would whisper to each other when we saw infants in the store or on the street. Give me the baby. Then giggle a nervous laugh that came to diffuse the fear that there would never be a tiny little one in our arms, even though one had grown in our hearts for years, years that kept adding up, full of failed attempts at having a pile of diapers and tiny clothes in our room filled with the new smell of a little life, that glorious fragrance of a newborn baby. Everywhere we went, we seem to run into young mothers pushing strollers with two or three babies in them, cell phones in hand, lit cigarettes, dangling thoughts, obviously elsewhere. They meandered along, apparently oblivious to how favored they were to be able to produce these precious little ones. No wonder we were, we felt like saying, give us the baby. Give us the baby to hold and read to and care for. We didn't make a lot of money, but we had a lot of love to give. So why should only those with lots of money or lots of fertility be the ones to get the babies? We are at the will of others. Another to decide that we are the arms that should hold the baby. Another mother will have to choose us to connect to us through photos, to read the booklet we have painstakingly put together. Somehow she will decide from that without seeing into our hearts, much as we had hoped with the sperm donors. Another mother will hope we are telling the truth of our lives that the pictures are truly reflective of a joyful place where someone else will raise her infant to an adult. Again, we are completely at another woman's mercy. Please, please be merciful this time. Thank you. That was lovely. So do you have any last words? I would say here is the book. We'll put a picture of it. Do you have a website we might put up on the site when we do the interview? Yes, definitely. Do you have any last words for our audience before we leave you in this wonderful book? I would say just to know you're not alone. If you're struggling with infertility, you're struggling trying to figure out the adoption system, the foster care system. It's a maze and it doesn't come easily and there are people to support you and other... We are resources ourselves. Yeah, share your stories so other people feel free to share theirs. I think you've done the community of service by the LGBT community but also because this struggle is probably somewhat harder and given to the community in a way that you really was done in a fair and balanced way, I thought really. So thank you so much for doing this and everybody read the book and we'll see you later. Take care. Thanks. Thanks for having the show. Appreciate it. Thank you for joining us and until next time, remember, resist.