I’m exploring the themes that interest me through a new medium – join me on my creative writing journey here and on Substack.
Desire Lines
What if you were not welcomed into the world?
What if there were no stories about how you were born and celebrated that were carefully archived as part of your family’s treasure chest?
Desire Lines is a creative writing project through which I’m exploring identity, belonging, and the impacts of forced adoption and ‘legitimacy’. Through the lens of my personal journey, I’m offering candid accounts of navigating multiple worlds with raw insight into the challenges and triumphs of living across boundaries of country, culture, and self.
Desire Lines explores the unfurling impacts of decisions made by Lil Brindle in the marshlands of 1960s Fenland Britain, as forced adoption ruled the life paths of ‘illegitimate’ children. The collateral consequences of Lil’s choices rage through her and her daughter Amy’s sense of agency, desires, relationships and choices, in the lowlands of Britains’ Fens, salt marshes of America’s South Carolina and the wilderness of Australia’s lutruwita/Tasmania.
Amy Brindle slipped into 1969 with her brown skin and mop of brunette locks. Her birth hidden in a Fenland hospital to minimise attention on her white mother Lil’s circumstances. Amy’s birth father prohibited from welcoming her. And Lil’s white husband fighting for his dignity with his family, a watchful community and himself.
