The Museum of the Lost and Found: a creative practice approach to telling adoptees’ stories

This PhD research project seeks to do two things: firstly explore how, through creative practice using various forms of nonfiction, stories about the place and the identity of adoptees are told; and secondly, enrich our understanding of the fragmentary history of adoption in Australia when the adoption of children was conducted and sanctioned by both the church and the state. I have responded to the research question: “How might experimentation with forms of the lyric essay enable the creation of stories about adoptees' relationships with place and identity?” To this end I have developed ways of writing stories that embrace my own experience with that of others, in this instance the life-changing event of infant adoption and the adoptees’ memories attached to that event. This writing traverses terrain between the personal and the political, the sociological and the social, the literary and the familiar, the narrator and the subject. The project comprises essays combining creative and exegetical writing; a contextual section about writing nonfiction; the creative practice methods I have used; about how adoption stories have been penned previously; and a number of artefacts-asessays that include objects and a sound recording. By making things – physical things such as maps and containers and paintings and books – I have developed further ways in which a lyric essay can be structured and subsequently read. My research into the ways that adoption stories are essayed showed that new ways of telling these stories could be achieved through experimentation and innovation. The essays offer a method for crafting stories about people, including myself, whose lives have been de/identified, dis/placed and dis/located in biological and lived domains. This creative writing research contributes to the evolution of the nonfiction lyric essay through multiple platforms of expression and exposition including text, voice and object.