Optional Guiding Prompts

Below is a list of optional guiding prompts to aid in sparking ideas, thoughts, questions, and curiosities for creating work. This list was modeled after, and inspired by, Latino Outdoors’ prompts for their Yo Cuento blog posts.

• Where is home?

• Where do you find joy?

• What do you think of when you hear the term ‘adoptee environmentalisms?’

• What is your environmental identity?

• How has your adoptee experience prepared you to advocate for just environmental futures?

• What do you think about climate change and reproductive justice from an adoptee perspective?

• What comes to mind when you think of yourself as art?

• What ghosts and hauntings are present in your life?

• What silences have you experienced in your own life? How do you negotiate these silences within the context of uncertain climate futures?

• ‘Coming out of the fog’ is a commonly used phrase within the adoptee community. Adopted people often use it to describe the realization that the ‘adoption fantasy,’ as a story immersed in perpetual gratefulness, does not accurately describe many transracial adoptees’ experiences in life.

  • How did you come out of the fog? Did you always notice its presence? Who helped you along the way?
  • How would you describe this fog? Was it: dense, thick, opaque, sticky, feather-light, or immersive? Something other?

• How do you situate yourself and your contribution amongst the legacy of creative works, activism, and frameworks by transracial adoptees and Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities?

• What would you include if you were to make a ‘recipe’ out of your experiences, practices, and activism surrounding transracial adoption?

• How do you negotiate the everyday entanglements between memory, environment, and race?

• How does your experience as a transracial and/or transnational adoptee shape your thoughts about the environment? How are your lived experiences, thoughts, and relationships surrounding the environment different from those around you, and why do you think this is the case?

• As a transracial adoptee, you may have experienced the loss of identity, culture, and land. Do you currently experience or relate to climate grief as it connects to dispossession, displacement, and loss of life (human and multispecies)?