Belonging Matters: Conversations on Adoption, Family, and Kinship

Written by Julie Ryan McGue

Narrated by Julie Ryan McGue

Belonging Matters is meant to support the adoption community while creating a conversation with those not directly touched by adoption. The collection addresses the questions:

—If you are part of the adoption universe, how do you find identity, family, and community

—If someone you know is adopted, how do you understand and support them in their search for identity, family, and belonging

—How do we improve the adoption experience to invoke social change that benefits the individual, the family unit, and the communities in which they live?

This collection is about examining all that makes us unique, and it is about finding meaning and healing from the difficulties we encounter in life.

Author: Julie Ryan McGue is an American writer. She is a domestic adoptee and an identical twin. Her award-winning memoir, Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging, was released in May 2021. It is about her five-year search to locate birth relatives, family medical history and personal background. In Julie’s weekly blog and monthly column (The Beacher Newspapers), she writes about finding out who you are and where you belong and making sense of it. Her work has appeared in the Story Circle Network Journal, Brevity Nonfiction Blog, Imprint News, Adoption.com, Lifetime Adoption Adoptive Families Blog, Adoption & Beyond, and Severance Magazine. Her personal essays have appeared in several anthologies: Real Women Write: Seeing Through Her Eyes (Story Circle Network), and Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis (She Writes Press, 2022). Julie holds a BA in psychology from Indiana University and an MM in marketing and finance from the Kellogg Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University. She splits her time between northwest Indiana and Sarasota, Florida.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lantern Audio
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781960876546

Julie Ryan McGue

Julie Ryan McGue is a memoirist, blogger, and columnist, as well as an adult domestic adoptee and an identical twin. She writes two weekly blogs: Touched By Adoption, which deals with the complicated topic of adoption, and That Girl, This Life, which features snippets of her daily life. That Girl, This Life is also the name of the monthly column she pens for The Beacher, a weekly paper serving the beach communities of Northwest Indiana. She has served multiple terms on the board of the Midwest Adoption Center and is a member of the American Adoption Congress. Besides her laptop, Julie loves her Steinway, Nikon camera, and tennis racquet. Married for over thirty-five years, she is the mother of four adult children and splits her time between Northwest Indiana and Sarasota, Florida.