“Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Frederick Buechner said that, and it’s a quote I thought of when prepping to talk to Angela Tucker, the subject of the documentary Closure, directed by her husband, Bryan Tucker, and the woman behind The Adopted Life, a blog and forthcoming episodes/mini-documentaries for that blog. A self-described private person and introvert, Angela has made her story public and herself vulnerable in the interest of educating people about transracial adoption and building community for transracial adoptees like her.
Toward the end of this episode, Angela said “thanks for recognizing this as a creative project,” and yeah, I guess I’m winding up the year of podcasts with what may seem like a little bit of a different look at the creative life. But creation is, simply, bringing something into existence, and–hopefully–being able to say, “It is good,” and completing the endeavor by putting it out there, into culture, into other lives. I think what Angela is doing is very good, and I wanted to talk to her about it and share it with you.
I was going to write and then record a stirring monolog as a preface to this episode, about how beyond the challenge and work and fun of figuring out a novel or a screenplay, or working with poems, essays, reviews, there is the part of the creative life that has to do with the Buechner quote–finding those places where what excites or compels us intersects with what the world (or, more granularly, with what individual people in the world) might need, and what the world might make of what we do once we let go, and I don’t mean that in terms of retweets and other social media shares or the like.
But as it turns out, I have a terrible cold here on Editing Day, and don’t want to inflict my voice and cough on you, so there’s no preamble, no stirring end-of-year call to passion and vocation, and indeed not even my usual info at the end about show notes and shoutouts. I will let the episode speak for itself, and look forward to returning after January with more.
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