Nicole J. Burton

Spiritual Paths of Adoption Recovery

2012-04-23T00:09:47Z

What helped us overcome adoption trauma? How do we tell the truth about our experience and stay positive? How do we turn recovery into purpose? At the American Adoption Congress conference in Denver this week, I'm leading a panel discussion with authors Patrick McMahon and Nancy Verrier.

"Cars" Tour Continues at KenCen

2011-08-25T01:19:21Z

Miss "Cars" the first time around? Join us at the Kennedy Center for a ride through one man's automotive life and times.

A Natural History of My Husband's Cars is presented by ABG Playwrights and is part of the Kennedy Center's 10th Annual Page to Stage Festival.

Terrace Gallery, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F Street, NW, Washington, DC

Sat, Sept 3, 1 pm (Labor Day Weekend - 60 minute show)

Free No tickets or reservations required

Foggy Bottom Metro, free Kennedy Center shuttle to front door or 4 block walk; some street parking available; KC parking $20

Admission to all Page to Stage Festival events is free. The Page to Stage Festival offers dozens of performances by DC's theaters and playwrights:

Kennedy Center Page to Stage Schedule of Performances.

Read "The Cars" Script

2011-07-29T18:00:10Z

A Natural History of My Husband's Cars (PDF) - 26 pages

Tell Us Your Car Story

2011-07-21T20:19:34Z

Do you have a car story? Sure you do!
Brigid Schulte wrote a great car story about her Volvo in the Post magazine last week.
Tell us your car story and come hear ours at A Natural History of My Husband's Cars on July 29 at the Takoma Park, MD Community Auditorium.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF MY HUSBAND'S CARS - Fri, July 29, 7:30pm

2011-06-06T01:52:15Z

Even as a young boy in Northern Virginia, Jim Landry always wanted to drive. Fascinated by cars, he began driving himself to piano lessons at age 12 in his mother's '61 Mercury station wagon. From a '62 Volkswagon Beetle ragtop to a '72 Oldsmobile to the pocket-rocket '90 Plymouth Laser, he's owned nine cars and each has a story.

Join playwright Nicole Burton and her husband, photographer and musician Jim Landry for A Natural History of My Husband's Cars—a ride through one man's automotive life and times. In the 75-minute performance, Landry and Burton weave stories, photographs, and original music with a social history of the cars' vintages.

A Natural History of My Husband's Cars will be presented at the Takoma Park Community Center Auditorium on Friday, July 29 at 7:30 pm as part of the “We Are Takoma” series.

Admission is free (suggested donation $15). For more information, call 301-891-7224.

The Takoma Park Community Center Auditorium is located at 7500 Maple Avenue, Takoma Park, MD. Takoma Metro/Parking on site.

Flying to Conference

2011-04-12T23:59:51Z

The American Adoption Congress Conference in 2008 was the first adoption conference I'd ever attended. I was swept away by the kindness and inclusion I experienced, especially among the other artists and the women I roomed with, strangers who became friends in no time. Most of the year, the Adoption Nation is invisible. You can't tell who we are. We can't even identify each other. In April, we emerge like rare butterflies and congregate, hundreds of us, in meeting rooms and coffee bars, arms round each other, indigo and emerald wings draped and fluttering.

Adopted People Are Not Blank Slates

2011-04-03T19:15:13Z

"Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France... If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in twenty-first-century New York, the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers....
... the child born today enters the world just as much a blank slate as the child born thirty thousand years ago..."
From Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Untrue. None of us are blank slates. Foer has a three-year-old child but has yet to learn that his child came encoded with Foer characteristics - talents, tendencies, mannerisms, preferences, habits, and of course, appearances. The myth of the blank slate, popularized by criminal adoption brokers such as Georgia Tann, allows adoptive parents to justify transferring the human children of resource-less women to wealthy and "needy" adults in developed countries. Except we're not "transferable" blank slates. As we mature to adulthood, we either become who we always were or unconsciously grieve the loss of that person.

The Waking Hour

2011-01-17T15:36:49Z

You don't hear people talk much about adoption and codependency but adoption can't survive without codependency. The role of the adopted person is to make everyone in society feel A-OK about this unnatural arrangement. Adopted children "do their job" when they practice codependency. Only when we free ourselves and shrug off this excess responsibility do we start to live authentically. Letting go of responsibility for managing other people's feelings, especially those of our parents, may bring consequences, but we should do it anyway. We have a choice: we can wake up and be ourselves or we can live our lives in animatronic sleep.

I Am an Adoption Abolitionist

2010-12-08T02:27:02Z

I told friends at a Hanukkah party on Sunday that I recently transitioned from adoption reformer to adoption abolitionist--they were shocked! "What will happen to all the babies?" The conversation didn't last long after that (my original post on Facebook). A discussion followed and a request for me to elaborate.

I believe that closed adoption should be abolished except when it's court ordered for the safety of the child. I totally oppose international adoption, as do many other countries that no longer allow it because in practice, it's too close to human slavery. I'm not naive enough to believe that all forms of adoption can or should be abolished but adoption should be the end-of-the-line last-ditch option because of the HARM it does to adopted people and their original families. We (adopted people) live in a parallel universe in which our adoption is preceded by personal CATASTROPHE, meaning, the loss of all the people who are and will ever be important to us, plus our community, culture, religion, and even language and country. Our prior lives are annihilated and suppressed FOREVER, unless we are able to claw our way back and uncover our heritage and relatives at great personal risk. In 40 out of 50 American states, we're forbidden to do this and the official records are sealed. Meanwhile, in the other universe of adoptive parents, the adoption industry, and society at large, including the media, adoption is proclaimed as WONDERFUL or a MIRACLE. You see the dichotomy here: what is a personal catastrophe that we spend the rest of our lives dealing with and making the best of is proclaimed the best thing since sliced bread (and what's wrong with you?). It all depends on perspective, and the Wonderful/Miracle perspective dominates most discussions. No more. Finally, adoption is complicated. It is a euphemism for "abandonment followed by adoption." We learn to love our adoptive families - abolition of adoption isn't about them, it's about us.

Moving Adoption into the 21st Century

2010-11-19T02:24:45Z

Six authors and national leaders from all sides of the Adoption Triad signed this op-ed. Please help us get it published in your local media.

There's no better time to cast a discerning eye at adoption than during National Adoption Month in November. On November 20^th, hundreds of courts and families will come together on National Adoption Day to finalize adoptions from the foster care system. These celebrations will rightfully honor all adoptive families and support the adoptive placement of some of the 114,500 children in foster care awaiting placement in permanent homes across the country.

When the public considers adoption, they often think about these waiting children and the families who open their hearts to them. They may not realize that in America six million adopted adults are systematically denied the right to information about their identities through archaic laws in 40 states. As a nation, we deny the challenges that adopted people face as they try to piece together their identities from ‘non-identifying information,’ which is the scant data they're given when they seek to know more about their origins.

The national dialogue about adoption doesn't reflect reality: the psychological challenges for all members of the adoption triad, the continuing controversies about transracial adoption, the trend towards increasing openness in which birth family members and adoptive families form relationships, or the legislative struggles in state after state to open up birth records.

The adoption community made up of public and private agencies, attorneys, counselors, and social workers relates to adoptive parents as their primary stakeholders. But alongside that community, in what often seems like a parallel universe, are the interests of adult adopted Americans. It is their voices that should also be heard this month, for surely it is they who should be considered the central stakeholders in adoption.

Adoption reform organizations, from the American Adoption Congress to grassroots state coalitions, support new laws that give adult adopted people access to their original birth certificates without restrictions or limitations. Who among us would want to have the most intimate knowledge about our origins withheld from us—for life? We need to examine the secrecy and misinformation that's existed over the past fifty years and recognize those adoption practices for what they are: outdated practices that infantilize adopted persons by keeping them in the dark about their origins, and in effect, prevent them from developing fully-integrated identities.

Knowing who you are and where you've come from is a basic human need and an essential civil right. As we celebrate adoption month, let's encourage a deeper national conversation that benefits all corners of the adoption triangle: the adoptive parents, the birth parents, and the adopted people themselves.

Nicole Burton, author of Swimming Up The Sun, A Memoir of Adoption

Micky Duxbury, author of Making Room in Our Hearts: Keeping Family Ties Through Open Adoption

Donnie Davis, AAC President, representing the American Adoption Congress

Mary Martin Mason, author of Out Of The Shadows: Birthfather’s Stories

Carol Schaefer, author of The Other Mother: A Woman's Love for the Child She Gave Up for Adoption

Susan Ito, editor of A Ghost at Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption

Coming Out of the Closet - For Good

2010-09-21T22:47:37Z

Writing a memoir about adoption means I'm slowly coming out of the Adoption Closet. You might have thought that happened long ago but I've kept the door ajar, running back into the closet whenever a relative or society disapproves of my sharing honest feelings. Half-in, half-out: An awkward position to be in.

This weekend, I'm presenting at the Adoption Crossroads Conference in New York City with a panel of veteran memoir writers: Betty Jean Lifton, author of Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter, and Carol Schaefer, author of The Other Mother: A Woman's Love for the Child She Gave Up for Adoption. The session is called Memoir: Adoption Reunion's Final Frontier. I think I'm ready to come out of the adoption closet - for good.

Last Call at the Marble Bar at the Kennedy Center

2010-09-05T15:15:21Z

If you don't have plans for Labor Day Weekend, please come to the readings of our plays at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Annual Page-to-Stage Festival, Sunday, Sept 5, 2-6 pm, in the Terrace Gallery.
ABG Playwrights (formerly WWWG) present:

4:00 P.M. - LAST CALL AT THE MARBLE BAR by Nicole Burton
Directed by Sheilah Crossley-Cox
Act 1 of the fantastical story of a violent crime as (if) told by Fellini

2:00 P.M. - ALL THE SINS OF MY PAST LIFE by Patricia Connelly
Directed by Nancy Robillard
A young woman’s discovery of a horrifying secret about herself pits a daughter against her mother, destroys her marriage, and shatters the young woman's deep religious faith.

Admission is Free and No Reservation Required

FRED & FRIEDA Premiere!

2010-04-19T21:18:54Z

The April 2010 production of FRED & FRIEDA at the Greenbelt Arts Center was a glorious success thanks to fabulous, sold-out audiences. Watch for news here on its next production.

Washington Informer - The Reluctant Warrior of Fred & Frieda

2010-04-15T23:02:19Z

Beautiful Washington Information article by Malcolm Barnes about Black Holocaust liberator William S. Keyes and my new play. Check out the photos.

FRED & FRIEDA Performances

2010-04-11T15:56:31Z

FRED & FRIEDA will premiere at the Greenbelt Arts Center on Thursday, April 15-18, 2010.

Show times are Thursday, April 15 at 10:00 am, Friday, April 16 at 10:00 am and 8:00 pm, Saturday, April 17 at 8:00 pm, and Sunday, April 18 at 2:00 pm.

The Thursday and Sunday matinees are sold out but unclaimed seats will be sold 10-15 minutes before the shos to the waitlist, so if you'd like to try your luck, please make a reservation at 301-441-8770 and come to the theater at your chosen performance.

We're also talking to two theaters about a future Washington, D.C. production. Please email us at nicole@nicolejburton.com if you'd like to hear about future performances of FRED & FRIEDA.