THE YEAR OF INTERVIEWING DANGEROUSLY @wendywelch

LUCY BURDETTE: Though I've never met her in person, today's guest is someone I admire deeply. She absolutely puts her efforts into making a difference in the world. (Make sure you look at her bio after you're finished with the post.) She has a big job, but she also owns and runs a bookstore, runs a cat rescue organization (out of the bookstore), and writes books. Her latest, FALL OR FLY, about foster care and adoption in Appalachia, will be published in January. It's such an important topic and most of us don't know much about it. I wanted you to hear about this from her. Welcome Wendy!

WENDY WELCH: I started writing Fall or Fly: the strangely hopeful story of adoption and foster care in Appalachia, without realizing I was writing it. A local pastor (one of the sweetest, most integrity-filled people around) asked “Could you do for foster parents what you did for cancer patients? And then write a book about it?”

Translation: could we organize storytelling circles at churches wherein foster parents told their personal journey with any eye toward interesting others in foster parenting? Last year, a similar faith-based project with cancer survivors had good effect in screening uptakes.

Unfortunately, foster parents in the public eye are targets for criticism: saints or demons, no middle ground among those who don’t foster but enjoy telling those who do how it should be done. It’s ugly.

No, we couldn’t see people who had already opened their hearts having others fire bullets at them. Instead we created a blog, and I worked to edit and refine participants’ stories for anonymous publication. This was most satisfying; it’s fun to write, exciting to tell other people’s stories as a journalist, but helping others get their writing the way they want it? I LOVED this part. And thought it was the whole thing.

We agreed to launch the blog at an Appalachian Studies event nearby. The presentation was published in the conference handbook, and my phone rang. Gillian Berkowitz, editor-in-chief with Swallow Press at Ohio University, wondered if a book were associated with the project. No? Would we like one to be?

I called Dale.

“Dude, praying for a book deal was cheating.”

I could hear him grinning all the way down the phone line.

Those stories that had delighted me to work with and relieved many foster parents of their feelings of isolation became the basis for Fall or Fly, yet we needed more. Much more. The year of interviewing dangerously began.

Dale and his colleagues introduced me quietly to social workers, foster parents, adult or teen foster kids, senior officials, and sideliners (pastors, school teachers, nurses, a few others). Typing notes in abbreviated misspelled swiftness, I listened to Vesuvius blow. When people in professions bound by silence finally get to talk, they start with anger, move into frustration, melt into ineffectiveness and failure and finally emerge into hopeful moments when things came right. Tempting though it was to write only the later inspirational stories into a larger framework of “Look how great this is!” that would have been wrong—for honesty or accuracy.

Much is going wrong in foster care, and not what the public thinks. Outcomes are easy to criticize, success hard to define, let alone achieve. Even getting it right may look wrong to the armchair outsiders. A friend raising an autistic child hated when her baby had meltdowns in stores because of ill-informed public comment: “That tantrum deserves a spanking!” It was actually sensory overload, not something easily explained to mom-on-the-street, who first required convincing such a thing was real—didn’t happen to HER kid—then that neither spanking nor demon-casting would expel it.

Similar stories abound in foster care: insert gay, sexualized, starved, physically harmed, and yes, autistic, and repeat. Everybody knows how to raise kids. Raising other people’s is so different?

Yes, it is. How does love translate to young’uns who have taught themselves not to need it before their brains are fully developed? When you’re raising kids whose bio parents are substance abusers, how do you show love to those “no-good *&^%$ failures” your children idolize and will reunite with someday, even though they’re hurting the kids you’re trying to help? All but four of the children in Fall or Fly had living parents abusing drugs. When you become addicted, you don’t stop loving your kids; you stop being capable of caring for them.

Those are not subtle differences in the foster care world.Writing Fall or Fly was exhilarating, scary, dark, yet strangely hopeful – hence the title. The chaos and frustration of a system that pulls against itself is exhausting to capture in words; God help those who walk into it every day fighting for the children. And yet, candles only show when it’s dark. The people in there—parents, social workers, admin, interested bystanders—they don’t spend their time cursing the dark (well, not after the first week of interviews). They keep the lights on.

Is it enough light? Are we sliding into significant repercussions across not just Appalachia, but America? This place may be the poster child, but the problem is nationwide.

Hope is expensive. Exhaustion feeds darkness. Candles shine. Which is stronger?

Wendy and Jack at the bookstore

Wendy Welch directs the Graduate Medical Education Consortium of Southwest Virginia, working at the intersection of health and economic development. With her husband Jack Beck (presenter of Celtic Clanjamphry for NPR) she runs a shop that is the subject of her 2012 memoir Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap. Editor of the volume Public Health in Appalachia, her most recent book is Fall or Fly, telling the story of foster care in Coalfields Appalachia. And she is ringmaster of the all-volunteer cat rescue APPALACHIAN FELINE FRIENDS. She sleeps between these things.

Follow her on Facebook or on the blog she shares with Jack, her husband, who is a larger-than-life Scottish character.