This month, we spoke with Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka about her experience as a 2024 Community Storytelling Fellow. During her fellowship, Joon Ae wrote about the adoptee community in essays "We Contain Multitudes" and "A Debt of Gratitude." In our conversation, she emphasized the importance of physical, emotional, and intellectual space for members of marginalized communities—and suggested that telling stories is one way to reclaim that space.
The Community Storytelling Fellowship supports nonfiction storytellers working in any medium—journalism, audio, video, comics, photography, and more—in sharing true stories from communities they belong to. The goal of the fellowship is to provide time, space, and resources for stories that connect people and communities. To learn about our 2025 fellows, visit our website.
How has your approach to community storytelling developed since the beginning of your fellowship?
This fellowship has inspired me to spend a lot of time thinking about space—literal and energetic space as a signifier of power. One of the goals of justice work is to make, hold, and expand space. One thing that often troubles me is how much space folks with historical power demand. They are born into spaciousness, and they’re used to filling it all up (with ease, expectation, and entitlement). Many don’t realize how much space they fill up, take, and demand.
Whereas those of us who are oppressed are literally pressed into small spaces—physical, emotional, and intellectual spaces. We are trapped in marginalized neighborhoods and stranded in food deserts. We are boxed into stereotypes, not allowed our full range of emotions. We have to fight to have a seat at the table, let alone be heard. When we are oppressed, our movement is literally and metaphorically prevented. Perhaps this is part of the beauty of the word movement when we talk about collective liberatory action.
I think of community storytelling as taking space for myself and my community. What has become most clear to me is that we are more powerful together than we are alone. Together, our stories transcend our individual experiences to create something larger, more whole, and more true.
What do you see as the value or importance of telling these stories about your community?
The most important thing about my community storytelling is that it connects adoptees with adoptees and helps those in our very marginalized, invisibilized, and actively (and often violently) silenced community feel less alone. I want adoptees to feel validated and to feel a sense of belonging. I want them to know there are people out here fighting for us. Ultimately, I want my storytelling to help shift power back to the people who live the actual stories.
My adoptee community has historically been invisibilized—our stories erased and supplanted by the narratives from adoptive parents and adoption professionals, i.e. those who benefit from the multinational adoption industrial complex. The value of telling our stories together lies in reclaiming the narrative from those who speak about and for us. People don’t have to agree with me and the voices I amplify, but I’d like them to, at least, entertain a more complex view.
What would you tell other storytellers interested in sharing stories about their communities?
Our lived experience is a source of unique insight and truth. No one else can tell these stories the way we can, and our voices add essential nuance to conversations that are often controlled by dominant culture, the marketplace, etc. It’s scary to speak truth to power. People tell me that I am bold and brave, but I don’t associate those qualities with myself. I am scared all the time, but I know the pain of silence is worse than my fear of being judged, attacked, rejected—both by defenders of dominant culture and by my own community.
Storytelling, especially about marginalized identities, can be emotionally taxing. Surround yourself with people who understand your vision and can provide encouragement, feedback, and grounding when needed. And take care of yourself. Public writing can feel exposing and vulnerable. Set boundaries, give yourself permission to rest, and don’t take yourself so seriously. Your voice and well-being both deserve care and respect.
Any future projects you are working on that you would like to highlight?
The most important work in my life is supporting my beloved Palestinian friends in Gaza, the Abu Dayers. Folks can read about my friendship with Tamara Abu Dayer in my essay “A Debt of Gratitude" and learn about supporting her family on Instagram. I am also deeply invested in VOICES, of which I am a cofounder. VOICES is an organization for BIPOC adoptees and by BIPOC adoptees, and we hold a variety of community events throughout the year, including a large annual conference that draws folks from around the world. I cofounded the Constellation Reading Series, which is the sweetest monthly community reading series at the Bishop & Wilde bookstore, supported by Tin House. Constellation is about cultivating an intersectional community space for people who love reading and writing. I also started a new interdisciplinary business practice called Ajumama Workshop for writing coaching, project support, and workshops. And this year, I want to do another revision of my novel and finish up the other essays that were inspired by and written for my Community Storytelling fellowship with Oregon Humanities.
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