Monday Evening Speaker Series
Adoption Network Cleveland is pleased to offer a VIRTUAL Monday Evening Speaker Series full of topics that are of interest to a broad audience impacted by adoption, kinship, and foster care. These programs are made possible by donors and presenters volunteering their time and they thrive thanks to the active participation of attendees.
Upcoming Presentations
Monday, October 6, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
Choosing to Breathe: A Return to The Gathering Place presented by Linda Pevac aka Emma Stevens
What happens when we make a conscious decision to make our identities more than only being an adoptee? What if we were first to do the hard work necessary to move residual trauma out of our bodies and then dedicate ourselves to writing ourselves a new story? I want to share with you my own experience of doing just that and how creating The Gathering Place has helped me transform. This magical and mysterious place has shown me that when I choose to fully breathe and make space for new thoughts and ideas about myself and the world around me, I can, and we all can, be set free from former ways of being.
About Emma
Emma Stevens, who is also known as Linda Pevac, is the author of two earlier memoirs: The Gathering Place: An Adoptee’s Story and A Fire Is Coming. Her adoption journey began when she was relinquished as an infant and adopted at three months old. Only in hindsight does she understand how being an adoptee has shaped and formed her entire life.
In her first memoir, The Gathering Place, Emma describes a magical space she has created for healing, comfort, and restoration for the younger parts of herself that never felt safe, seen, heard, or understood. A Fire Is Coming is Emma’s cautionary tale, emphasizing the importance of selecting a therapist thoughtfully. She alerts readers to the psychological nightmare that can result from an unethical therapist, doctor, or counselor.
Emma’s third memoir, Choosing to Breathe, brings together all three themes. It takes readers back to The Gathering Place, where they discover what it means to integrate their identities as Emma releases multiple layers of trauma.
After graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma, she pursued master's-level coursework in psychology at Pepperdine University in Orange County, California. In March 2024, Emma won an Independent Author Award for her second book, A Fire Is Coming, at Tucson’s 2024 Festival of Books. She was a finalist in the 18th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards for the same book.
Emma loves traveling and spending time with her two adult children and her two lively, affectionate Bengal cats. www.emmastevenswriter.com
Monday, October 13, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
Finding Your Voice: From Personal Journey to Shared Experience with Deborah Jiang-Stein
Deborah Jiang-Stein, a product of foster care and adoption, is author of Lucky Tomorrow: Stories, and the memoir, Prison Baby. She will discuss her adoption journey after learning the secret of her birth in prison. She speaks about the stories that define us, and reframing our narrative on our own terms, moving through trauma stories to include joy, resilience, and growth in the adoption narrative.
About Deborah
Deborah Jiang-Stein is a product of foster care and adoption, and an award-winning writer, public speaker, collaborator, and author of the short story collection, Lucky Tomorrow, and the memoir Prison Baby. Deborah is founder of the unPrison Project, working with and mentoring people in prisons to build life skills.
Monday, October 27, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
The Long Shadow of Adoption: How to Find Light in the Dark Places with Eileen Drennen
Eileen Drennen, a first mother and open records advocate, has written about how losing her only child to adoption has affected all her relationships in essays and a memoir (tentatively titled ONCE REMOVED and currently out on submission). While she acknowledges the decades-long process of researching, reliving and revising a memoir about the things you can’t change is not for the faint of heart, she credits the process with teaching her about the ways imagination and a sense of play can lighten the heavy load of grief. She speaks about how unpacking generalized grief into specific losses made it more real and how string theory and the idea of multiverses helped her tell a bigger story.
About Eileen
Eileen Drennen is a writer and editor who worked in newspapers for 27 years. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte, N.C., has taught critical writing at the college level and has presented at national adoption-related conferences on topics related to her memoir-in-progress. Her writing has appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, O, The Oprah Magazine and The Rumpus. One of her essays was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and another is forthcoming in an anthology of essay forms.
Monday, November 3, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
Buried Truth, a Poignant Story of a Man’s Search for His Father, Exposing Powerful Forces Bent on Hiding the Truth with Jim Graham
Jim Graham, for five decades, believed he was a member of the Graham family, from a lower-middle-class neighborhood, several miles east of Buffalo, NY. The revelation that he was not, shocked him. To make his story more intriguing, Jim was not adopted. Truth can be stranger than fiction. He quickly realized that he was a pawn in a scheme to protect the Catholic Church from a public scandal. Kathryn Graham, who he believed to be his aunt and was not, unsympathetically told him, “It had to be this way.” She went on to say, “We are all dealt a hand in life; it comes down to how we play it.” The hand that he was dealt was a game of seven card stud poker, with only one card turned up. The following 25 years, he persevered, putting together the pieces of his life that he was denied.
Although Jim is not an adoptee, his compelling and poignant memoir, Buried Truth, deals with issues often experienced by adoptees. Did my parents love me? How could they give me up? Is there value in researching my past? Will I be able to acquire records that document my history? Am I better off not knowing the facts that led to being separated from my parents?
Jim’s childhood was disturbing since the father figure in the house in which he was raised was unfatherly. John Graham, John’s spinster sister Kathryn, and their mother Stella, were coerced by the church to raise Jim, to appear to be John’s son. The purpose was to hide the identity of Jim’s biological father, Father Thomas S. Sullivan, a Roman Catholic priest. John Graham died in 1979. For years, Jim felt guilty that he was not emotional when the man he thought to be his father passed. In 1993, just months after the death of the priest, a member of the Graham family leaked the secret; John Graham was not Jim’s father, a deceased priest was. Immediately, the church directed the Grahams to put the genie back in the bottle, denying Jim any further information about his father. The heartache for Jim was twofold; he never knew his father, plus the Grahams and the church stonewalled Jim for decades about his history.
Jim will describe his journey of courage and perseverance. Like a detective, he followed the money trail, recovered documents, and networked with strangers and friends of his parents, some willing to provide information, others not. In the end, Jim proved what the Grahams and the church denied him: Father Thomas Sullivan was his father. Jim is an advocate for other abused and neglected children of priests worldwide. His story of relentless determination is an inspiration for anyone attempting to fulfill a quest riddled with challenges.
About Jim
Jim Graham is the author of Buried Truth, a Poignant Story of a Man’s Search for His Father, Exposing Powerful Forces Bent on Hiding the Truth, which was published in August 2025.
Jim was born in July 1945 in Buffalo, NY, and graduated from high school at Williamsville South, NY. He worked for American Airlines from 1963 to 1976, in numerous positions. Jim was drafted into the Army in May of 1966, served 12 months in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. In 1976, Jim left American Airlines to start his own businesses in sales and marketing, which he ran for 30 years. Since 2008, Jim has been retired and living in South Carolina with his wife, Melodie.
Monday, November 10, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
Healing Yoga for Grief and Loss with Kim Dyckes
Kim Dyckes is an adoptee, a 200-hour certified yoga teacher, a retired Montessori teacher, and a long-time volunteer for Adoption Network Cleveland. Yoga became a way of life for Kim from the first time she experienced its healing properties in 2008, and her practice carried her through many difficult times, including a divorce and the untimely deaths of her daughter and stepdaughter.
After Kim retired from her career as a Montessori teacher in 2022, she obtained her 200-hour yoga certification at Chagrin Yoga in Chagrin Falls, Ohio and began teaching at various studios and a local assisted living facility. She quickly realized she needed to share the healing powers of yogic breath, movement and sound with those who struggle with grief and loss. She began to study this realm and now leads grief workshops at Sunshine Yoga Studio in Chesterland, Ohio, and other Cleveland area settings.
Kim understands that grief comes in many forms and often in unexpected waves. She has been in reunion with her birthmother and half siblings for over thirty years, and her interactions with them have taught her that all members of the adoption constellation experience grief and loss and that the holiday season can be particularly triggering in this regard.
Kim looks forward to sharing techniques to calm the nervous system and navigate waves of grief using breath, movement and sound. No yoga experience is necessary. The program can be accessed from a mat or a chair. This is about emotional healing, not physical flexibility.
