Square Up: 50,000 miles in search of a way home by Lisa Dailey
Publisher: Sidekick Press, (March 30, 2021) Category: Memoir, Travel, Family Travel, Adventure Travel, Grief Tour dates: January 17-February 18, 2022 ISBN: 978-1734494556 Available in Print and ebook, 272 pages
Description Square Up by Lisa Dailey
Have you ever wished you could run away and leave your life behind? Born on the “Day of the Wanderer,” Lisa Dailey has always been filled with wanderlust. Although she and her husband had planned to take their family on a ’round-the-world adventure, she didn’t expect their plans to come together on the heels of grief, after losing seven family members in five years.
Square Up shows us that travel not only helps us understand and appreciate other cultures, but invites us to find compassion and wisdom, heal from our losses, and discover our capacity for forgiveness, as well as joy.
My Thoughts Square Up by Lisa Dailey
Lisa Daily and her husband, Ray, have always loved to travel and had planned on taking the two young teenaged boys on a trip. However, in the period of 5 years, she lost seven loved ones, including her parents and younger brother. Grief and depression struck and put her in a rut. After awhile, her husband brought up the idea of traveling again. With gentle persuasion, she finally agreed. They both wanted to show their boys parts unknow to them.
Since Ray was in the military, the family mostly flew in military planes to keep the cost down. She explains how terribly uncomfortable and cold these planes are and highly recommends bringing a blanket and dressing warm.
The family traveled all over Asia. They took a longer stop in Vietnam and Cambodia so Ray could volunteer since he is also a dentist. I loved her descriptions of all the places they travel over the period of 7 months. One of my favorite stories from the family’s travels was of the Rat Temple in Deshnoke, India. The rats, over 25,000 of them are believed to be ancestors, reborn as rats. As with any Hindu temple you visit, you must remove your shoes before going inside. So, there are rats crawling over your feet and even nibbling on occasion. You can also buy food outside, to feed the rats. I love animals but I will not be going their! LOL!
Towards the end of their journey and with a lot of hassle getting special travel visa, the went to Ghana in Africa. Ray was to volunteer doing dentistry there as well. Once there, they found out there were even more road blocks to him volunteering.
Though there were a lot of difficulties in the 7 months, the family persevered and Lisa started dealing with her grief in a more positive way. Right after I started reading ‘Square Up’, my sister passed away. She was the 5th death in 3 years for me. Four of them were in the last year. So, I had to stop reading the book for awhile. It was triggering for me at the time. However, I am so glad I picked it back up! I love the lessons Lisa learned during the journey and I think some have rubbed off on me.
If you love reading travel adventures, you will love this book! If you have suffered loss, there are lessons to be learned here! I loved this book so much that I am sure I will read it again. Because there are so many books, I want to read I rarely read the same book twice! I highly recommend ‘Square Up’ and give it 5 out of 5 stars.
I received the eBook for my honest opinion.
About Lisa Dailey
Lisa Dailey is an avid traveler and writer. In her time abroad, she unearthed new ways of looking at her life through her discoveries in remote corners of the world and she continues to enrich her life through travel. She is currently working on a recipe anthology as well as her first work of fiction. A native Montanan,
Lisa now makes her home by the ocean in Bellingham, Washington, but returns to her roots every summer for a healthy dose of mountains and Big Sky.
Lisa is the owner of Silent Sidekick and Sidekick Press where she helps guide authors through their publishing journey.
This giveaway is for 3 print copies One for each of 3 winners. This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on February 12, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Finding Sisters: How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find Her Birth Family by Rebecca Daniels
Publisher: Sunbury Press (September 14, 2021) Category: Non Fiction, Memoir, Genetic Genealogy, Adoption, Family Reunion, Extended Families Tour dates: January-February, 2022 ISBN: 978-1620065587 Available in Print and ebook, 125 pages
Description Finding Sisters by Rebecca Daniels
Where does she come from?
Who are her genetic parents?
Who is she?
Does she even want to know?
With almost no information of her genetic heritage, adoptee Rebecca Daniels follows limited clues and uses DNA testing, genealogical research, thoughtful letter writing, and a willingness to make awkward phone calls with strangers to finally find her birth parents.
But along the way, she finds much more.
Two half-sisters.
A slew of cousins on both sides.
A family waiting to be discovered.
With the assistance of a distant cousin in Sweden and several other DNA angels on the internet, Daniels finally comes face to face with her birth mother just months before her passing. Join in on this author’s discovery of family and self in ‘Finding Sisters: How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find Her Birth Family.’
My Thoughts Finding Sisters by Rebecca Daniels
Rebecca Daniels has known from a young age that she and her younger brother were adopted. However, she always felt loved by her adoptive parents and didn’t think much about who her birth parents were.
One day, quite some time after her parents died, a friend, told Rebecca that she was going to have DNA testing and that Rebecca should as well. After giving it some thought, she decided to do it. Her main objective was to find out about any genetic health problems in her birth family.
After submitting her DNA, lots of results started coming in. A bunch of distant cousins, including one in Sweden, Thomas. It turned out to be excellent that she reached out to him as he was really into ancestry and genetics, himself and was very knowledgeable. Via email, he was able to lead Rebecca down the path of finding closer relatives. She eventually found her birth mother who was still alive and living with Rebecca’s half sister. Rebecca arranged to meet them and spend time with them. They lived in a different state. Eventually, she goes on to find more connections including a half sister on her paternal side.
Rebecca shares a lot of information about the steps she took in her search but in such a way that it never got boring. In fact, I couldn’t put the book down and read into the wee hours of the morning. I am a huge fan of the television show ‘Long Lost Family’ so, when I found out about this book, I knew I had to read it. If you enjoy well written memoirs, this book is for you. If you are interested in ancestry and DNA testing and results, this book is for you! I give it 4.5/5 stars and highly recommend it!
I received the eBook for my honest opinion.
Excerpt Finding Sisters by Rebecca Daniels
Excerpt from Chapter Two: I Think We Might Be Related
While I understood exactly what Thomas was talking about, I still didn’t want to move too quickly. I wanted to give Glenna an out in case she really didn’t want to be found, so when I finally wrote that letter, it didn’t say, “I think you’re my mother!” Instead, the phrase I used in my letter was, “I think we might be related.” I decided on a short, hand-written note that told her I had been doing some research into my birth family, that I knew I had been a Baby Jane Doe G—, and that I was wondering whether she was the same Glenna G— who had married Arthur H— in Bremerton less than three months after my birth in the same town.
During the time I was working on exactly what to say to Glenna in my letter, Thomas continued to do research on Glenna’s family and discovered that her adopted mother, Flora, had a sister in Washington State, which made me even more certain we were on the right track. I wrote him back immediately:
That makes a lot of sense to me and is a very exciting development. I’ve been trying to figure out how and why a girl from South Dakota would go to WA State to have her baby, and this information helps a lot. From what I know of illegitimate pregnancies and how they were generally handled in the 1940s and 50s, girls were often sent away when the pregnancy began to show, usually to live with another female relative [ostensibly to help them with something that the parents could comfortably say they are having difficulty with . . . losing weight, doing better in school, getting her emotions under control, etc.], to have the baby there, and then give it up for adoption, before returning home as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, except that the girl was now more tractable and socially appropriate.
. . .
While I was working on my letter to Glenna, I also started looking for April on Facebook. Luckily for me, she had her privacy screens set so that I could see a few photos of her, and she had also included a couple of images of her parents, Dorian and Glenna, on her page. I wrote to Thomas immediately, but while he had a basic profile, he was not a regular Facebook user, joking that he might be the last person on the planet who is not, but when I sent him the photos I had downloaded from April’s Facebook page, along with a couple from my own page, he replied almost immediately:
April really looks like Glenna. And so do you! You are a young version of her. These pictures are more than I could hope for. We are lucky that you look like Glenna and April. April could have looked like Dorian, but she obviously looks like her mother. The same holds true for you. You seem to have gotten most of your facial features from Glenna’s side. After seeing Glenna’s and your portraits side by side, I am as convinced as I can get that your birth mother is found. The only thing that can make me even more sure is after you have been in contact with Glenna and got it all confirmed with her.
I also sent the photos to a friend here in Massachusetts and asked her if she saw the resemblance. Her reply? “These are your people; this is your tribe.” So, all that remained for me to do was to send that letter to Glenna, and this new information did nothing to change my strategy for what I wrote in the letter. The evening before my birthday, I wrote out a card by hand and got it ready to mail on the morning of March 17, 2015. That same evening, I got an email from my new cousin, Barbara, who had received my letter and wanted to set up a phone conversation the next day. I immediately sent a note to Thomas, telling him about both Barbara’s email and my note to Glenna:
I wrote a short note to Glenna, one that says, “I think we might be related,” so she can finesse the situation if she’s never told April about the adoption [presuming the circumstantial evidence is correct]. I’m nervous but excited to hear from her, but everything I’ve been reading about the post-WWII adoptions tells me that she could have been keeping this secret for 60+ years, and she might not want to open that can of worms at all. Or she might be thrilled to find her daughter, finally. Or anything in between. I didn’t write to April. I’m going to let Glenna tell her whatever she wants to tell her . . .
Thomas wrote back to say he was excited and happy for me and would be squeezing his thumbs for good luck about these contacts I was making, also telling me he appreciated me keeping him informed about the situation, but he did want to disagree with me about one thing:
I think you handled the contact note with Glenna perfectly. Of course, she will understand who you are, and in the same time, you really show her and April all the possible respect. Well done!
There is only one thing I do not agree with—at all—to call your situation a can of worms! You are gift!!! You were a gift 66 years ago that your birth parents, by reasons we do not know, were not able to take care of. No doubt it was your birth mother’s hardest decision during all her life to give you up. Then you became a gift for your parents. And now you might be a most unexpected gift, 66 years later.
I hoped he was right, that my message to Glenna would be welcomed, though I had no further expectations than that. Frankly, it was all I could manage at the time, emotionally speaking. I had initiated contact with some close members of my probable birth family, and now, less than a month after my first interactions with Cousin Thomas, and thanks to his genealogical expertise and enthusiasm, I was standing on the verge of moving from research to reality!
About Rebecca Daniels
Rebecca Daniels (MFA, PhD) taught performance, writing, and speaking in liberal arts universities for over 25 years, including St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, from 1992-2015. She was the founding producing director of Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR, and directed with many professional Portland theatre companies in the 1980s.
She is the author of the groundbreaking Women Stage Directors Speak: Exploring the Effects of Gender on Their Work (McFarland, 1996, 2000) and has been published in multiple professional theatre journals. After her retirement from teaching, she began her association with Sunbury Press with Keeping the Lights on for Ike: Daily Life of a Utilities Engineer at AFHQ in Europe During WWII; or, What to Say in Letters Home When You’re Not Allowed to Write about the War (Sunbury Press, 2019), a book based on her father’s letters home from Europe during WWII.
She had always known she was adopted, but it was only as retirement approached, and with a friend’s encouragement, that she began the search for her genetic heritage through DNA testing. Finding Sisters explores how DNA testing, combined with traditional genealogical research, helped her find her genetic parents, two half-sisters, and other relatives in spite of being given up for a closed adoption at birth.
She is currently working on a new memoir about her late-in-life second marriage and sudden widowhood titled Adventures with the Bartender: Finding and Losing the Love of my Life in Six Short Years.
This giveaway is for 1 print copy and 1 pdf copy. Print is open to the U.S. only and pdf is open worldwide. This giveaway ends on February 26, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Square Up: 50,000 miles in search of a way home by Lisa Dailey
Publisher: Sidekick Press, (March 30, 2021) Category: Memoir, Travel, Family Travel, Adventure Travel, Grief Tour dates: January 17-February 18, 2022 ISBN: 978-1734494556 Available in Print and ebook, 272 pages
Description Square Up by Lisa Dailey
Have you ever wished you could run away and leave your life behind? Born on the “Day of the Wanderer,” Lisa Dailey has always been filled with wanderlust. Although she and her husband had planned to take their family on a ’round-the-world adventure, she didn’t expect their plans to come together on the heels of grief, after losing seven family members in five years.
Square Up shows us that travel not only helps us understand and appreciate other cultures, but invites us to find compassion and wisdom, heal from our losses, and discover our capacity for forgiveness, as well as joy.
Praise Square Up by Lisa Dailey
“Lisa Dailey weaves an extraordinary and fascinating tale of her journey around the world with her family. But this is far more than a travel story; it’s a merciful, compassionate story of how traveling experiences can offer insight, perspective, and healing. As a therapist, I can say that I’d recommend this book to anyone who has struggled with profound loss or serious anxiety. It is a story of self-compassion, not self-pity, with moments of charm and humor that delight throughout. If you loved Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, you’ll adore this story.”-Betsy Graziani Fasbinder, author of Filling Her Shoes
“Lisa Dailey is a woman after my own heart. She understands that both the discomfort and adventure of travel can change-and heal-us. In Square Up, in the throes of grief after several family deaths, Lisa and her husband, Ray, take their children around the world to places as far-flung as Cambodia, Myanmar, and Ghana. For the rest of her family, the trip is an opportunity to see the world and stretch their worldview (they visit a temple filled with rats and venture into the culinary enterprise of eating tarantulas, after all). And while all of this is riveting, indeed a treat for lovers of travel writing, what really captures the heart in this memoir is the way the narrator finds her way, after nearly being crushed by her recent losses, to peace of mind and self-compassion. Square Up is full of grace and love and gentle warmth-an authentic story of love of self, family, and, of course, travel.”-Cami Ostman, author of Second Wind: One Woman’s Midlife Quest to Run Seven Marathons on Seven Continents
Square Up by Lisa A Dailey is a memoir that will capture the hearts of fans of travel and adventure, but the story is far more spiritual than entertaining. Dailey shares her grief and the pain she experienced after losing family members within five years—her parents and twenty-three-old brother included. The void their loss left in her heart was huge. But then traveling around the world with her family—her husband and two sons—changed everything. They had planned the trip for years and had looked forward to it with excitement. In seven months, this family would travel to thirteen countries and across four continents. What makes it a unique experience? There is a lot of excitement reading this book as the reader follows the itinerary of the author and her family, but there is far more to that. Lisa A Dailey’s travels across different countries brought her into contact with different cultures and people, and the encounter with new places, with nature, with people, provoked something deeper in her, an inner journey towards healing. Lisa A Dailey understood that the world is filled with life and a lot to celebrate, and each step they took away from home led her further away from her pain. The author writes in a mesmerizing and exciting voice and it is interesting to follow how she explores her emotions. Square Up is observant and the author pays attention to detail, offering tips that travelers can use and recreating wonderful sights that readers would want to visit. It is both entertaining and very informative.”- Ruffina Oserio, Readers’ Favorite
“For someone who hasn’t traveled more than a few miles from she was born (that would be me) this book was a grand adventure around the world. I enjoyed myself immensely as I was able to touch, taste, smell and see each destination and it’s mysteries through the narrators stunning descriptions. As well, the underlying story of how the narrator struggled with her deep sense of grief mixed with anger at all the loss of life she’d witnessed, tugged at my heart strings. This story will allure you with its travel, break you open with it’s pain and send you away feeling stronger and more hopeful than ever before.”- Lorinda Boyer, Author of Straight Enough: A Memoir
Interview With Lisa Dailey
TR: Please tell us something about Square Up that is not in the summary. (About the book, “character” you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)
LD: Wow, where to begin… In writing the memoir, I had to make sure that the story had an arc and that the scenes and locations I picked to write about were relevant to either the story arc or the character arc. Though I cover a little bit of a lot of places, there were many, many more stops that didn’t make the book. The book ends in Spain, but in reality, we continued on the trip for several more weeks. We made a stop in Switzerland to see my husband’s college roommate and his family in Baden. We continued to Germany to fly home from Ramstein Air Force Base, but first we drove to Hannover to see our exchange student daughter who we had hosted a couple of years before the trip. Both visits were a nice precursor to our return to reality in the U.S.
TR: How long did it take you to write this book from concept to fruition?
LD: I blogged about the entire trip as we were travelling as a way to keep friends and family back home up to date on our location and activities. When I returned home, I thought I could just compile those blog posts into one document, do a little editing, and call it a blog. But I soon realized that the blog posts told the “what” part of the journey, but it was missing the “so what” portion. I then enrolled in a 9-month get your book done program and completed a first draft and then a second. After revisions, sending my work through a critique group twice, and a developmental edit, I published in March 2021, almost exactly 5 years from the date we returned home.
TR: You share a lot about your family and family losses you have gone through in such a short time. How did your family react when you told them you were writing this, Square Up?
LD: I was most concerned about my husband and kids, but they were all supportive. I suspect they had become used to my writing about our family in a public arena. And one must remember when reading a blog or a memoir that the author is giving you a view of their lives through one window. It is not their entire life. For my family, I definitely didn’t pull back the curtains on their personal lives beyond some of their interactions with me. And the family members that I did write about more were those that had passed but still had a hold on me.
TR: How did your life as a mother influence your writing of Square Up?
LD: Interesting question. The first draft of the book didn’t include my children. I didn’t want to put their lives on paper without them having a say in it. But when I put the first chapters through critique, everyone agreed that something was missing and because the kids were part of the journey, they needed to be part of the story. So, I spoke with the boys and talked about what I was doing and how I would portray them, and they both agreed it would be fine to be included. Ultimately, they are minor supporting characters, but I agree that their presence in the story was necessary.
TR: What inspired you to write?
LD: I’ve always been a voracious reader and writer. For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamed of writing books. Square Up was not the first book I thought I would write, however. I’d had a novel I’d been playing around with long before the trip. But when I came back from seven months away from my life, I needed a way to process what it all meant and out of that came the memoir.
TR: How much time and effort went into writing Square Up? Did you do any research for the book?
LD: I did quite a bit of research on all of the places that I included in the book. I had all my journal and blogging notes on cities and location names, but I had to dig into the history to tell a deeper story (along with proper spellings and distances to make sure I got everything right).
TR: Where did you get the inspiration for your cover?
LD: I spoke at length to a cover designer about the story and left the concept up to her. I was reluctant to put my face on the cover at first, but when she explained how it fit with the personal side of my story, I was all for it. The stupa also plays a big part in the story and the stupa image on the cover is one we took on the trip.
TR: What is next for Lisa Dailey? Do you have another book in mind or other project?
LD: I have two books I am currently working on. One is a fictional family saga set in present-day eastern Montana. This is the book that I’ve been writing in my head for probably 25 years. Now it is starting to take shape on paper!
The second book is a cookbook all about soup, though I may start blogging about this first before turning into book form. The concept for this one is that I think it used to be special to go out to dinner and now the tables have turned and it’s special to be able to prepare a home cooked meal. Soup is a great gateway into the cooking arena. You can tailor soup to your own taste preferences and if something goes wrong, you can easily fix it.
About Lisa Dailey
Lisa Dailey is an avid traveler and writer. In her time abroad, she unearthed new ways of looking at her life through her discoveries in remote corners of the world and she continues to enrich her life through travel. She is currently working on a recipe anthology as well as her first work of fiction. A native Montanan,
Lisa now makes her home by the ocean in Bellingham, Washington, but returns to her roots every summer for a healthy dose of mountains and Big Sky.
Lisa is the owner of Silent Sidekick and Sidekick Press where she helps guide authors through their publishing journey.
This giveaway is for 3 print copies One for each of 3 winners. This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on February 12, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Square Up: 50,000 miles in search of a way home by Lisa Dailey
