A Return, a Garden, and What Comes Next

Good to Be Back!

Welcome to new and seasoned subscribers and followers, and thank you for sticking with me. It’s been a while, and I’ve missed this humble writing station and your company. Allow me to update you…

This spring, the seeds of my first long-form fiction germinated, and I tended that new garden of words throughout the summer. The fruits of my labor have ripened this fall, and my Magical Realism novella, Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic, is set to be released. It feels like the right moment to reintroduce myself.

Although I’ve been writing on Substack for two years, storytelling has been a lifelong thread. Whether in personal stories that blur memory and emotion, community garden notes, nature observations, or flights of poetic fancy, I’ve always been drawn to the sound and rhythm of words—the music of making sense and meaning.

Why “Roots & Branches”?

Much of my work grows from the perspective of an American adopted person born and relinquished during what we now refer to as the Baby Scoop Era. I was adopted at the age of one in 1952 by an Air Force couple from New York City who were stationed in South Carolina. Our transient life—a slide show of faces and places—imprinted the trauma of primal separation. And so I write about adoption: to understand, to honor, and to recover what was lost to me.

How the Landscape Grew

My daughter, born when I was twenty, was my first known biological relative and, until the age of forty-three, my only genetic mirror. What did that intense, heartfelt reflection mean to me as an adoptee? Nothing compares to that original sense of identity.

I began the search for my true birth records at age forty, while studying horticulture in the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania. After three years of writing and phoning, I learned my natural mother’s name. Our year-long encounter was emotionally raw, and ended with her death. How might our relationship have deepened? We tried, but she and I were both wounded. In her late sixties, she had never had a stable relationship and had relinquished several children to relatives and to the system. Yet our life-changing connection proved a kind of recovery of self for us both. After decades of not knowing, we knew. Identity, heritage, and ancestral awareness continue to shape my writing.

Branching Out

Once an offshoot of this newsletter, Memoirish Musings by Mel was the section where you’d find Japanese image poetry alongside nostalgia, slice-of-life vignettes, and reflections on gardening and nature.

Now, the new section Seasons will be your destination for image poems—Haiga, Shahai, and prose-poetic Haibun. I hope you’ll join me there soon.

At heart, Roots & Branches is about connection. I’ve learned in my seventy-four years that we grow through what we’ve lost and what we find again. My hope is that something here will resonate with you.

What’s Next?

Next, I’ll open the gate to the first installment of my novella in the section The Garden Between Worlds. Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic by Islay Corwin weaves adoption, myth, folklore, gardens, and a touch of fae light.

Thank you — I’m glad you’re here.

— Mary Ellen (Mel) Gambutti

From the memoir “I Must Have Wandered” by Mary Ellen Gambutti.