“Unraveling Secrets of the Heart: Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s Journey in ‘Lost Found Kept’ Reveals the Power of Redemption”
I struggled most with the biological father chapter. There’s so much there—it’s another book, but not this one. I needed some part of that story in Lost Found Kept because it helped with the reader’s understanding of the family history. Other than my dissertation I’d never written anything this long and to make writing it easier, I tried to think of each chapter as a self-contained piece of writing, almost like an essay, and just let it riff off the other chapters. I strongly believe that you can’t write well about trauma if you are still traumatized. I think material needs to be processed and understood to be used effectively. Writing this book is a story in time, but it, of course, isn’t the whole story. My mother died three months before I found out the book had won the inaugural Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award, and I had to decide about whether to include her passing when I did the final edits. The thing about death when you have a complicated relationship is that it ends the hope that things between you can ever be different. When we grieve the person, we are often grieving the death of that hope as well.
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