What if home isn’t a place you find, but a place you build step by step?
I sit down with author and family physician, Brittany Penner, to unpack Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home, her powerful Métis memoir about identity, adoption, and the radical work of healing. From being carried out of the hospital by a social worker to navigating a white Mennonite upbringing, Brittany traces how the Sixties Scoop shaped her beginnings and how lineage still insists on being seen-- in faces, gestures, and the stories that refuse to disappear.
Brittany shares the artistic leap that changed everything: throwing away a 100,000-word draft(!!!) and rebuilding the book through photographs and VHS tapes. We talk about using images to verify memory, honor body knowledge, and write with precision without losing lyric grace. She opens up about medicine too and reveals how tending to her own pain transformed how she advocates for Indigenous women in clinical settings, why believing someone can be the most clinical act of all, and how she protects joy in her creative life so it doesn’t calcify under the weight of systems.
At the heart of this conversation is a simple practice with a profound arc: walking herself home. After a separation that reawakened old losses, Brittany found steadiness in daily walks, watching seasons turn as grief softened. We explore found family, kinship that ignores the word “half,” and the way motherhood reframes generational trauma with tenderness and resolve.
If you’re wrestling with where you belong, how to write your truth, or how to hold hope when hope feels heavy, this episode offers a map that is honest and quietly brave.
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Buy Brittany Penner's "Children Like Us"
Transcripts are available through Apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.
This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy
Special thanks to my new friend, Brittany!
Xx, Alex
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