Letting adoptees discover their birth parents was an issue back when I was covering the General Assembly. Few if any who testified against the change, as I recall, identified themselves as parents who had given up newborns. The lack of public confessions was easily understood.
When the issue surfaced at the Capitol again not long ago, memories popped up. It didn’t take much, in my new retirement community, to imagine an elderly woman — make her the widow of a clergyman — haunted by fear that her teen-age unwed 
pregnancy would be revealed, and she humiliated, if the infant she gave up at birth showed up shouting “Mama!”
Getting the story together took a bit of work, but when I had it right I began sending it out. A literary magazine called (how do they find these names?) Caustic Frolic liked it, and it’s now published. To read it online, click===>here
revisiting the Ancient Bristlecone Forest in the Inyo-White Mountains, just east of the High Sierra, where I’d herded cattle one summer in ancient history. I can’t remember now what prompted me to build the story around a homeless couple out to see America, but it flowed fairly well. Unsure of it, though, I set it aside.t
for submissions to its next issue on the theme “the great outdoors.”
out an unusual challenge last fall: Invited stories about a game that ended in death, preferably horrible death. Moreover, they insisted on stories that began with the death scene, and then backed up to posit the setting and the game, leading up to an already-known climax — while somehow maintaining some suspense.
what people say to one another. I’ve written and had published several in that unusual format.
If you went out to look, on at least some nights, you might hear the yelps of some remote progeny of the critters that you used to hear sing in the California desert. And when your daughter came to visit, she might warn you that those wild animals have been known to go after domestic pets.
on the theme of “adrift”. I imagined a girl who lost her paddle while kayaking, and awaits a hero to rescue her. Third Street didn’t like it, but The Writer’s Club did; you can read it 
the dying, the forgotten or the almost entirely unknown aspects of Americana,” invited very short (500-word) essays involving “creatures . . . from pets to beasts of burden.”
services like eHarmony, Match, etc. But a few months ago someone mentioned trying one, so who knows? there may be others. I would find the idea distasteful, but was prompted to imagine a recently widowed man being urged by his son to sign up for such a service, and balking. Aiming for a sense of mournful open expanse, I placed it on the Platte River in Nebraska where the sandhill cranes stop each spring, which prompted a title.
