Beautiful Bastards
Beautiful Bastards is a poetic journey into a world of intertwined destinies; an adoption memoir involving three generations of women with disrupted ties. Through a tapestry of poetry, myth, visual art, and dreams, the author reconstructs origin stories as an adoptee, and for the daughter she gave up for adoption. In the process she continually transforms her sense of self.
The journey is told through imagery and visceral storytelling as a chronology from her conception into her mystery years in foster care, adoption at age three, early childhood. The story pivots on sexual awakening, teen pregnancy, when she relinquishes her own newborn daughter. Three generations unfold in a sphere of mystery, moving through the complexities of relationships that weave together loss, love and connection.
Art work, influenced by celestial images and the microscopic, speaks to the text and frame life within the vastness of the cosmos.
Ariel Rathbun is a long-time Seattle resident, transplanted from the east coast. Writing “by the seat of her pants” since teen years, she finally studied the craft with inspiring teachers at Hugo House. Her creative life has included music, dance, physical theater, photography and painting.
Ariel is both an adoptee and a birthmother. Her adoption memoir, Beautiful Bastards, an adoption odyssey of three generations*, weaves her dual role into a celestial theme of poetry and original art hovering on the edges of subconscious. Her writing delves into the ethereal, the natural world, visceral experience, and a touch of whimsy.
*The poem, Lunacy, written in 1996, was previously published in Sulfur Surrealist Jungle before she realized it was about adoption. The seed was planted, germinated in 2019 and bloomed in 2025.
