NEW BOOK!!! Pig Blood: A collection of autobiographical short stories by a former sperm donor Sandman. http://www.cabrimed.org/book.jsp
What if you had dozens of children whom you had never met – never seen? If you were an anonymous semen donor, like Sandman, this would be the reality that you would face. One day in the spring of 2006, he received an e-mail from a young woman in a nearby town who was just about to graduate from high school. It said, ‘I think you are my biological father.’ As this unusual friendship developed, he learned that they both spoke French, enjoyed writing, and shared a weakness for a certain soft drink. The sense of relief, curiosity and closure that his daughter expressed came as a surprise. Tapping a few numbers into a calculator, he realized that there could be more than one hundred others like her. Almost all their parents would have concealed the circumstances of their conception from them, as hers had, until by some medical emergency or slip of the tongue, it would accidentally pop out. When these children (or even their children) came to know this unexpected fact, they would come searching for their genetic roots. They would want to know something about the man who helped to give them life. Sandman is a doctor and a medical scientist, but one who had no prior experience writing except for the scientific press. Faced with the length of time that it takes a donor child to find a parent, and the difficulty, once found, of establishing significant levels of contact, he decided to become an author of a different sort. He gathered together some short stories and other bits of creative writing that he had accumulated over the years. He added some newer essays, to document for these unknown children his experiences, opinions, and a bit of his personality. The result is the collection of short stories called ‘Pig Blood.’