"Mother, Creature, Kin" with Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder · May 18th

Chelsea will share readings from the book, reflect on her writing process, and engage in conversation about the themes that shaped her work. 

May 18th, 2025
11am-12pm

Your ticket includes:

• A signed copy of Mother, Creature, Kin

• Light snacks

• A cozy, inspiring morning with fellow book lovers
  
  

We’d love to see you there!

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About the book: 

Becoming a mother in this time means bringing life into a world that appears to be coming undone. Drawing upon ecology, mythology, and her own experiences as a new mother, Steinauer-Scudder confronts what it means to "mother": to do the good work of being in service to the living world. What if we could all mother the places we live and the beings with whom we share those places? And what if they also mother us?

In prose that teems with longing, lyricism, and knowledge of ecology, Steinauer-Scudder writes of the silent flight and aural maps of barn owls, of nursing whales, of real and imagined forests, of tidal marshes, of ancient single-celled organisms, and of newly planted gardens. The creatures inhabiting these stories teach us about centering, belonging, entanglement, edgework, homemaking, and how to imagine the future. Rooted in wonder while never shying away from loss, Mother, Creature, Kin reaches toward a language of inclusive care learned from creatures living at the brink.

Writing in the tradition of Camille Dungy, Elizabeth Rush, and Margaret Renkl, Steinauer-Scudder invites us into the daily, obligatory, sacred work of care. Despair and fear will not save the world any more than they will raise our children, and while we don't know what the future holds, we know it will need mothers. As the very ground shifts beneath our feet, what if we apprenticed ourselves to the creaturely mothers with whom we share this beloved home?

About the Author: 

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder writes at the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred. She has a masters of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and has worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, a publication exploring the intersection of ecology, culture, and spirituality. Her work has also been featured in The Common, The Slowdown, Crannóg Magazine, From the Ground Up, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and Katie Holten's The Language of Trees. Having grown up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma, she and her family live in northern New England.