Luminous nonfiction about the natural world from essayist Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, who asks: what can other-than-human creatures teach us about mothering, belonging, caregiving, loss, and resiliency?

What does it mean to be a mother in an era of climate catastrophe? And what can we learn from the plants and creatures who mother at the edges of their world's unraveling?

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?

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.

Prologue

Introduction

Part I. Centering: Orienting to Sacred Place

Heartbeat

Axis Mundi

Coming into Being

The Good Mother

A Mothering Language

Part II. Belonging: Taking Flight with Birds

Ascendance

Setting Bearings

Hoopoe, i

Sensory Orientation

Hoopoe, ii

Disruption

Hoopoe, iii

Quickening

Unraveling

Hoopoe, iv

Part III. Entanglement: Tracking Whales

Bodies in Orbit

Bloodlines, Milklines

Scrimshaw

Flukeprint

Dream

Urban Whale

Devour

Whale Chase

Whalefall

Chimera

Knife's Edge

Farewell

Part IV. Community: Imagining Trees

Mythical Forests

Cultivating Roots

Cutting Down the World

Retrained Growth

Creation Story

Tree Seed

Part V. Edge-Work: Traversing Salt Marshes

Vulnerable Nest

Porous Boundaries

Between the Tides

Edge Erosion

Passageways

Reclamation

Wild Transgression

Flood

Hurricane

Tide-Work

Part VI. Homemaking: Tending the Seasons

Inhabiting

Wonder (Summer)

Music (Fall)

A Particular Love (Winter)

Rebirth (Spring)

Ritual (Summer)

Creating Possible Futures

"This is a heartachingly beautiful, deeply life-altering book, one I will be placing into the hands of many mothers, creatures, and kin. Tenderly we are reminded of all the ways in which we have become lost; all the ways we find to become found once more. On community, interconnectedness, and ecologies of care, this book has widened my heart beyond compare. There is grace here, and hope, and the light we need to guide us onward. A book for these times." --Kerri ni´ Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places and Cacophony of Bone

"This is a beautiful book--the prose, the stories, the sentiments and values. It belongs in the company of works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, and Robin Kimmerer, all of whom are inspiring presences in these pages. While Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder writes vividly about bearing and nurturing a child, she also invites us to understand mothering in a larger sense, as caring for all creatures--for birds and whales, trees and grasses, the entire web of life." --Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination

"Mother, Creature, Kin is both an education and an affirmation of our most essential and connected ways of being. Nuanced and layered, its language is a force of love." --Jamie Figueroa, author of Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer and Mother Island

"Lyrical and level-headed at once, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder roots her elegant writing firmly in science while learning from the awe of mystics and, like the best of mothers, leads us lovingly and with utmost care and awareness through the debris of the Sixth Extinction on a path toward radical hope and wonder." --Anna Badkhen, author of Bright Unbearable Reality

"I felt that I'd been waiting for this book--you do not have to be a mother to read it. It's gentle, personal, and powerfully benign: a story of mothering as a practical expression of love, whether for a child, or a whale, or a tree, or a single-celled organism, or all these lives together." --Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency

"A luminous, compellingly readable account of the power of wild kindness and of the extraordinary things that happen if we pay proper attention to the world. This is potent literary alchemy. Let it transform you." --Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast