Mothering in Times of Crisis: A Conversation with Jennifer Case and Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

This week, I talk about human and beyond-human acts of mothering with authors Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder and Jennifer Case. In this episode, Chelsea and Jennifer discuss and compare their respective books about motherhood—Mother, Creature, Kin (Broadleaf Books, 2025) and We Are Animals (Trinity University Press, 2024)—and offer insights into their creative and curious research, interview, and writing processes.

Our exciting conversation ranges from expansive definitions and models of “mothering,” to explorations of what it means to care for each other and the planet, and ultimately ends on a note of hope through a discussion of what acts of “mothering” are inspiring us right now. I left the conversation feeling inspired as both a writer and a community member, and I’m confident listeners will feel the same.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kayleigh Lobdell: I would love to invite each of you to tell us a little about your work. How did you come to this? What is the goal of the book? What should readers expect?

Jennifer Case: I always describe my book We Are Animals as about feminism, motherhood and evolutionary biology, and the ways those three things felt conflicted and entangled in my own life once I became a mother. The book was me trying to unpack those threads and those conflicts.

In addition, I would also describe it as a meditation on choice and control in terms of reproductive justice, and again, those locations in my own life and in society where choice and control feels fraught or entangled. I try to decipher the difference between a choice that is empowering and a lack of choice that is disempowering and the ways we have to sometimes accept that things are beyond our control. We can see all those differences in our own lives when it comes to reproductive choices.

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder: I always say Mother, Creature, Kin is a weaving of ecology, mythology, and spirituality, and my first years being a mother of my daughter.

I think about what we can learn from other-than-human creatures and ecosystems—about not only living through this time of ecological crisis, but about belonging and caregiving and loss and grief and resiliency.

My hope for the book is that it is an invitation to others, whether or not you care for a human child in your life, to think about practices of deep care and the idea of ecological motherhood as a shared community and place-based responsibility that we can all engage in together.

KL: You both have really expansive, inclusive visions of motherhood—inclusive of both a wide range of people, but also of experiences, which I really appreciated. How did you come to those understandings of motherhood? How has your personal definition of motherhood evolved over time?

JC: This book was my way to try and understand what motherhood is and what it means to mother. And I was particularly interested in what it means physically and biologically to give birth and go through that experience, and the ways that the physical and biological experience of being pregnant and giving birth is sometimes at odds with or in conflict with our cultural conceptions of motherhood.

I was really trying to dig underneath all of our cultural conceptions of motherhood and try to discover for myself what motherhood even is. What is that experience? And in what ways do all the ways we talk about motherhood sometimes hinder our ability to experience the thing as it is?

CSS: I came at it as someone who was writing in the spiritual ecology realm about climate crisis. I think my question in that sense was: What does it mean to mother in a time of climate crisis?

I wanted to write a book that was going to give me a pathway into a hopeful answer to that question while again and again struggling to find that hope. And so ultimately, the book became a way for me to really be able to look squarely at some of my own denial about climate change and climate crisis, even as someone who thought I had my eyes wide open about that.

I think there are all kinds of ways that that denial can be lifted for us. And for me, motherhood was one way where I had to finally say: It might actually not be okay! For so many right now, it is already not okay. So, how do we be with that and move through that?

KL: You both write about finding community in different places that you have lived in. What connections do you see between each of your experiences and why finding community important to your work as scholars and humans?

JC: Before I had children, I really valued place-based writing and place-based philosophies and place-based living. I wanted to live in a manner that connected me with places and benefited the environments around me.

But that became a little more complicated once I had children. Having children in a state I was not from, and then moving to another state and being fairly mobile, and yet wanting to really root my children in a place, even though I did not know that place all that well—it just added complexities.

And yet, there is that longing and yearning beneath the book for me to still, no matter what situations we find ourselves in, live in community with the land, the non-human beings, and the human beings around us.

CSS: I have definitely felt this sense of imposter syndrome. So many of the writers I love have been in one place for decades, and here I am trying to do nature writing work and yet I have moved so many times.

What does it mean to write about being placed when I have felt so adrift so often in my life? I think part of this writing this book for me was thinking: How can I do this work, even if I have only been here for a year or two? What does it look like to build community, no matter how long you have been somewhere? What are the things that are available to us? How do we reach out? How do we find place-based inspiration and worthwhile work to do?

KL: We are in a political moment where reproductive choice and family planning has become more fraught. Families are being separated all over the country. What lessons from your books do you think could help us in this political moment? What kind of revolutionary potential might we find in motherhood or mothering?

JC: It is a politically fraught moment. It is kind of funny, because I wrote most of these essays between 2016 and 2019, and there was a moment during Biden’s presidency when I thought maybe these do not matter anymore; maybe we as a culture have grown beyond some of these questions about reproductive justice. And then, of course, they turned out to be just as timely now as they were when I wrote them.

I live in Arkansas, which is a more conservative state, and I see all of the new cultural messaging about motherhood that did not exist when I was writing these essays a decade ago now, especially in the trad wife movement, which is so fascinating to me. What I hope my book can offer to readers is the invitation to unpack those cultural messages and understand what mothering and motherhood actually is—and to give yourself space to accept your experience of motherhood outside of the messages that we are getting from across the political spectrum.

CSS: Jennie, your book does do that. I wanted to read a very short little passage that has stayed with me, which is in your chapter on the silence of regret. It is the last lines of the chapter:

Because what I’m most interested in, after all, isn’t the perfect parent who wanted her children deeply and was enamored with every moment, but the woman who was not always enamored, yet who cared for and loved her children just the same. Hers, I believe, is the greater story of courage and love. She’s the woman who has something to teach me. The woman who I think has something to teach us all.

Those words: courage and love. In this moment when all of us are living with utterly broken hearts, and humans are crying out—the earth is crying out, I think there is something so important in that. How do we keep showing up with courage and love when fear and anger are right there alongside them? And it is not that fear and anger are not also important emotions right now, but how do we forward that courage and love?

Much of your book to me was about: How do we tell honest, hard truths, and how do we also listen to honest, hard truths? How do we keep finding ways to show up with love in a wounded time?

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Featured image: Red foxes interacting. Photo by Steffi Wacker, 2025.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Jennifer Case is the author of The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World (forthcoming from Trinity University Press), We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024), and Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared widely in journals such as The Rumpus, Orion, Ecotone, Literary Mama, and North American Review, among others. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. Website. Contact.

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN (Broadleaf Books, 2025). From 2017-2022, she worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, an online and print publication exploring the intersection of culture, ecology, and spirituality. Her writing can also be found in The Atlantic, Nautilus, Terrain.org, The Common, Decor Maine, From the Ground Up, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and in Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. She lives with her family in Vermont. Contact.

Kayleigh Lobdell (they/them) is a Ph.D. student in literary studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with previous Masters in English Literature (2023) and Adolescent English Education (2020). Their work is in contemporary women’s and Native American speculative/dystopian fiction, and in particular, they explore how issues of fertility, race, the environment, and “child protection” policies intersect within and beyond fiction. Contact.