Featured Reviews

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder – Mother, Creature, Kin [Feature Review]

Discovering a Deeper Story

A Feature Review of

Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Hardcover: Broadleaf, 2025
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Reviewed by Ann Byle

Early in her book Mother, Creature, Kin, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder asks this question: “What is it to be a mother in a time of ecological collapse?”(10) Her question is the thread woven throughout her book of essays, and one that she answers thoroughly enough to create an intricate tapestry replete with the flora and fauna of land and sea, as well as the humans who populate—and help destroy—the earth. 

The book started, said Steinauer-Scudder, when her daughter Aspen “was born into a world that is unraveling”(xiii). She wanted to create a book “about mothering with and to and through the Earth,” with a hope to “center the feminine all the more by claiming that it calls to all of us, as Earth creatures and as birthed creatures, in a composting and decomposing kind of way”(xv).

This she does throughout, using examples such as the struggling right whales, barn owls, salt marshes, forests, creeks, and the tiniest plants. Her story, too, becomes part of the tapestry as she contemplates motherhood and the changes it brought, the places she and her family have lived, and the many places she’s explored. The landscapes of Oklahoma, Washington, Vermont, Maine and more play significant roles in her thinking and formation, as has her day-to-day life as a mother, daughter, wife, friend, reader, and witness.

Readers will discover her love for Rachel Carson, Ursula Le Guin—they named a Vermont property Earthsea—Moses’s mother Jochabed, and will be invited to participate in her experiences of traveling the edges of salt marshes, birdwatching, and splashing in a cool creek. 

Each experience, each habitat, each vista, each animal, each tree takes on deeper meaning thanks to Steinauer-Scudder’s eye. She has a unique ability to see well beyond the surface of things to discover the deeper story, the origin story, of what is going on in the world today. Her writing is melodic, but not the simple melody of a children’s song, though that is there too. Her writing weaves, twists, intertwines, and braids to create a complex and multi-layered work. It’s not an easy-breezy read; instead, readers will be challenged, encouraged to think deeply, and urged to act on behalf of the earth and its future. 

Steinauer-Scudder has created a tapestry for our time. It’s beautiful, but it also reveals the underside of neglecting our planet, our future, and our individual lives. She, too, succumbs to despair, “I want to keep hope’s fire burning on this burning Earth. But especially in the quiet, in the dark, my hope flickers like a candle when someone has opened a door and let the gale in. Sometimes the flame goes out” (271).

Yet she also offers hope in the face of despair, hope in the face of a degrading planet and a population that often cares little about the ramifications of their actions. There is one thing that we can all hold on to, she says. “I choose love. It is upon love that I will do what I can to heal; it is upon love that I will kneel to pray, it is upon love that I will guide our daughter’s feet. This is the practice of inscendence that I am called to” (274).

Those of us looking for inspiration, love, knowledge, and a deeper understanding of our role as mother to the Earth will find it in the pages of Mother, Creature, Kin. This is a book to be treasured, savored, and read again and again. 

Ann Byle

Ann Byle lives in West Michigan with her science teacher husband, Ray. Their young adult children are in and out regularly. Ann writes for Christianity Today and Publishers Weekly, among other publications, and is author of Chicken Scratch: Lessons on Living Creatively from a Flock of Hens.


 
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